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Wherever you look you are likely to see people on their phones, noses inches from the screen, browsing the internet, and especially spending time on social media. If you have used social media before, you know you can “like” posts, share them with friends, comment on them, and respond to what others have said. How do our brains remember social media? Do we remember social media posts better if we interact with them in some way? To study this, we asked people to view real Instagram posts and comment on some of them. Later, we tested their memory for these posts. We found that people were much more likely to remember the posts that they commented on. These results are important to consider when using social media. When we actively engage with social media, it is more likely to stick in memory, so we may need to choose wisely what we interact with to keep ourselves healthy. 

Social media is a routine part of every-day life for millions of people worldwide. How does engaging with social media shape enduring memories for that experience? This question is important given the popularity of certain types of content on social media platforms, such as content widely known as “fitspiration”. Two experiments involving 510 US adults (mean age = 36.82) examined memory for food and fitness-related social media images that individuals write comments about, as well as memory for other images in the context. We demonstrate that commenting on social media images boosts memory for them and weakly affects memory for conceptually related images in the same context. Exploratory analyses revealed correlations between self-reported disordered eating symptomology and effects of commenting on memory. These findings demonstrate that how people engage with social media has implications for the enduring memories of that content and may relate to behaviors and attitudes in offline lives, such as eating and body image.