In the age of digital connectivity, social media has rearranged how people meet and interact. Still, it also creates a wider problem: people call it perceived social isolation (PSI) among young adults. It has emerged as an important public health and psychological concern among young people. To examine how social media use is tied to PSI among young adults, this work draws on Social Displacement Theory. It conducts an independent quantitative study in a collectivist cultural setting. The focus is on young people ages 18 to 32 in Punjab, Pakistan, and it uses standardized sampling methods and peer-validated, well-established measurement instruments. This study explores four dimensions of social media use behavior and their association with perceived social isolation and then applies Spearman’s rank correlation analysis to examine how the relationships align. The results show that all four dimensions of use correlate positively with loneliness, and browsing frequency across platforms is the most powerful predictor of PSI. However, this is a cross-sectional study, so it relies solely on respondents’ self-reports and, as a result, cannot claim strict causal direction. In the future, research could switch to longitudinal designs or even randomized controlled trials. It could also in corporate multi-source data, broaden its reach to include more urban and rural samples, and map the less-visible functional routes linking the two.

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