Social Media Crisis Essay

5 May 2022 Social Media Crisis Social media is a platform that is considered useful for some people but is also considered harmful for others. Social media is very harmful especially for youths and teens. Social media use can impact so many negative problems or issues to teens and youths under the age of 18. I know social media has a positive impact on teens and youths under the age of 18, but that doesn’t stop the negative impact from affecting them. Even if people think the positive outweighs the negative, the negative is still harmful and causes problems to youths under the age of 18. People say social media is not harmful, but I think it is. Kids are affecting their mental health by staying on social media all the time instead of going outside, having fun and knowing what is happening around them, that’s why social media should be restricted for kids and teens under the age of 18 in the same way that cigarettes and alcohol are restricted. Social media as a platform can impact negative issues or problems to youths and teens in different ways such as emotionally, physically and mentally. Talking about emotions, social media can affect youths and teens emotionally through so many ways like lowering their selfesteem meaning that teens will lack confidence of who they are and what they are capable of doing. People who have low self-esteem find it hard to be confident in themselves which makes them afraid of making mistakes and letting people close to them down. Author Justin Vinh who is a honors student who hopes to be a physician also explained emotions in his article. According to the article “Social media: The Screen, the brain, and Human Nature”, the author Vinh summarizes an experiment on “how participants judged their peers’ emotions. The experiment revealed that the participants, all college students, consistently believed that their peers had more fun and fewer negative experiences than the peers actually did (Jordan et al., 2010, as cited in Copeland, 2011). In other words, the researchers’ participants overestimated their peers’ happiness. In another experiment, the researchers found that their participants were unhappier when they overestimated another person’s happiness” (p.609). So just like the author said overestimating other people’s happiness can make teens lose confidence in themselves, which contributes to them being afraid of making mistakes. Another emotional health issues that social media causes is cyberbullying, cyberbullying means sending or sharing bad, negative and harmful content about someone. This cyberbullying can cause emotional breakdown to kids or teens and make them feel bad about themselves. It is also known as cyber harassment. Negative body image is another emotional health issue social media can cause. Social media can iimpact negative body image by causing teens or kids to imagine or exaggerate about their physical appearance (body shape or size) because of the pictures of celebrities or influencers the see online. And just like the author Vinh said in the article “Social media: The Screen, the brain, and the Human Nature”, “Social media welcomes its users to compare themselves to their peers, and it compels them to try to outdo their “opponents” to gain more followers and likes. This constant quest to create a better online image, along with the endless stream of photos and videos of people who seemingly have a better life, could lead to feelings of inferiority and worthlessness” (p.609). Physical effects of social media on teens. Social media can have physical effects on teens, some of the physical effects are sleep deprivation and general addiction. Talking about sleep deprivation, when the words sleep deprivation comes to one’s head it means depriving someone of sleep or being awake and overactive all through the night. Sleep on its own is a very necessary factor in the health of a human being, without sleep one won’t be able to go on with his/her dayto-day activities. For everybody (teens included), staying up and awake all night can cause us so many health issues. For example, insomnia; staying awake all night can cause you insomnia which is a sleep disorder that occurs when you have trouble sleeping or falling asleep. Another health issue sleep deprivation can cause is poor eyesight, which is also a physical effect of social media but it’s under sleep deprivation. Poor eyesight in terms of sleep deprivation is caused by the emission of blue light from a smartphone, which is too bright for the human eyes. Starring at our phones on bed all through the night is very harmful because the exposure of light directly into the eyes can damage the parts of the eyes called the retinas which may lead to blindness. Another physical effect of social media is general addiction, general addiction to social media is an obsession with social media that has to do with being too concerned about what is happening on social media. It is an urge to use social media making it the most important thing around you. According to the author Nicholas Carr who is an American writer, he explains in the article “How smartphones hijacked our minds” that “Smartphones have become so entangled with our existence that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources” (p.600). What the author is saying is that smartphones are too addictive for teens and kids. Mental effects of social media on teens. social media affects teens and kids mentally and by mentally, I mean thinking and understanding. It has to do with the brain because the more time teens spend on social media the more difficult it is for their brain to process what it have seen on social media. Still on mental effects of social media, when we talk about mental effects what comes to our mind is mental health. Mental health is not an issue to be played with, It is a growing problem and the rate of mental health issues increases every year. Mental health is crucial at every stage of life, from Birth to adolescence through adulthood. One of the mental effects of social media on teens and kids is anxiety, anxiety in terms of the use of social media means teens moving to social media to escape or forget worries or problem bordering them. A type of anxiety that is widely known to affect teens through social media is fear of missing out (FOMO), this type of anxiety could cause teens to compare their past experiences to others. Depression is another mental effect of social media on teens and kids, depression is the same with anxiety. Depression is actually a disease caused by so many things not just social media but in terms of social media depression is very important because it can lead to so many health issues and dangers. The level of depression caused by social media has increased due to lack of support especially for teen, parents need to be cautious of their children when it comes to social media issues parents should not let their kids or teen children use social media until they are up to a specific age (18) if their children are not up to such age social media should be restricted for them. That’s why the author Carr who is an American writer said in the article “How smartphones hijacked our minds”, “integration of smartphones into daily life” appears to cause a “brain drain” that can diminish such vital mental skills as “learning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity” (p.600). Depression also leads to suicide which is the last mental effect of social media on my list, suicide means killing oneself due to hate or depression. It is leads to death and that is the most important reason why teens and kids should not be allowed to enter social media. In conclusion, social media is bad for teens they can only be allowed to use social media when they reach a specific age (18). Social media is very harmful to teens from the distractions to disruption of sleep, bullying, peer pressure, anxiety, depression and so much more. The risk or effects of teens using social media may be related to how much they use but, in this case, teens should not be allowed to enter social media or use social media because the causes and consequences will be painful and by then it will be too late to cry. So therefore, teens and kids who are under the specific age of eighteen should be restricted from social media.