is social media bad or good essay

Essay on Social Media for School Students and Children

500+ words essay on social media.

Social media is a tool that is becoming quite popular these days because of its user-friendly features. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more are giving people a chance to connect with each other across distances. In other words, the whole world is at our fingertips all thanks to social media. The youth is especially one of the most dominant users of social media. All this makes you wonder that something so powerful and with such a massive reach cannot be all good. Like how there are always two sides to a coin, the same goes for social media. Subsequently, different people have different opinions on this debatable topic. So, in this essay on Social Media, we will see the advantages and disadvantages of social media.

Advantages of Social Media

When we look at the positive aspect of social media, we find numerous advantages. The most important being a great device for education . All the information one requires is just a click away. Students can educate themselves on various topics using social media.

Moreover, live lectures are now possible because of social media. You can attend a lecture happening in America while sitting in India.

Furthermore, as more and more people are distancing themselves from newspapers, they are depending on social media for news. You are always updated on the latest happenings of the world through it. A person becomes more socially aware of the issues of the world.

In addition, it strengthens bonds with your loved ones. Distance is not a barrier anymore because of social media. For instance, you can easily communicate with your friends and relatives overseas.

Most importantly, it also provides a great platform for young budding artists to showcase their talent for free. You can get great opportunities for employment through social media too.

Another advantage definitely benefits companies who wish to promote their brands. Social media has become a hub for advertising and offers you great opportunities for connecting with the customer.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Disadvantages of Social Media

Despite having such unique advantages, social media is considered to be one of the most harmful elements of society. If the use of social media is not monitored, it can lead to grave consequences.

Thus, the sharing on social media especially by children must be monitored at all times. Next up is the addition of social media which is quite common amongst the youth.

This addiction hampers with the academic performance of a student as they waste their time on social media instead of studying. Social media also creates communal rifts. Fake news is spread with the use of it, which poisons the mind of peace-loving citizens.

In short, surely social media has both advantages and disadvantages. But, it all depends on the user at the end. The youth must particularly create a balance between their academic performances, physical activities, and social media. Excess use of anything is harmful and the same thing applies to social media. Therefore, we must strive to live a satisfying life with the right balance.

FAQs on Social Media

Q.1 Is social media beneficial? If yes, then how?

A.1 Social media is quite beneficial. Social Media offers information, news, educational material, a platform for talented youth and brands.

Q.2 What is a disadvantage of Social Media?

A.2 Social media invades your privacy. It makes you addicted and causes health problems. It also results in cyberbullying and scams as well as communal hatred.

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Social Media: Beneficial or Harmful? Essay

It is important to note that social media is a core element of the internet, and it reshaped how a modern human perceives information, communicates, socializes, and learns about the outside world. It became a primary lens through which one interacts with others, and thus, it is critical to properly evaluate whether or not such a state of affairs is beneficial or harmful to human wellbeing. The given assessment argues that social media, not the internet, is harmful to society and humanity in general because it reshapes the social fabric, causes loss of reason, logic, attentiveness, and memory, violates individual rights of all people as well as proliferates misinformation, which means that social media’s harms heavily outweigh its benefits.

Firstly, in order to fairly and properly assess the benefits or harms of social media, the latter should be distinguished from the internet. For example, it is stated that “the notion that the Internet is bad for you seems premised on the idea that the Internet is one thing—a monolith” (Goldsmith 597). In other words, the internet is not one thing but rather a collection of vastly different forms of communication, presentation, information exchange, entertainment, interactions, and other functions. Therefore, the internet is a source of many positive aspects of modernity because it not only brings more informational democracy but also prevents restriction and control of the free exchange of knowledge. However, the question is not about the internet as a whole but rather social media. Unlike the internet, which brings a number of benefits, which far outweigh the harms, social media does not bring a similar imbalance in favor of good. Social media was designed to simplify socialization and communication online, but the outcome is unchecked control of the flow of conversation in favor of a specific agenda, profit, and violation of individual rights.

Secondly, not all internet elements utilize artificial intelligence as extensively as social media platforms. The use of AI allows such companies to fine-tune one typology of information consumed, which means that it is social media that makes decisions for its users. While the internet is a library of knowledge, where a person makes a clear choice on what to read, watch, listen to, or interact with, social media uses AI and complex algorithms to influence its user. The underlying business model of all social media platforms is to learn about its user as much as possible and profit from them in a targeted manner. Such a design is not an inherent feature of the internet, which is not constrained to be profitable in this manner since many websites operate through subscriptions, direct sales, or other means. When it comes to such dangers, AI itself can also be a problem. It is stated that “there are indeed concerns about the near-term future of AI —algorithmic traders crashing the economy, or sensitive power grids overreacting to fluctuations and shutting down electricity for large swaths of the population” (Littman 314). In other words, social media’s extensive use of AI in combination with its problematic business model creates a host of issues that are not attributable to the internet.

Thirdly, in addition to social media-specific problems, they are also linked to harms associated with both devices and the internet in general. As stated before, the internet has its harms and benefits, but the latter usually outweighs the former. Similarly, devices come with harms as well as benefits, where the balance is tilted towards the positive aspects. However, not only social media has its inherent design flaws, but it also has problems with devices and the internet in general, which makes their harms far more abundant than benefits. For example, it is stated that “while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety” (Carr 582). In addition, “as the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens,” and “the division of attention impedes reasoning and performance” (Carr 583). Therefore, these device-related problems are multiplied a hundredfold by the fact that social media amplifies distraction and attention division through notifications. Social media is not a highly intellect-strengthening medium either, which further complicates the dependence factor.

Fourthly, social media companies are not properly regulated, and the nature of the business heavily favors oligopoly rather than a proper competitive environment because people want to have a unified platform for communication and audience-building. Therefore, the industry generates highly powerful companies with unchecked capabilities, where the national and even international discourse takes place exclusively on such mediums. For example, one cannot deny the influence of Twitter or Facebook as drivers of political or social discourse. Therefore, there is a conflict of interest among such big tech companies in regards to providing an open and fair platform versus making a profit, and the decision is clearly made in favor of the latter. The very structure of the business model of social media is to influence users to buy the advertisers’ products or services, and thus, it cannot be a just and fair place for discussion on important subjects by definition. Such a state of affairs threatens the fabric of society whether or not these companies intend to do so.

Fifthly, the conflict of interest described in the previous section brings its biggest harm when it comes to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, where private enterprises are not obliged to protect the freedom of speech and expression. Since the national and international discourse and communication are taking the place of social media, where the First Amendment is mandatory to have, these platforms are unable, unwilling, and not obliged to provide it. One can easily observe how such companies can become politically tilted towards one agenda over the other, where accounts of even the most influential individuals can be banned because they violated the terms of service of the company. In other words, a company’s rules override the Constitutional rules. It is important to note that only a better speech can be an answer to a bad speech and not a removal of that voice.

Sixthly, social media platforms are heavily engaged in data collection and privacy violations, which was demonstrated by well-known scandals and criticisms. Once again, the business model of social media companies is structured in such a manner that their primary customers are not users but advertisers. A former group is a form of product or service being sold to advertisers, which means that social media advances surveillance capitalism at its core. In a century where the right to privacy is constantly becoming a problem due to governmental antiterrorism interests, social media further threatens these fundamental rights. The problem is even more dangerous when one considers the ever-increasing cyber threat proliferation, which means a breach of security in a social media company endangers all of its users.

Seventhly, social media does not have a well-structured method of combatting misinformation since its primary incentive is to promote engagement and grab attention. Social media companies are conflicted between ensuring the accuracy of the information on their platform and boosting the interactivity with their users. Such companies want to have interesting pieces of information, which are better provided by misinformation since the truth is always more complex and intricate. Therefore, one can see how social media can become a breeding ground for people with agenda of public deception. In addition, these platforms would not have the capability to ensure the accuracy of information even if they were incentivized somehow. Public panic and political polarization are other phenomena that accompany social networks, and the catalyst for these occurrences is information received both directly by the subject and disseminated using modern social communication technologies.

In conclusion, social media is not the internet, and its harms are far more extensive than the latter because it affects memory, attention, and reason and violates individual rights for privacy, free expression, and fairness in discourse, as well as proliferates misinformation. In addition, social media inherits inherent problems associated with modern devices and the internet in general, which further compounds its harm. Therefore, the effects of social media hurt the social fabric by pretending that it serves its users while its actual customers are advertisers. It also pretends to provide an open and free platform for communication while its very business model implies targeted influence on the user’s preferences. The use of AI also adds to all of the concerns related to artificial intelligence safety.

Works Cited

Carr, Nicholas. “How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds.” They Say/I Say , edited by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, W.W. Norton & Norton Company, 2021, pp. 582-596.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Go Ahead: Waste Time on the Internet.” They Say/I Say , edited by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, W.W. Norton & Norton Company, 2021, pp. 597-602.

Littman, Michael. “Rise of the Machines” Is Not a Likely Future.” They Say/I Say , edited by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, W.W. Norton & Norton Company, 2021, pp. 311-314.

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Bibliography

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Feb 15, 2023

6 Example Essays on Social Media | Advantages, Effects, and Outlines

Got an essay assignment about the effects of social media we got you covered check out our examples and outlines below.

Social media has become one of our society's most prominent ways of communication and information sharing in a very short time. It has changed how we communicate and has given us a platform to express our views and opinions and connect with others. It keeps us informed about the world around us. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn have brought individuals from all over the world together, breaking down geographical borders and fostering a genuinely global community.

However, social media comes with its difficulties. With the rise of misinformation, cyberbullying, and privacy problems, it's critical to utilize these platforms properly and be aware of the risks. Students in the academic world are frequently assigned essays about the impact of social media on numerous elements of our lives, such as relationships, politics, and culture. These essays necessitate a thorough comprehension of the subject matter, critical thinking, and the ability to synthesize and convey information clearly and succinctly.

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So, whether you're a student looking to better your essay writing skills or want to remain up to date on the latest social media advancements, Jenni.ai is here to help. Jenni.ai is the ideal tool for helping you write your finest essay ever, thanks to its simple design, an extensive database of example essays, and cutting-edge AI technology. So, why delay? Sign up for a free trial of Jenni.ai today and begin exploring the worlds of social networking and essay writing!

Want to learn how to write an argumentative essay? Check out these inspiring examples!

We will provide various examples of social media essays so you may get a feel for the genre.

6 Examples of Social Media Essays

Here are 6 examples of Social Media Essays:

The Impact of Social Media on Relationships and Communication

Introduction:.

The way we share information and build relationships has evolved as a direct result of the prevalence of social media in our daily lives. The influence of social media on interpersonal connections and conversation is a hot topic. Although social media has many positive effects, such as bringing people together regardless of physical proximity and making communication quicker and more accessible, it also has a dark side that can affect interpersonal connections and dialogue.

Positive Effects:

Connecting People Across Distances

One of social media's most significant benefits is its ability to connect individuals across long distances. People can use social media platforms to interact and stay in touch with friends and family far away. People can now maintain intimate relationships with those they care about, even when physically separated.

Improved Communication Speed and Efficiency

Additionally, the proliferation of social media sites has accelerated and simplified communication. Thanks to instant messaging, users can have short, timely conversations rather than lengthy ones via email. Furthermore, social media facilitates group communication, such as with classmates or employees, by providing a unified forum for such activities.

Negative Effects:

Decreased Face-to-Face Communication

The decline in in-person interaction is one of social media's most pernicious consequences on interpersonal connections and dialogue. People's reliance on digital communication over in-person contact has increased along with the popularity of social media. Face-to-face interaction has suffered as a result, which has adverse effects on interpersonal relationships and the development of social skills.

Decreased Emotional Intimacy

Another adverse effect of social media on relationships and communication is decreased emotional intimacy. Digital communication lacks the nonverbal cues and facial expressions critical in building emotional connections with others. This can make it more difficult for people to develop close and meaningful relationships, leading to increased loneliness and isolation.

Increased Conflict and Miscommunication

Finally, social media can also lead to increased conflict and miscommunication. The anonymity and distance provided by digital communication can lead to misunderstandings and hurtful comments that might not have been made face-to-face. Additionally, social media can provide a platform for cyberbullying , which can have severe consequences for the victim's mental health and well-being.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, the impact of social media on relationships and communication is a complex issue with both positive and negative effects. While social media platforms offer many benefits, such as connecting people across distances and enabling faster and more accessible communication, they also have a dark side that can negatively affect relationships and communication. It is up to individuals to use social media responsibly and to prioritize in-person communication in their relationships and interactions with others.

The Role of Social Media in the Spread of Misinformation and Fake News

Social media has revolutionized the way information is shared and disseminated. However, the ease and speed at which data can be spread on social media also make it a powerful tool for spreading misinformation and fake news. Misinformation and fake news can seriously affect public opinion, influence political decisions, and even cause harm to individuals and communities.

The Pervasiveness of Misinformation and Fake News on Social Media

Misinformation and fake news are prevalent on social media platforms, where they can spread quickly and reach a large audience. This is partly due to the way social media algorithms work, which prioritizes content likely to generate engagement, such as sensational or controversial stories. As a result, false information can spread rapidly and be widely shared before it is fact-checked or debunked.

The Influence of Social Media on Public Opinion

Social media can significantly impact public opinion, as people are likelier to believe the information they see shared by their friends and followers. This can lead to a self-reinforcing cycle, where misinformation and fake news are spread and reinforced, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

The Challenge of Correcting Misinformation and Fake News

Correcting misinformation and fake news on social media can be a challenging task. This is partly due to the speed at which false information can spread and the difficulty of reaching the same audience exposed to the wrong information in the first place. Additionally, some individuals may be resistant to accepting correction, primarily if the incorrect information supports their beliefs or biases.

In conclusion, the function of social media in disseminating misinformation and fake news is complex and urgent. While social media has revolutionized the sharing of information, it has also made it simpler for false information to propagate and be widely believed. Individuals must be accountable for the information they share and consume, and social media firms must take measures to prevent the spread of disinformation and fake news on their platforms.

The Effects of Social Media on Mental Health and Well-Being

Social media has become an integral part of modern life, with billions of people around the world using platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to stay connected with others and access information. However, while social media has many benefits, it can also negatively affect mental health and well-being.

Comparison and Low Self-Esteem

One of the key ways that social media can affect mental health is by promoting feelings of comparison and low self-esteem. People often present a curated version of their lives on social media, highlighting their successes and hiding their struggles. This can lead others to compare themselves unfavorably, leading to feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem.

Cyberbullying and Online Harassment

Another way that social media can negatively impact mental health is through cyberbullying and online harassment. Social media provides a platform for anonymous individuals to harass and abuse others, leading to feelings of anxiety, fear, and depression.

Social Isolation

Despite its name, social media can also contribute to feelings of isolation. At the same time, people may have many online friends but need more meaningful in-person connections and support. This can lead to feelings of loneliness and depression.

Addiction and Overuse

Finally, social media can be addictive, leading to overuse and negatively impacting mental health and well-being. People may spend hours each day scrolling through their feeds, neglecting other important areas of their lives, such as work, family, and self-care.

In sum, social media has positive and negative consequences on one's psychological and emotional well-being. Realizing this, and taking measures like reducing one's social media use, reaching out to loved ones for help, and prioritizing one's well-being, are crucial. In addition, it's vital that social media giants take ownership of their platforms and actively encourage excellent mental health and well-being.

The Use of Social Media in Political Activism and Social Movements

Social media has recently become increasingly crucial in political action and social movements. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have given people new ways to express themselves, organize protests, and raise awareness about social and political issues.

Raising Awareness and Mobilizing Action

One of the most important uses of social media in political activity and social movements has been to raise awareness about important issues and mobilize action. Hashtags such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, for example, have brought attention to sexual harassment and racial injustice, respectively. Similarly, social media has been used to organize protests and other political actions, allowing people to band together and express themselves on a bigger scale.

Connecting with like-minded individuals

A second method in that social media has been utilized in political activity and social movements is to unite like-minded individuals. Through social media, individuals can join online groups, share knowledge and resources, and work with others to accomplish shared objectives. This has been especially significant for geographically scattered individuals or those without access to traditional means of political organizing.

Challenges and Limitations

As a vehicle for political action and social movements, social media has faced many obstacles and restrictions despite its many advantages. For instance, the propagation of misinformation and fake news on social media can impede attempts to disseminate accurate and reliable information. In addition, social media corporations have been condemned for censorship and insufficient protection of user rights.

In conclusion, social media has emerged as a potent instrument for political activism and social movements, giving voice to previously unheard communities and galvanizing support for change. Social media presents many opportunities for communication and collaboration. Still, users and institutions must be conscious of the risks and limitations of these tools to promote their responsible and productive usage.

The Potential Privacy Concerns Raised by Social Media Use and Data Collection Practices

With billions of users each day on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, social media has ingrained itself into every aspect of our lives. While these platforms offer a straightforward method to communicate with others and exchange information, they also raise significant concerns over data collecting and privacy. This article will examine the possible privacy issues posed by social media use and data-gathering techniques.

Data Collection and Sharing

The gathering and sharing of personal data are significant privacy issues brought up by social media use. Social networking sites gather user data, including details about their relationships, hobbies, and routines. This information is made available to third-party businesses for various uses, such as marketing and advertising. This can lead to serious concerns about who has access to and uses our personal information.

Lack of Control Over Personal Information

The absence of user control over personal information is a significant privacy issue brought up by social media usage. Social media makes it challenging to limit who has access to and how data is utilized once it has been posted. Sensitive information may end up being extensively disseminated and may be used maliciously as a result.

Personalized Marketing

Social media companies utilize the information they gather about users to target them with adverts relevant to their interests and usage patterns. Although this could be useful, it might also cause consumers to worry about their privacy since they might feel that their personal information is being used without their permission. Furthermore, there are issues with the integrity of the data being used to target users and the possibility of prejudice based on individual traits.

Government Surveillance

Using social media might spark worries about government surveillance. There are significant concerns regarding privacy and free expression when governments in some nations utilize social media platforms to follow and monitor residents.

In conclusion, social media use raises significant concerns regarding data collecting and privacy. While these platforms make it easy to interact with people and exchange information, they also gather a lot of personal information, which raises questions about who may access it and how it will be used. Users should be aware of these privacy issues and take precautions to safeguard their personal information, such as exercising caution when choosing what details to disclose on social media and keeping their information sharing with other firms to a minimum.

The Ethical and Privacy Concerns Surrounding Social Media Use And Data Collection

Our use of social media to communicate with loved ones, acquire information, and even conduct business has become a crucial part of our everyday lives. The extensive use of social media does, however, raise some ethical and privacy issues that must be resolved. The influence of social media use and data collecting on user rights, the accountability of social media businesses, and the need for improved regulation are all topics that will be covered in this article.

Effect on Individual Privacy:

Social networking sites gather tons of personal data from their users, including delicate information like search history, location data, and even health data. Each user's detailed profile may be created with this data and sold to advertising or used for other reasons. Concerns regarding the privacy of personal information might arise because social media businesses can use this data to target users with customized adverts.

Additionally, individuals might need to know how much their personal information is being gathered and exploited. Data breaches or the unauthorized sharing of personal information with other parties may result in instances where sensitive information is exposed. Users should be aware of the privacy rules of social media firms and take precautions to secure their data.

Responsibility of Social Media Companies:

Social media firms should ensure that they responsibly and ethically gather and use user information. This entails establishing strong security measures to safeguard sensitive information and ensuring users are informed of what information is being collected and how it is used.

Many social media businesses, nevertheless, have come under fire for not upholding these obligations. For instance, the Cambridge Analytica incident highlighted how Facebook users' personal information was exploited for political objectives without their knowledge. This demonstrates the necessity of social media corporations being held responsible for their deeds and ensuring that they are safeguarding the security and privacy of their users.

Better Regulation Is Needed

There is a need for tighter regulation in this field, given the effect, social media has on individual privacy as well as the obligations of social media firms. The creation of laws and regulations that ensure social media companies are gathering and using user information ethically and responsibly, as well as making sure users are aware of their rights and have the ability to control the information that is being collected about them, are all part of this.

Additionally, legislation should ensure that social media businesses are held responsible for their behavior, for example, by levying fines for data breaches or the unauthorized use of personal data. This will provide social media businesses with a significant incentive to prioritize their users' privacy and security and ensure they are upholding their obligations.

In conclusion, social media has fundamentally changed how we engage and communicate with one another, but this increased convenience also raises several ethical and privacy issues. Essential concerns that need to be addressed include the effect of social media on individual privacy, the accountability of social media businesses, and the requirement for greater regulation to safeguard user rights. We can make everyone's online experience safer and more secure by looking more closely at these issues.

In conclusion, social media is a complex and multifaceted topic that has recently captured the world's attention. With its ever-growing influence on our lives, it's no surprise that it has become a popular subject for students to explore in their writing. Whether you are writing an argumentative essay on the impact of social media on privacy, a persuasive essay on the role of social media in politics, or a descriptive essay on the changes social media has brought to the way we communicate, there are countless angles to approach this subject.

However, writing a comprehensive and well-researched essay on social media can be daunting. It requires a thorough understanding of the topic and the ability to articulate your ideas clearly and concisely. This is where Jenni.ai comes in. Our AI-powered tool is designed to help students like you save time and energy and focus on what truly matters - your education. With Jenni.ai , you'll have access to a wealth of examples and receive personalized writing suggestions and feedback.

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How Harmful Is Social Media?

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he sought to explain, as the piece’s title had it, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anyone familiar with Haidt’s work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media. Although Haidt concedes that political polarization and factional enmity long predate the rise of the platforms, and that there are plenty of other factors involved, he believes that the tools of virality—Facebook’s Like and Share buttons, Twitter’s Retweet function—have algorithmically and irrevocably corroded public life. He has determined that a great historical discontinuity can be dated with some precision to the period between 2010 and 2014, when these features became widely available on phones.

“What changed in the 2010s?” Haidt asks, reminding his audience that a former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision of a four-year-old with a loaded weapon. “A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.” While the right has thrived on conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, the left has turned punitive: “When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And, unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.” Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: the rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”

These are, needless to say, common concerns. Chief among Haidt’s worries is that use of social media has left us particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias, or the propensity to fix upon evidence that shores up our prior beliefs. Haidt acknowledges that the extant literature on social media’s effects is large and complex, and that there is something in it for everyone. On January 6, 2021, he was on the phone with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke and the author of the recent book “ Breaking the Social Media Prism ,” when Bail urged him to turn on the television. Two weeks later, Haidt wrote to Bail, expressing his frustration at the way Facebook officials consistently cited the same handful of studies in their defense. He suggested that the two of them collaborate on a comprehensive literature review that they could share, as a Google Doc, with other researchers. (Haidt had experimented with such a model before.) Bail was cautious. He told me, “What I said to him was, ‘Well, you know, I’m not sure the research is going to bear out your version of the story,’ and he said, ‘Why don’t we see?’ ”

Bail emphasized that he is not a “platform-basher.” He added, “In my book, my main take is, Yes, the platforms play a role, but we are greatly exaggerating what it’s possible for them to do—how much they could change things no matter who’s at the helm at these companies—and we’re profoundly underestimating the human element, the motivation of users.” He found Haidt’s idea of a Google Doc appealing, in the way that it would produce a kind of living document that existed “somewhere between scholarship and public writing.” Haidt was eager for a forum to test his ideas. “I decided that if I was going to be writing about this—what changed in the universe, around 2014, when things got weird on campus and elsewhere—once again, I’d better be confident I’m right,” he said. “I can’t just go off my feelings and my readings of the biased literature. We all suffer from confirmation bias, and the only cure is other people who don’t share your own.”

Haidt and Bail, along with a research assistant, populated the document over the course of several weeks last year, and in November they invited about two dozen scholars to contribute. Haidt told me, of the difficulties of social-scientific methodology, “When you first approach a question, you don’t even know what it is. ‘Is social media destroying democracy, yes or no?’ That’s not a good question. You can’t answer that question. So what can you ask and answer?” As the document took on a life of its own, tractable rubrics emerged—Does social media make people angrier or more affectively polarized? Does it create political echo chambers? Does it increase the probability of violence? Does it enable foreign governments to increase political dysfunction in the United States and other democracies? Haidt continued, “It’s only after you break it up into lots of answerable questions that you see where the complexity lies.”

Haidt came away with the sense, on balance, that social media was in fact pretty bad. He was disappointed, but not surprised, that Facebook’s response to his article relied on the same three studies they’ve been reciting for years. “This is something you see with breakfast cereals,” he said, noting that a cereal company “might say, ‘Did you know we have twenty-five per cent more riboflavin than the leading brand?’ They’ll point to features where the evidence is in their favor, which distracts you from the over-all fact that your cereal tastes worse and is less healthy.”

After Haidt’s piece was published, the Google Doc—“Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review”—was made available to the public . Comments piled up, and a new section was added, at the end, to include a miscellany of Twitter threads and Substack essays that appeared in response to Haidt’s interpretation of the evidence. Some colleagues and kibbitzers agreed with Haidt. But others, though they might have shared his basic intuition that something in our experience of social media was amiss, drew upon the same data set to reach less definitive conclusions, or even mildly contradictory ones. Even after the initial flurry of responses to Haidt’s article disappeared into social-media memory, the document, insofar as it captured the state of the social-media debate, remained a lively artifact.

Near the end of the collaborative project’s introduction, the authors warn, “We caution readers not to simply add up the number of studies on each side and declare one side the winner.” The document runs to more than a hundred and fifty pages, and for each question there are affirmative and dissenting studies, as well as some that indicate mixed results. According to one paper, “Political expressions on social media and the online forum were found to (a) reinforce the expressers’ partisan thought process and (b) harden their pre-existing political preferences,” but, according to another, which used data collected during the 2016 election, “Over the course of the campaign, we found media use and attitudes remained relatively stable. Our results also showed that Facebook news use was related to modest over-time spiral of depolarization. Furthermore, we found that people who use Facebook for news were more likely to view both pro- and counter-attitudinal news in each wave. Our results indicated that counter-attitudinal exposure increased over time, which resulted in depolarization.” If results like these seem incompatible, a perplexed reader is given recourse to a study that says, “Our findings indicate that political polarization on social media cannot be conceptualized as a unified phenomenon, as there are significant cross-platform differences.”

Interested in echo chambers? “Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter,” which seems convincing—except that, as another team has it, “We do not find evidence supporting a strong characterization of ‘echo chambers’ in which the majority of people’s sources of news are mutually exclusive and from opposite poles.” By the end of the file, the vaguely patronizing top-line recommendation against simple summation begins to make more sense. A document that originated as a bulwark against confirmation bias could, as it turned out, just as easily function as a kind of generative device to support anybody’s pet conviction. The only sane response, it seemed, was simply to throw one’s hands in the air.

When I spoke to some of the researchers whose work had been included, I found a combination of broad, visceral unease with the current situation—with the banefulness of harassment and trolling; with the opacity of the platforms; with, well, the widespread presentiment that of course social media is in many ways bad—and a contrastive sense that it might not be catastrophically bad in some of the specific ways that many of us have come to take for granted as true. This was not mere contrarianism, and there was no trace of gleeful mythbusting; the issue was important enough to get right. When I told Bail that the upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear, he suggested that there was at least some firm ground. He sounded a bit less apocalyptic than Haidt.

“A lot of the stories out there are just wrong,” he told me. “The political echo chamber has been massively overstated. Maybe it’s three to five per cent of people who are properly in an echo chamber.” Echo chambers, as hotboxes of confirmation bias, are counterproductive for democracy. But research indicates that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life, where our social networks—in the original use of the term—are rarely heterogeneous. (Haidt told me that this was an issue on which the Google Doc changed his mind; he became convinced that echo chambers probably aren’t as widespread a problem as he’d once imagined.) And too much of a focus on our intuitions about social media’s echo-chamber effect could obscure the relevant counterfactual: a conservative might abandon Twitter only to watch more Fox News. “Stepping outside your echo chamber is supposed to make you moderate, but maybe it makes you more extreme,” Bail said. The research is inchoate and ongoing, and it’s difficult to say anything on the topic with absolute certainty. But this was, in part, Bail’s point: we ought to be less sure about the particular impacts of social media.

Bail went on, “The second story is foreign misinformation.” It’s not that misinformation doesn’t exist, or that it hasn’t had indirect effects, especially when it creates perverse incentives for the mainstream media to cover stories circulating online. Haidt also draws convincingly upon the work of Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, to sketch out a potential future in which the work of shitposting has been outsourced to artificial intelligence, further polluting the informational environment. But, at least so far, very few Americans seem to suffer from consistent exposure to fake news—“probably less than two per cent of Twitter users, maybe fewer now, and for those who were it didn’t change their opinions,” Bail said. This was probably because the people likeliest to consume such spectacles were the sort of people primed to believe them in the first place. “In fact,” he said, “echo chambers might have done something to quarantine that misinformation.”

The final story that Bail wanted to discuss was the “proverbial rabbit hole, the path to algorithmic radicalization,” by which YouTube might serve a viewer increasingly extreme videos. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this does happen, at least on occasion, and such anecdotes are alarming to hear. But a new working paper led by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, found that almost all extremist content is either consumed by subscribers to the relevant channels—a sign of actual demand rather than manipulation or preference falsification—or encountered via links from external sites. It’s easy to see why we might prefer if this were not the case: algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. “These are the three stories—echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms—but, when you look at the literature, they’ve all been overstated.” He thought that these findings were crucial for us to assimilate, if only to help us understand that our problems may lie beyond technocratic tinkering. He explained, “Part of my interest in getting this research out there is to demonstrate that everybody is waiting for an Elon Musk to ride in and save us with an algorithm”—or, presumably, the reverse—“and it’s just not going to happen.”

When I spoke with Nyhan, he told me much the same thing: “The most credible research is way out of line with the takes.” He noted, of extremist content and misinformation, that reliable research that “measures exposure to these things finds that the people consuming this content are small minorities who have extreme views already.” The problem with the bulk of the earlier research, Nyhan told me, is that it’s almost all correlational. “Many of these studies will find polarization on social media,” he said. “But that might just be the society we live in reflected on social media!” He hastened to add, “Not that this is untroubling, and none of this is to let these companies, which are exercising a lot of power with very little scrutiny, off the hook. But a lot of the criticisms of them are very poorly founded. . . . The expansion of Internet access coincides with fifteen other trends over time, and separating them is very difficult. The lack of good data is a huge problem insofar as it lets people project their own fears into this area.” He told me, “It’s hard to weigh in on the side of ‘We don’t know, the evidence is weak,’ because those points are always going to be drowned out in our discourse. But these arguments are systematically underprovided in the public domain.”

In his Atlantic article, Haidt leans on a working paper by two social scientists, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, who took on a comprehensive meta-analysis of about five hundred papers and concluded that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” Haidt writes, “The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.” Nyhan was less convinced that the meta-analysis supported such categorical verdicts, especially once you bracketed the kinds of correlational findings that might simply mirror social and political dynamics. He told me, “If you look at their summary of studies that allow for causal inferences—it’s very mixed.”

As for the studies Nyhan considered most methodologically sound, he pointed to a 2020 article called “The Welfare Effects of Social Media,” by Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow. For four weeks prior to the 2018 midterm elections, the authors randomly divided a group of volunteers into two cohorts—one that continued to use Facebook as usual, and another that was paid to deactivate their accounts for that period. They found that deactivation “(i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use.” But Gentzkow reminded me that his conclusions, including that Facebook may slightly increase polarization, had to be heavily qualified: “From other kinds of evidence, I think there’s reason to think social media is not the main driver of increasing polarization over the long haul in the United States.”

In the book “ Why We’re Polarized ,” for example, Ezra Klein invokes the work of such scholars as Lilliana Mason to argue that the roots of polarization might be found in, among other factors, the political realignment and nationalization that began in the sixties, and were then sacralized, on the right, by the rise of talk radio and cable news. These dynamics have served to flatten our political identities, weakening our ability or inclination to find compromise. Insofar as some forms of social media encourage the hardening of connections between our identities and a narrow set of opinions, we might increasingly self-select into mutually incomprehensible and hostile groups; Haidt plausibly suggests that these processes are accelerated by the coalescence of social-media tribes around figures of fearful online charisma. “Social media might be more of an amplifier of other things going on rather than a major driver independently,” Gentzkow argued. “I think it takes some gymnastics to tell a story where it’s all primarily driven by social media, especially when you’re looking at different countries, and across different groups.”

Another study, led by Nejla Asimovic and Joshua Tucker, replicated Gentzkow’s approach in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they found almost precisely the opposite results: the people who stayed on Facebook were, by the end of the study, more positively disposed to their historic out-groups. The authors’ interpretation was that ethnic groups have so little contact in Bosnia that, for some people, social media is essentially the only place where they can form positive images of one another. “To have a replication and have the signs flip like that, it’s pretty stunning,” Bail told me. “It’s a different conversation in every part of the world.”

Nyhan argued that, at least in wealthy Western countries, we might be too heavily discounting the degree to which platforms have responded to criticism: “Everyone is still operating under the view that algorithms simply maximize engagement in a short-term way” with minimal attention to potential externalities. “That might’ve been true when Zuckerberg had seven people working for him, but there are a lot of considerations that go into these rankings now.” He added, “There’s some evidence that, with reverse-chronological feeds”—streams of unwashed content, which some critics argue are less manipulative than algorithmic curation—“people get exposed to more low-quality content, so it’s another case where a very simple notion of ‘algorithms are bad’ doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It doesn’t mean they’re good, it’s just that we don’t know.”

Bail told me that, over all, he was less confident than Haidt that the available evidence lines up clearly against the platforms. “Maybe there’s a slight majority of studies that say that social media is a net negative, at least in the West, and maybe it’s doing some good in the rest of the world.” But, he noted, “Jon will say that science has this expectation of rigor that can’t keep up with the need in the real world—that even if we don’t have the definitive study that creates the historical counterfactual that Facebook is largely responsible for polarization in the U.S., there’s still a lot pointing in that direction, and I think that’s a fair point.” He paused. “It can’t all be randomized control trials.”

Haidt comes across in conversation as searching and sincere, and, during our exchange, he paused several times to suggest that I include a quote from John Stuart Mill on the importance of good-faith debate to moral progress. In that spirit, I asked him what he thought of the argument, elaborated by some of Haidt’s critics, that the problems he described are fundamentally political, social, and economic, and that to blame social media is to search for lost keys under the streetlamp, where the light is better. He agreed that this was the steelman opponent: there were predecessors for cancel culture in de Tocqueville, and anxiety about new media that went back to the time of the printing press. “This is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, and it’s absolutely up to the prosecution—people like me—to argue that, no, this time it’s different. But it’s a civil case! The evidential standard is not ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ as in a criminal case. It’s just a preponderance of the evidence.”

The way scholars weigh the testimony is subject to their disciplinary orientations. Economists and political scientists tend to believe that you can’t even begin to talk about causal dynamics without a randomized controlled trial, whereas sociologists and psychologists are more comfortable drawing inferences on a correlational basis. Haidt believes that conditions are too dire to take the hardheaded, no-reasonable-doubt view. “The preponderance of the evidence is what we use in public health. If there’s an epidemic—when COVID started, suppose all the scientists had said, ‘No, we gotta be so certain before you do anything’? We have to think about what’s actually happening, what’s likeliest to pay off.” He continued, “We have the largest epidemic ever of teen mental health, and there is no other explanation,” he said. “It is a raging public-health epidemic, and the kids themselves say Instagram did it, and we have some evidence, so is it appropriate to say, ‘Nah, you haven’t proven it’?”

This was his attitude across the board. He argued that social media seemed to aggrandize inflammatory posts and to be correlated with a rise in violence; even if only small groups were exposed to fake news, such beliefs might still proliferate in ways that were hard to measure. “In the post-Babel era, what matters is not the average but the dynamics, the contagion, the exponential amplification,” he said. “Small things can grow very quickly, so arguments that Russian disinformation didn’t matter are like COVID arguments that people coming in from China didn’t have contact with a lot of people.” Given the transformative effects of social media, Haidt insisted, it was important to act now, even in the absence of dispositive evidence. “Academic debates play out over decades and are often never resolved, whereas the social-media environment changes year by year,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting around five or ten years for literature reviews.”

Haidt could be accused of question-begging—of assuming the existence of a crisis that the research might or might not ultimately underwrite. Still, the gap between the two sides in this case might not be quite as wide as Haidt thinks. Skeptics of his strongest claims are not saying that there’s no there there. Just because the average YouTube user is unlikely to be led to Stormfront videos, Nyhan told me, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry that some people are watching Stormfront videos; just because echo chambers and foreign misinformation seem to have had effects only at the margins, Gentzkow said, doesn’t mean they’re entirely irrelevant. “There are many questions here where the thing we as researchers are interested in is how social media affects the average person,” Gentzkow told me. “There’s a different set of questions where all you need is a small number of people to change—questions about ethnic violence in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, people on YouTube mobilized to do mass shootings. Much of the evidence broadly makes me skeptical that the average effects are as big as the public discussion thinks they are, but I also think there are cases where a small number of people with very extreme views are able to find each other and connect and act.” He added, “That’s where many of the things I’d be most concerned about lie.”

The same might be said about any phenomenon where the base rate is very low but the stakes are very high, such as teen suicide. “It’s another case where those rare edge cases in terms of total social harm may be enormous. You don’t need many teen-age kids to decide to kill themselves or have serious mental-health outcomes in order for the social harm to be really big.” He added, “Almost none of this work is able to get at those edge-case effects, and we have to be careful that if we do establish that the average effect of something is zero, or small, that it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about it—because we might be missing those extremes.” Jaime Settle, a scholar of political behavior at the College of William & Mary and the author of the book “ Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America ,” noted that Haidt is “farther along the spectrum of what most academics who study this stuff are going to say we have strong evidence for.” But she understood his impulse: “We do have serious problems, and I’m glad Jon wrote the piece, and down the road I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a fuller handle on the role of social media in all of this—there are definitely ways in which social media has changed our politics for the worse.”

It’s tempting to sidestep the question of diagnosis entirely, and to evaluate Haidt’s essay not on the basis of predictive accuracy—whether social media will lead to the destruction of American democracy—but as a set of proposals for what we might do better. If he is wrong, how much damage are his prescriptions likely to do? Haidt, to his great credit, does not indulge in any wishful thinking, and if his diagnosis is largely technological his prescriptions are sociopolitical. Two of his three major suggestions seem useful and have nothing to do with social media: he thinks that we should end closed primaries and that children should be given wide latitude for unsupervised play. His recommendations for social-media reform are, for the most part, uncontroversial: he believes that preteens shouldn’t be on Instagram and that platforms should share their data with outside researchers—proposals that are both likely to be beneficial and not very costly.

It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. “But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it—a broader impact on trust,” he said. “Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can’t trust anything, and other people are being misled about it—well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself.” Nyhan had a similar reaction. “There are genuine questions that are really important, but there’s a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There’s so much focus on sweeping claims that aren’t actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better.” He added, “We’re years into this, and we’re still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It’s totally wild.”

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Is social media good for you?

Using social media can have benefits for your mental health, but only if you use it in the right way

By Dr Peggy Kern, University of Melbourne

Whether I’m standing on the tram, sitting in a café, or walking down the street, I’m struck by the sight of so many people looking down at their phones, scrolling through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or a myriad of other social media platforms.

I immediately ask myself, in this increasingly technological age, what is the impact of constant social media use on our mental health?

On one hand, it allows us to stay up-to-date and connected. I can find out what friends in America and around the world are doing at any time of day or night.

On the other, it’s hard to carry on a normal conversation without someone compulsively checking their feed, rendered paranoid by FOMO (fear of missing out). A person might have thousands of “friends”, but feel completely alone.

So is social media good or bad for us? In a new study published in the Journal of Mental Health , PhD student Elizabeth Seabrook, Dr Nikki Rickard from Monash University and myself found that it is not as clear-cut as you might think.

We reviewed 70 studies that have examined how social network use relates to depression, anxiety, and subjective wellbeing. Results were mixed. Some studies found social media users were happier and more connected with other people.

But other studies found that social media users had more signs of depression or anxiety. So we also looked at various factors that had an impact on when it is beneficial or harmful.

How gender shapes our Facebook chats

Studies were conducted between 2005 and 2016, mostly with adolescents and young adults. Most focused on Facebook, with a few studies centred around the use of Twitter, MySpace, or social media in general.

These studies examined a variety of themes, including how much time people spent on social media, the number of friends they had, and whether or not they liked and felt accepted by their friends.

Also examined were the words they used, how much personal information they shared, whether they compared themselves with others, and how much they felt addicted to social media.

Across the studies, it appears that it’s not so much that social media causes anxiety and depression, but that people have different ways of using social media, which may be more or less helpful.

For example, Chris, who reported high levels of wellbeing, liked to use Facebook to catch up on the latest gossip and share with others fun things that happened during the day.

Meanwhile, Carey, who suffers from depression, spent hours browsing the newsfeed, and bemoaning how nice everyone else’s life seems.

For many, social media appears to have a range of benefits. It provides a way for many of us to connect with others. We can support other people and feel supported by them. It may even be a useful way for those with social anxiety and those who have a hard time with face-to-face interactions to connect with others.

But for those with depression or anxiety, it could make their symptoms worse. Indeed people who often compared themselves to their friends, ruminated about life, or had negative interactions with others, were at greater risk of depression and anxiety.

Notably, the number of hours that people spent on social media didn’t make a clear difference – it was more the feeling of being addicted to it. It seems like what a person writes about is more indicative of their state of mental health than the number of hours spent online.

Share the love with positive posts

Those with symptoms of depression were more likely to be jealous of their friends, compare themselves to others, and use negative language when using social media. This is similar to what I’ve seen in some of my other research, which points to the power of the words that we use.

A growing number of studies suggest that we might be able to use data from social media use to identify people suffering from depression or anxiety, thereby providing the possibility for offering support and resources for those who might not otherwise get the help they need.

So what can we take away from the study? We each have unique patterns in how we use social media, in terms of the language we use and how we behave when we are using it.

Do you keep your friends updated on your activities? Post pictures of your family? Complain about work or other people? Passively browse news feeds without commenting? Do you feel like it helps you connect with others, or do you feel addicted and controlled by it?

As a whole, our review suggests that it is valuable to pause and consider what our behavioural patterns are. By understanding them better, we potentially can make better choices about how to best use social media, as well as use it to promote good mental health.

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Just How Harmful Is Social Media? Our Experts Weigh-In.

A recent investigation by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook was aware of mental health risks linked to the use of its Instagram app but kept those findings secret. Internal research by the social media giant found that Instagram worsened body image issues for one in three teenage girls, and all teenage users of the app linked it to experiences of anxiety and depression. It isn’t the first evidence of social media’s harms. Watchdog groups have identified Facebook and Instagram as avenues for cyberbullying , and reports have linked TikTok to dangerous and antisocial behavior, including a recent spate of school vandalism .

As social media has proliferated worldwide—Facebook has 2.85 billion users—so too have concerns over how the platforms are affecting individual and collective wellbeing. Social media is criticized for being addictive by design and for its role in the spread of misinformation on critical issues from vaccine safety to election integrity, as well as the rise of right-wing extremism. Social media companies, and many users, defend the platforms as avenues for promoting creativity and community-building. And some research has pushed back against the idea that social media raises the risk for depression in teens . So just how healthy or unhealthy is social media?

Two experts from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia Psychiatry share their insights into one crucial aspect of social media’s influence—its effect on the mental health of young people and adults. Deborah Glasofer , associate professor of psychology in psychiatry, conducts psychotherapy development research for adults with eating disorders and teaches about cognitive behavioral therapy. She is the co-author of the book Eating Disorders: What Everyone Needs to Know. Claude Mellins , Professor of medical psychology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Sociomedical Sciences, studies wellbeing among college and graduate students, among other topics, and serves as program director of CopeColumbia, a peer support program for Columbia faculty and staff whose mental health has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. She co-led the SHIFT research study to reduce sexual violence among undergraduates. Both use social media.

What do we know about the mental health risks of social media use?

Mellins : Facebook and Instagram and other social media platforms are important sources of socialization and relationship-building for many young people. Although there are important benefits, social media can also provide platforms for bullying and exclusion, unrealistic expectations about body image and sources of popularity, normalization of risk-taking behaviors, and can be detrimental to mental health. Girls and young people who identify as sexual and gender minorities can be especially vulnerable as targets. Young people’s brains are still developing, and as individuals, young people are developing their own identities. What they see on social media can define what is expected in ways that is not accurate and that can be destructive to identity development and self-image. Adolescence is a time of risk-taking, which is both a strength and a vulnerability. Social media can exacerbate risks, as we have seen played out in the news. 

Although there are important benefits, social media can also provide platforms for bullying and exclusion, unrealistic expectations about body image and sources of popularity, normalization of risk-taking behaviors, and can be detrimental to mental health. – Claude Mellins

Glasofer : For those vulnerable to developing an eating disorder, social media may be especially unhelpful because it allows people to easily compare their appearance to their friends, to celebrities, even older images of themselves. Research tells us that how much someone engages with photo-related activities like posting and sharing photos on Facebook or Instagram is associated with less body acceptance and more obsessing about appearance. For adolescent girls in particular, the more time they spend on social media directly relates to how much they absorb the idea that being thin is ideal, are driven to try to become thin, and/or overly scrutinize their own bodies. Also, if someone is vulnerable to an eating disorder, they may be especially attracted to seeking out unhelpful information—which is all too easy to find on social media.

Are there any upsides to social media?

Mellins : For young people, social media provides a platform to help them figure out who they are. For very shy or introverted young people, it can be a way to meet others with similar interests. During the pandemic, social media made it possible for people to connect in ways when in-person socialization was not possible.  Social support and socializing are critical influences on coping and resilience. Friends we couldn’t see in person were available online and allowed us important points of connection. On the other hand, fewer opportunities for in-person interactions with friends and family meant less of a real-world check on some of the negative influences of social media.

Whether it’s social media or in person, a good peer group makes the difference. A group of friends that connects over shared interests like art or music, and is balanced in their outlook on eating and appearance, is a positive. – Deborah Glasofer

Glasofer : Whether it’s social media or in person, a good peer group makes the difference. A group of friends that connects over shared interests like art or music, and is balanced in their outlook on eating and appearance, is a positive. In fact, a good peer group online may be protective against negative in-person influences. For those with a history of eating disorders, there are body-positive and recovery groups on social media. Some people find these groups to be supportive; for others, it’s more beneficial to move on and pursue other interests.

Is there a healthy way to be on social media?

Mellins : If you feel social media is a negative experience, you might need a break. Disengaging with social media permanently is more difficult­—especially for young people. These platforms are powerful tools for connecting and staying up-to-date with friends and family. Social events, too. If you’re not on social media then you’re reliant on your friends to reach out to you personally, which doesn’t always happen. It’s complicated.

Glasofer : When you find yourself feeling badly about yourself in relation to what other people are posting about themselves, then social media is not doing you any favors. If there is anything on social media that is negatively affecting your actions or your choices­—for example, if you’re starting to eat restrictively or exercise excessively—then it’s time to reassess. Parents should check-in with their kids about their lives on social media. In general, I recommend limiting social media— creating boundaries that are reasonable and work for you—so you can be present with people in your life. I also recommend social media vacations. It’s good to take the time to notice the difference between the virtual world and the real world.

Social media use can be positive for mental health and well-being

January 6, 2020— Mesfin Awoke Bekalu , research scientist in the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, discusses a new study he co-authored on associations between social media use and mental health and well-being.

What is healthy vs. potentially problematic social media use?

Our study has brought preliminary evidence to answer this question. Using a nationally representative sample, we assessed the association of two dimensions of social media use—how much it’s routinely used and how emotionally connected users are to the platforms—with three health-related outcomes: social well-being, positive mental health, and self-rated health.

We found that routine social media use—for example, using social media as part of everyday routine and responding to content that others share—is positively associated with all three health outcomes. Emotional connection to social media—for example, checking apps excessively out of fear of missing out, being disappointed about or feeling disconnected from friends when not logged into social media—is negatively associated with all three outcomes.

In more general terms, these findings suggest that as long as we are mindful users, routine use may not in itself be a problem. Indeed, it could be beneficial.

For those with unhealthy social media use, behavioral interventions may help. For example, programs that develop “effortful control” skills—the ability to self-regulate behavior—have been widely shown to be useful in dealing with problematic Internet and social media use.

We’re used to hearing that social media use is harmful to mental health and well-being, particularly for young people. Did it surprise you to find that it can have positive effects?

The findings go against what some might expect, which is intriguing. We know that having a strong social network is associated with positive mental health and well-being. Routine social media use may compensate for diminishing face-to-face social interactions in people’s busy lives. Social media may provide individuals with a platform that overcomes barriers of distance and time, allowing them to connect and reconnect with others and thereby expand and strengthen their in-person networks and interactions. Indeed, there is some empirical evidence supporting this.

On the other hand, a growing body of research has demonstrated that social media use is negatively associated with mental health and well-being, particularly among young people—for example, it may contribute to increased risk of depression and anxiety symptoms.

Our findings suggest that the ways that people are using social media may have more of an impact on their mental health and well-being than just the frequency and duration of their use.

What disparities did you find in the ways that social media use benefits and harms certain populations? What concerns does this raise?

My co-authors Rachel McCloud , Vish Viswanath , and I found that the benefits and harms associated with social media use varied across demographic, socioeconomic, and racial population sub-groups. Specifically, while the benefits were generally associated with younger age, better education, and being white, the harms were associated with older age, less education, and being a racial minority. Indeed, these findings are consistent with the body of work on communication inequalities and health disparities that our lab, the Viswanath lab , has documented over the past 15 or so years. We know that education, income, race, and ethnicity influence people’s access to, and ability to act on, health information from media, including the Internet. The concern is that social media may perpetuate those differences.

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The Pros and Cons of Social Media for Youth

A new review article looks at how social media affects well-being in youth...

Posted October 16, 2021 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

• Social media has both positive and negative effects on well-being in youth.
• Social media impacts four distinct areas for youth: connections, identity, learning, and emotions.

More than 90 percent of teenagers in the U.S. have a smartphone. Access to this type of technology and social networking changes the playing field for young people who are simultaneously developing a sense of identity and new social relationships.

We have certainly heard about the downside of teens and smartphones: cyberbullying, anxiety , and a misrepresented sense of body image . Research demonstrates there are some benefits too, including the ability to keep in touch with friends and loved ones – especially when the COVID-19 pandemic limited in-person social interactions.

A new systematic review published in the journal Adolescent Research Review combines the evidence from qualitative studies that investigate adolescent social media use.

The authors found, in short, that the links between adolescent well-being and social media are complicated and depend on a broad range of factors.

“Adults have always been concerned about how the latest technology will harm children,” said Amanda Purington, director of evaluation and research for ACT for Youth in the BCTR and a doctoral candidate in Cornell’s Social Media Lab. “This goes back to radio programs, comic books, novels – you name it, adults were worried about it. The same is now true for social media. And yes, there are concerns – there are many potential risks and harms. But there are potential benefits, too.”

Reviewing 19 studies of young people ages 11 to 20, the authors identified four major themes related to social media and well-being that ultimately affected aspects of young people’s mental health and sense of self.

The first theme, connections, describes how social media either supports or hinders young people’s relationships with their peers, friends, and family. The studies in the review provided plenty of examples of ways that social media helped youth build connections with others. Participants reported that social media helped to create intimacy with friends and could improve popularity. Youth who said they were shy reported having an easier time making friends through social media. Studies also found social media was useful in keeping in touch with family and friends who live far away and allowing groups to communicate in masse. In seven papers, participants identified social media as a source of support and reassurance.

In 13 of the papers, youth reported that social media also harmed their connections with others. They provided examples of bullying and threats and an atmosphere of criticism and negativity during social media interactions. Youth cited the anonymity of social media as part of the problem, as well as miscommunication that can occur online.

Study participants also reported a feeling of disconnection associated with relationships on social media. Some youth felt rejected or left out when their social media posts did not receive the feedback they expected. Others reported feeling frustrated, lonely , or paranoid about being left out.

The second theme, identity, describes how adolescents are supported or frustrated on social media in trying to develop their identities.

Youth in many of the studies described how social media helped them to “come out of their shells” and express their true identities. They reported liking the ability to write and edit their thoughts and use images to express themselves. They reported that feedback they received on social media helped to bolster their self-confidence and they reported enjoying the ability to look back on memories to keep track of how their identity changed over time.

In eight studies, youth described ways that social media led to inauthentic representations of themselves. They felt suspicious that others would use photo editing to disguise their identities and complained about how easy it was to deliver communications slyly, rather than with the honesty required in face-to-face communication. They also felt self-conscious about posting selfies, and reported that the feedback they received would affect their feelings of self-worth .

The third theme, learning, describes how social media use supports or hinders education . In many studies, participants reported how social media helped to broaden their perspectives and expose them to new ideas and topics. Many youths specifically cited exposure to political and social movements, such as Black Lives Matter.

On the flip side, youth in five studies reported that social media interfered with their education. They said that phone notifications and the pressure to constantly check in on social media distracted them from their studies. Participants reported that they found it difficult to spend quiet time alone without checking their phones. Others said the 24-7 nature of social media kept them up too late at night, making it difficult to get up for school the next day.

The fourth theme, emotions, describes the ways that social media impacts young people’s emotional experiences in both positive and negative ways. In 11 papers, participants reported that social media had a positive effect on their emotions. Some reported it improved their mood, helped them to feel excited, and often prompted laughter . (Think funny animal videos.) Others reported that social media helped to alleviate negative moods, including annoyance, anger , and boredom . They described logging onto social media as a form of stress management .

But in nearly all of the papers included in the review, participants said social media was a source of worry and pressure. Participants expressed concern about judgment from their peers. They often felt embarrassed about how they looked in images. Many participants expressed worry that they were addicted to social media. Others fretted about leaving a digital footprint that would affect them later in life. Many participants reported experiencing pressure to constantly respond and stay connected on social media. And a smaller number of participants reported feeling disturbed by encountering troubling content, such as self-harm and seeing former partners in new relationships.

“As this review article highlights, social media provides spaces for adolescents to work on some of the central developmental tasks of their age, such as forming deeper connections with peers and exploring identity,” Purington said. “I believe the key is to help youth maximize these benefits while minimizing risks, and we can do this by educating youth about how to use social media in ways that are positive, safe, and prosocial.”

The take-home message: The body of evidence on social media and well-being paints a complicated picture of how this new technology is affecting youth. While there are certainly benefits when young people use social media, there is also a broad range of pressures and negative consequences.

The Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research at Cornell University is focused on using research findings to improve health and well-being of people at all stages of life.

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Science News

Social media harms teens’ mental health, mounting evidence shows. what now.

Understanding what is going on in teens’ minds is necessary for targeted policy suggestions

Most teens use social media, often for hours on end. Some social scientists are confident that such use is harming their mental health. Now they want to pinpoint what explains the link.

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By Sujata Gupta

February 20, 2024 at 7:30 am

In January, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, appeared at a congressional hearing to answer questions about how social media potentially harms children. Zuckerberg opened by saying: “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health.”

But many social scientists would disagree with that statement. In recent years, studies have started to show a causal link between teen social media use and reduced well-being or mood disorders, chiefly depression and anxiety.

Ironically, one of the most cited studies into this link focused on Facebook.

Researchers delved into whether the platform’s introduction across college campuses in the mid 2000s increased symptoms associated with depression and anxiety. The answer was a clear yes , says MIT economist Alexey Makarin, a coauthor of the study, which appeared in the November 2022 American Economic Review . “There is still a lot to be explored,” Makarin says, but “[to say] there is no causal evidence that social media causes mental health issues, to that I definitely object.”

The concern, and the studies, come from statistics showing that social media use in teens ages 13 to 17 is now almost ubiquitous. Two-thirds of teens report using TikTok, and some 60 percent of teens report using Instagram or Snapchat, a 2022 survey found. (Only 30 percent said they used Facebook.) Another survey showed that girls, on average, allot roughly 3.4 hours per day to TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, compared with roughly 2.1 hours among boys. At the same time, more teens are showing signs of depression than ever, especially girls ( SN: 6/30/23 ).

As more studies show a strong link between these phenomena, some researchers are starting to shift their attention to possible mechanisms. Why does social media use seem to trigger mental health problems? Why are those effects unevenly distributed among different groups, such as girls or young adults? And can the positives of social media be teased out from the negatives to provide more targeted guidance to teens, their caregivers and policymakers?

“You can’t design good public policy if you don’t know why things are happening,” says Scott Cunningham, an economist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

Increasing rigor

Concerns over the effects of social media use in children have been circulating for years, resulting in a massive body of scientific literature. But those mostly correlational studies could not show if teen social media use was harming mental health or if teens with mental health problems were using more social media.

Moreover, the findings from such studies were often inconclusive, or the effects on mental health so small as to be inconsequential. In one study that received considerable media attention, psychologists Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski combined data from three surveys to see if they could find a link between technology use, including social media, and reduced well-being. The duo gauged the well-being of over 355,000 teenagers by focusing on questions around depression, suicidal thinking and self-esteem.

Digital technology use was associated with a slight decrease in adolescent well-being , Orben, now of the University of Cambridge, and Przybylski, of the University of Oxford, reported in 2019 in Nature Human Behaviour . But the duo downplayed that finding, noting that researchers have observed similar drops in adolescent well-being associated with drinking milk, going to the movies or eating potatoes.

Holes have begun to appear in that narrative thanks to newer, more rigorous studies.

In one longitudinal study, researchers — including Orben and Przybylski — used survey data on social media use and well-being from over 17,400 teens and young adults to look at how individuals’ responses to a question gauging life satisfaction changed between 2011 and 2018. And they dug into how the responses varied by gender, age and time spent on social media.

Social media use was associated with a drop in well-being among teens during certain developmental periods, chiefly puberty and young adulthood, the team reported in 2022 in Nature Communications . That translated to lower well-being scores around ages 11 to 13 for girls and ages 14 to 15 for boys. Both groups also reported a drop in well-being around age 19. Moreover, among the older teens, the team found evidence for the Goldilocks Hypothesis: the idea that both too much and too little time spent on social media can harm mental health.

“There’s hardly any effect if you look over everybody. But if you look at specific age groups, at particularly what [Orben] calls ‘windows of sensitivity’ … you see these clear effects,” says L.J. Shrum, a consumer psychologist at HEC Paris who was not involved with this research. His review of studies related to teen social media use and mental health is forthcoming in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

Cause and effect

That longitudinal study hints at causation, researchers say. But one of the clearest ways to pin down cause and effect is through natural or quasi-experiments. For these in-the-wild experiments, researchers must identify situations where the rollout of a societal “treatment” is staggered across space and time. They can then compare outcomes among members of the group who received the treatment to those still in the queue — the control group.

That was the approach Makarin and his team used in their study of Facebook. The researchers homed in on the staggered rollout of Facebook across 775 college campuses from 2004 to 2006. They combined that rollout data with student responses to the National College Health Assessment, a widely used survey of college students’ mental and physical health.

The team then sought to understand if those survey questions captured diagnosable mental health problems. Specifically, they had roughly 500 undergraduate students respond to questions both in the National College Health Assessment and in validated screening tools for depression and anxiety. They found that mental health scores on the assessment predicted scores on the screenings. That suggested that a drop in well-being on the college survey was a good proxy for a corresponding increase in diagnosable mental health disorders. 

Compared with campuses that had not yet gained access to Facebook, college campuses with Facebook experienced a 2 percentage point increase in the number of students who met the diagnostic criteria for anxiety or depression, the team found.

When it comes to showing a causal link between social media use in teens and worse mental health, “that study really is the crown jewel right now,” says Cunningham, who was not involved in that research.

A need for nuance

The social media landscape today is vastly different than the landscape of 20 years ago. Facebook is now optimized for maximum addiction, Shrum says, and other newer platforms, such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, have since copied and built on those features. Paired with the ubiquity of social media in general, the negative effects on mental health may well be larger now.

Moreover, social media research tends to focus on young adults — an easier cohort to study than minors. That needs to change, Cunningham says. “Most of us are worried about our high school kids and younger.” 

And so, researchers must pivot accordingly. Crucially, simple comparisons of social media users and nonusers no longer make sense. As Orben and Przybylski’s 2022 work suggested, a teen not on social media might well feel worse than one who briefly logs on. 

Researchers must also dig into why, and under what circumstances, social media use can harm mental health, Cunningham says. Explanations for this link abound. For instance, social media is thought to crowd out other activities or increase people’s likelihood of comparing themselves unfavorably with others. But big data studies, with their reliance on existing surveys and statistical analyses, cannot address those deeper questions. “These kinds of papers, there’s nothing you can really ask … to find these plausible mechanisms,” Cunningham says.

One ongoing effort to understand social media use from this more nuanced vantage point is the SMART Schools project out of the University of Birmingham in England. Pedagogical expert Victoria Goodyear and her team are comparing mental and physical health outcomes among children who attend schools that have restricted cell phone use to those attending schools without such a policy. The researchers described the protocol of that study of 30 schools and over 1,000 students in the July BMJ Open.

Goodyear and colleagues are also combining that natural experiment with qualitative research. They met with 36 five-person focus groups each consisting of all students, all parents or all educators at six of those schools. The team hopes to learn how students use their phones during the day, how usage practices make students feel, and what the various parties think of restrictions on cell phone use during the school day.

Talking to teens and those in their orbit is the best way to get at the mechanisms by which social media influences well-being — for better or worse, Goodyear says. Moving beyond big data to this more personal approach, however, takes considerable time and effort. “Social media has increased in pace and momentum very, very quickly,” she says. “And research takes a long time to catch up with that process.”

Until that catch-up occurs, though, researchers cannot dole out much advice. “What guidance could we provide to young people, parents and schools to help maintain the positives of social media use?” Goodyear asks. “There’s not concrete evidence yet.”

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The Pros and Cons of Social Media

A look at the ups and downs of being so digitally connected to people

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Social networking has changed the way we communicate, do business, get our daily news fix and so much more. But is it really all it's cracked up to be?

That depends on who you talk to and how you're using it. A site like Facebook could serve as an opportunistic launching pad for a new business owner, or it could be an inescapable source of negative peer pressure for a young teen. There are pros and cons to everything in life—and that includes our social networking habits.

The Pros of Social Networking

There are a lot of upsides to social networking. Ask yourself how you can take more advantage of the following whenever you decide to check out your favorite social networks.

Connect to Other People All Over the World

  One of the most obvious pros of using social networks is the ability to instantly reach people from anywhere. Use Facebook to stay in touch with your old high school friends who've relocated all over the country, use Google Meet to connect with relatives who live halfway around the world, or meet brand new people on social media from cities or regions you've never even heard of before.

Easy and Instant Communication

Now that we're connected wherever we go, we don't have to rely on our landlines, answering machines or snail mail to contact somebody. We can simply open up our laptops or pick up our smartphones and immediately start communicating with anyone on social media or one of the many social messaging apps available.

Real-Time News and Information Discovery

Gone are the days of waiting around for the six o'clock news to come on TV or for the delivery boy to bring the newspaper in the morning. If you want to know what's going on in the world, all you need to do is jump on social media. An added bonus is that you can customize your news and information discovery experiences by choosing to follow exactly what you want.

Great Opportunities for Business Owners

Business owners and other types of professional organizations can connect with current customers, sell their products and expand their reach using social media. There are actually lots of entrepreneurs and businesses out there that thrive almost entirely on social networks and wouldn't even be able to operate without it.

General Fun and Enjoyment

You have to admit that social networking is just plain fun sometimes. A lot of people turn to it when they catch a break at work or just want to relax at home. Since people are naturally social creatures, it's often quite satisfying to see comments and likes show up on our own posts, and it's convenient to be able to see exactly what our friends are up to without having to ask them directly.

The Cons of Social Networking

It's no secret that there's also a dark side to social networking. You may want to ask yourself how you can minimize the following cons of social networking as much and as often as possible.

If social media is your primary source for news and other information, you could end up in a filter bubble, which is when you've isolated yourself from new information and engaging with people who have different perspectives. If you've managed to stay in a bubble of harmful misinformation, it can damage relationships and even be dangerous.

Information Overload and Overwhelm

With so many people now on social media tweeting links and posting selfies and sharing YouTube videos, it sure can get pretty noisy. Becoming overwhelmed by too many Facebook friends to keep up with or too many Instagram photos to browse through isn't all that uncommon. Over time, we tend to rack up a lot of friends and followers, and that can lead to lots of bloated news feeds with too much content we're not all that interested in.

Privacy Issues

So much is shared online these days that issues over privacy are becoming an increasingly big concern. Whether it's a question of social sites owning your content after it's posted, becoming a target after sharing your location online , or even getting in trouble at work after tweeting something inappropriate — sharing too much with the public can open up all sorts of problems that sometimes can't ever be undone.

Social Peer Pressure and Cyber Bullying

For people struggling to fit in with their peers — especially teens and young adults — the pressure to do certain things or act a certain way can be even worse on social media than it is at school or any other offline setting. In some extreme cases, the overwhelming pressure to fit in with everyone posting on social media or becoming the target of a cyberbullying attack can lead to serious stress, anxiety and even depression.

Increased Feelings of Social Isolation

  Since people are now connected all the time and you can pull up a friend's social profile with a click of your mouse or a tap of your smartphone, it's a lot easier to use online interaction as a substitute for face-to-face interaction. Some people argue that social media actually promotes antisocial human behavior.

Distraction and Procrastination 

How often do you see someone look at their phone? People get distracted by all the social apps and news and messages they receive, leading to all sorts of problems like distracted driving or the lack of gaining someone's full attention during a conversation. Browsing social media can also feed procrastination habits and become something people turn to in order to avoid certain tasks or responsibilities.

Sedentary Lifestyle Habits and Sleep Disruption 

Lastly, since social networking is all done on some sort of computer or mobile device, it can sometimes promote too much sitting down in one spot for too long. Likewise, staring into the artificial light from a computer or phone screen at night can negatively affect your ability to get a proper night's sleep.

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Regions & Countries

2. views of social media and its impacts on society.

When asked whether social media is a good or bad thing for democracy in their country, a median of 57% across 19 countries say that it is a good thing. In almost every country, close to half or more say this, with the sentiment most common in Singapore, where roughly three-quarters believe social media is a good thing for democracy in their country. However, in the Netherlands and France, about four-in-ten agree. And in the U.S., only around a third think social media is positive for democracy – the smallest share among all 19 countries surveyed.

In eight countries, those who believe that the political system in their country allows them to have an influence on politics are also more likely to say that social media is a good thing for democracy. This gap is most evident in Belgium, where 62% of those who feel their political system allows them to have a say in politics also say that social media is a good thing for democracy in their country, compared with 44% among those who say that their political system does not allow them much influence on politics.

Those who view the spread of false information online as a major threat to their country are less likely to say that social media is a good thing for democracy, compared with those who view the spread of misinformation online as either a minor threat or not a threat at all. This is most clearly observed in the Netherlands, where only four-in-ten (39%) among those who see the spread of false information online as a major threat say that social media has been a good thing for democracy in their country, as opposed to the nearly six-in-ten (57%) among those who do not consider the spread of misinformation online to be a threat who say the same. This pattern is evident in eight other countries as well.

Views also vary by age. Older adults in 12 countries are less likely to say that social media is a good thing for democracy in their country when compared to their younger counterparts. In Japan, France, Israel, Hungary, the UK and Australia, the gap between the youngest and oldest age groups is at least 20 percentage points and ranges as high as 41 points in Poland, where nearly nine-in-ten (87%) younger adults say that social media has been a good thing for democracy in the country and only 46% of adults over 50 say the same.

The perceived impacts of the internet and social media on society

The publics surveyed believe the internet and social media are affecting societies. Across the six issues tested, few tend to say they see no changes due to increased connectivity – instead seeing things changing both positively and negatively – and often both at the same time. 

A median of 84% say technological connectivity has made people easier to manipulate with false information and rumors – the most among the six issues tested. Despite this, medians of 73% describe people being more informed about both current events in other countries and about events in their own country. Indeed, in most countries, those who think social media has made it easier to manipulate people with misinformation and rumors are also more likely to think that social media has made people more informed.

When it comes to politics, the internet and social media are generally seen as disruptive, with a median of 65% saying that people are now more divided in their political opinions. Some of this may be due to the sense – shared by a median of 44% across the 19 countries – that access to the internet and social media has led people to be less civil in the way they talk about politics. Despite this, slightly more people (a median of 45%) still say connectivity has made people more accepting of people from different ethnic groups, religions and races than say it has made people less accepting (22%) or had no effect (29%). 

There is widespread concern over misinformation – and a sense that people are more susceptible to manipulation

Previously reported results indicate that a median of 70% across the 19 countries surveyed believe that the spread of false information online is a major threat to their country. In places like Canada, Germany and Malaysia, more people name this as a threat than say the same of any of the other issues asked about. 

This sense of threat is related to the widespread belief that people today are now easier to manipulate with false information and rumors thanks to the internet and social media. Around half or more in every country surveyed shares this view. And in places like the Netherlands, Australia and the UK, around nine-in-ten see people as more manipulable.

In many places, younger people – who tend to be more likely to use social media (for more on usage, see Chapter 3 ) – are also more likely to say it makes people easier to manipulate with false information and rumors. For example, in South Korea, 90% of those under age 30 say social media makes people easier to manipulate, compared with 65% of those 50 and older. (Interestingly, U.S.-focused research has found older adults are more likely to share misinformation than younger ones.) People with more education are also often more likely than those with less education to say that social media has led to people being easier to manipulate.

In 2018, when Pew Research Center asked a similar question about whether access to mobile phones, the internet and social media has made people easier to manipulate with false information and rumors, the results were largely similar. Across the 11 emerging economies surveyed as part of that project , at least half in every country thought this was the case and in many places, around three-quarters or more saw this as an issue. Large shares in many places were also specifically concerned that people in their country might be manipulated by domestic politicians. For more on how the two surveys compare, see “ In advanced and emerging economies, similar views on how social media affects democracy and society .”

Spotlight on the U.S.: Attitudes and experiences with misinformation

Misinformation has long been seen as a source of concern for Americans. In 2016 , for example, in the wake of the U.S. presidential election, 64% of U.S. adults thought completely made-up news had caused a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current events. At the time, around a third felt that they often encountered political news online that was completely made up and another half said they often encountered news that was not fully accurate. Moreover, about a quarter (23%) said they had shared such stories – whether knowingly or not.

When asked in 2019 who was the cause of made-up news, Americans largely singled out two groups of people: political leaders (57%) and activists (53%). Fewer placed blame on journalists (36%), foreign actors (35%) or the public (26%). A large majority of Americans that year (82%) also described themselves as either “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the potential impact of made-up news on the 2020 presidential election. People who followed political and election news more closely and those with higher levels of political knowledge also tended to be more concerned.

Among adult American Twitter users in 2021, in particular, there was widespread concern about misinformation: 53% said inaccurate or misleading information is a major problem on the platform and 33% reported seeing a lot of that type of content when using the site. 

As of 2021 , around half (48%) of Americans thought the government should take steps to restrict false information, even if it meant losing freedom to access and publish content – a share that had increased somewhat substantially since 2018, when 39% felt the same.

Most say people are more informed about current events – foreign and domestic – thanks to social media and the internet

A majority in every country surveyed thinks that access to the internet and social media has made people in their country more informed about domestic current events. In Sweden, Japan, Greece and the Netherlands, around eight-in-ten or more share this view, while in Malaysia, a smaller majority (56%) says the same.

Younger adults tend to see social media making people more informed than older adults do. Older adults, for their part, don’t necessarily see the internet and social media making people less informed about what’s happening in their country; rather, they’re somewhat more likely to describe these platforms as having little effect on people’s information levels. In the case of the U.S., for example, 71% of adults under 30 say social media has made people more informed about current events in the U.S., compared with 60% of those ages 50 and older. But those ages 50 and older are about twice as likely to say social media has not had much impact on how informed people are compared with those under 30: 19% vs. 11%, respectively.

In seven of the surveyed countries, people with higher levels of education are more likely than those with lower levels to see social media informing the public on current events in their own country.

Majorities in every country also agree that the internet and social media are making people more informed about current events happening in other countries. The two questions are extremely highly correlated ( r = 0.94), meaning that in most places where people say social media is making people more informed about domestic events, they also say the same of international events. (See the topline for detailed results for both questions, by country.)

In the 2018 survey of emerging economies , results of a slightly different question also found that a majority in every country – and around seven-in-ten or more in most places – said people were more informed thanks to social media, the internet and smartphones, rather than less. 

In some countries, those who think social media has made it easier to manipulate people with misinformation and rumors are also more likely to think that social media has made people more informed. This finding, too, was similar in the 2018 11-country study of emerging economies: Generally speaking, individuals who are most attuned to the potential benefits technology can bring to the political domain are also the ones most anxious about the possible harms. 

Spotlight on the U.S.: Social media use and news consumption

In the U.S. , around half of adults say they either get news often (17%) or sometimes (33%) from social media. When it comes to where Americans regularly get news on social media, Facebook outpaces all other social media sites. Roughly a third of U.S. adults (31%) say they regularly get news from Facebook. While Twitter is only used by about three-in-ten U.S. adults (27%), about half of its users (53%) turn to the site to regularly get news there. And a quarter of U.S. adults regularly get news from YouTube, while smaller shares get news from Instagram (13%), TikTok (10%) or Reddit (8%). Notably, TikTok has seen rapid growth as a source of news among younger Americans in recent years.

On several social media sites asked about, adults under 30 make up the largest share of those who regularly get news on the site. For example, half or more of regular news consumers on Snapchat (67%), TikTok (52%) or Reddit (50%) are ages 18 to 29. 

While this survey finds that 64% of Americans think the public has become more informed thanks to social media, results of Center analyses do show that Americans who mainly got election and political information on social media during the 2020 election were less knowledgeable and less engaged than those who primarily got their news through other methods (like cable TV, print, etc.).

Majorities or pluralities tend to see social media leading to more political divisions

Around half or more in almost every country surveyed think social media has made people more divided in their political opinions. The U.S., South Korea and the Netherlands are particularly likely to hold this view. As a separate analysis shows, the former two also stand out for being the countries where people are most likely to report conflicts between people who support different political parties . While perceived political division in the Netherlands is somewhat lower, it, too, stands apart: Between 2021 and 2022, the share who said there were conflicts increased by 23 percentage points – among the highest year-on-year shifts evident in the survey.

More broadly, across each of the countries surveyed, people who see social division between people who support different political parties, are, in general, more likely to see social media leading people to be more divided in their political opinions.

In a number of countries, younger people are somewhat more likely to see social media enlarging political differences than older people. More educated people, too, often see social media exacerbating political divisions more than those with less education. 

Similarly, in the survey of 11 emerging economies conducted in 2018, results of a slightly different question indicated that around four-in-ten or more in every country – and a majority in most places – thought social media had made people more divided.

Publics diverge over whether social media has made people more accepting of differences

There is less consensus over what role social media has played when it comes to tolerance: A 19-country median of 45% say it has made people more accepting of people from different ethnic backgrounds, religions and races, while a median of 22% say it has made them less so, and 29% say that it has not had much impact either way.

South Korea, Singapore, Italy and Japan are the most likely to see social media making people more tolerant. On the flip side, the Netherlands and Hungary stand out as the two countries where a plurality says the internet and social media have made people less accepting of people with racial or religious differences. Most other societies are somewhat divided, as in the case of the U.S., where around a third of the public falls into each of the three groups.

Younger people are more likely than older ones in most countries to say that social media has increased tolerance. This is the case, for example, in Canada, where 54% of adults under 30 say social media has contributed to people being more accepting of people from different ethnic groups, religions and races, compared with a third of those ages 50 and older. In some places – and in Canada – older people are more likely to see social media leading to less tolerance, though in other places, older people are simply less likely to see much impact from the technology.

In most countries, people who see social media leading to more divisions between people with different political opinions are more likely to say social media has made people less accepting of those racially and religiously different from them than those who say social media is having no effect on political division. People who see more conflicts between partisans in their society are also more likely than those who see fewer divisions to place some of the blame on social media, describing it as making people less accepting of differences.  

Results of an analysis of the 11-country poll did find that people who used smartphones and social media were more likely to regularly interact with people from diverse backgrounds – though the question did not ask about acceptance , just about interactions. The publics in these emerging economies were also somewhat divided when it came to their opinions on how social media has led to people being more or less accepting of those with different viewpoints.

Mixed views on whether social media has made people discuss politics civilly

Across the countries surveyed, a median of 46% say access to the internet and social media has made people less civil when they talk about politics. This is more than the 23% who say it has made them more civil – though a median of 26% see little impact either way.

In the U.S., the Netherlands and Australia, a majority sees the internet and social media making people less civil. Roughly seven-in-ten Americans say this. Singapore stands out as the only country where around half see these technologies increasing civility. All other countries surveyed are somewhat divided.

People with higher levels of education tend to see less civility thanks to social media relative to those with lower levels of education.

In most places surveyed, those who think social media has made people more divided politically, compared with those who say it has had no impact on divisions, are also more likely to say social media has made people less civil in how they talk about politics.

Majorities view social media as a way to raise awareness among the public and elected officials

Across advanced economies, people generally recognize social media as useful for bringing the public’s and elected officials’ attention to certain issues, for changing people’s minds and for influencing policy choices. A median of 77% across the 19 countries surveyed say social media is an effective way to raise public awareness about sociopolitical issues. Those in the UK are particularly optimistic about social media as a way of bringing public attention to a topic, with about nine-in-ten holding this belief. People in France and Belgium are the least convinced about social media’s role in raising public awareness, but majorities in both countries still say it’s effective for highlighting certain issues among the public.

Many also consider social media effective for changing people’s minds on social or political issues (65% median). Confidence in social media’s effect on changing people’s minds is strongest in South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia. Germans, Belgians, Israelis and French adults are more skeptical, with no more than about half seeing social media as effective for changing people’s minds on sociopolitical issues.

Views on social media as a way to bring the attention of elected officials to certain issues are similar. A median of 64% consider social media effective for directing elected officials’ attention to issues, and this view is especially prevalent in South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia. People in Belgium, Hungary and France are less convinced.

Somewhat fewer consider social media effective for influencing policy decisions (61% median). Israelis are particularly doubtful of social media as a way for affecting policy change: A majority of Israelis say social media is an ineffective way of influencing policy decisions, and about half in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany agree. About a fifth in Poland also did not provide an answer.

An additional question was asked in the U.S. about social media’s role in creating sustained social movements; roughly seven-in-ten Americans say social media is effective for this. Younger Americans, as well as those with more education or higher incomes, are more likely than others to hold this view. Social media users and those who say social media has been generally good for U.S. democracy are also more likely to believe social media is effective at creating sustained social movements.

Age plays a role in how people in many of the 19 nations surveyed view social media’s role in public discourse. Those ages 18 to 29 are especially likely to see social media as effective for raising public awareness. For example, in France, 70% of those ages 18 to 29 see social media as an effective way of raising public awareness. Only 48% of those 50 and older share this view, a difference of 22 percentage points.

Similarly, younger adults are also more likely to consider social media an effective way for changing people’s minds on issues. The difference is greatest in Poland and Germany, where younger adults are 24 points more likely than their older counterparts to see social media this way. There are fewer differences between younger and older adults when it comes to social media’s effectiveness for directing elected officials’ attention and influencing policy decisions. Younger adults are also generally more likely to be social media users and provide answers to these questions.

Education and income are other demographic characteristics related to people’s view of social media as a way to influence public discourse. In 11 countries, those with incomes higher than the median income are more likely than those with lower incomes to consider social media effective for raising public awareness about sociopolitical issues. Those with more education are similarly more likely to consider social media effective for elevating sociopolitical issues in the public consciousness in eight countries. People with lower levels of education and income are somewhat less likely than others to provide answers to questions about social media’s effectiveness for influencing policies, changing minds and bringing attention to issues.

Social media usage is also connected to how people evaluate these platforms as a way to affect public discourse and policy choices. In nearly all countries, social media users are more likely than those who are not on social media to say social media is effective for raising public awareness, and social media users are also more likely to consider social media useful for changing people’s minds in 11 of 19 countries. The differences are greatest in Israel in both cases. Israeli social media users are 47 points more likely than non-users to say social media is effective for raising awareness and 38 points more likely to consider it effective for changing people’s minds on sociopolitical issues. Different views between social media users and non-users are less common when it comes to social media as an effective way for bringing elected officials’ attention to issues or influencing policy decisions. Social media users are also more likely than non-users to answer these questions.

Among social media users, those who are more active are more likely to consider social media an effective avenue for shaping people’s views and attention. Those who post about political or social issues at least sometimes on social media have a greater chance of seeing social media as effective for raising awareness for sociopolitical issues than those who post rarely or never in 16 countries. For example, in Spain, 84% of social media users who post sometimes or often see social media as an effective way to bring awareness to issues, compared to 71% of users who never or rarely post. Similarly, social media users who post more frequently are more likely to see social media as effective for changing minds in 13 countries, for influencing policy decisions in 15 countries, and bringing elected officials’ attention to issues in 12 nations.

People’s views of social media as a way to spread awareness or affect change are additionally related to how they see democracy. The beliefs that social media is effective for influencing policy decisions and for bringing issues to the attention of elected officials or the public are especially common among people who also believe they have a say in politics. For example, in Germany, 60% of people who say people like them have at least a fair amount of influence on politics also say social media is effective for affecting policy choices. In comparison, 43% of Germans who do not think they have a say in politics also think social media can influence policy decisions.

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Table of contents, in advanced and emerging economies, similar views on how social media affects democracy and society, freedom, elections, voice: how people in australia and the uk define democracy, global public opinion in an era of democratic anxiety, most people in advanced economies think their own government respects personal freedoms, more people globally see racial, ethnic discrimination as a serious problem in the u.s. than in their own society, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

10 Positive and Negative Effects of Social Media on Society

Nowadays, social media is so popular among the young, children, and adults. Each of us uses social media to be updated, to entertain ourselves, to communicate with others, to explore new things, and to connect with the world. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc. are examples of social media. Social media is a part of our lives today, and consciously or unconsciously, it is becoming our habit to continuously go through it and check the notifications.

What is social media?

Social media is a platform where we can communicate with a large number of people, make connections, and interact with them. It operates on the internet.A user usually creates an account on such a platform and allows interaction with the millions of other users available on it according to their preferences and choices. Apart from the interaction, it also allows users to share information, chat with other people, share their opinions, create content, and embrace their differences.

In today’s world, social media is an important part of young people’s lives, determining and shaping their perspectives.The youth typically adopt and pursue social media trends; for example, in dressing styles, the youth adopt dresses and styles that are promoted as trends by social media.

Social media not only allows people to share their opinions, but it also shapes the opinions of its users.Social media have an impact on their users as well as society as a whole, both positive and negative.

Here we will now discuss the negative and positive impacts of social media on society.

Positive impact of social media on   society.

• Builds connectivity and connection: Social media facilitates better communication as well as the development of stronger connections and connectivity around the world. One can talk to a person who lives thousands of miles away from him or her. One can also make connections in his or her respective field or area to promote his or her venture, business, or idea. LinkedIn is an example of social media where you can build connections from across the world and increase your connectivity. Hence, social media is not only connecting people within a society but also connecting people from different societies and cultures, allowing them to exchange their values and beliefs.
• People are empowered by social media because it educates them, makes them aware of them, and gives them a platform to raise their voices, showcase their talents, and promote their businesses. For instance, people on Instagram not only communicate with each other but are also establishing their small businesses and creating content on various things such as dressing style, make-up, fashion hacks, and educational content. Likewise, on YouTube, people do the same thing except chat and earn money through their talent, opinions, and content. Therefore, social media helps generate employment in society and educate its members.
• People are helped both economically and emotionally by social media : Economically, by providing customers to businesses and providing jobs to the unemployed. Emotionally, by demonstrating empathy and love to the people.The person who feels alone should communicate with people online and talk to them. Sometimes, when you post something on your social media account—a sad or happy post—people react accordingly. If you post something sad, people try to cheer you up or console you, and vice versa. Social media in society provides an equal opportunity to be social and interact, especially for those who find it difficult to communicate with others in person.
• Knowledge: on social media, people post massive amounts of content on a wide range of issues and topics. YouTube is a platform where you can find information in English, Hindi, or any other language you are comfortable with. From the fundamentals to the advanced, from simple to complex topics, one can learn for free on social media. There are many teachers, motivators, and religious gurus who provide knowledge in various fields and aspects.
• Provides new skills: Through social media, you can acquire and learn new skills. You can, for example, learn to knit on YouTube or do it yourself (DIY) on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. You can acquire as many skills as you want: cooking, knitting, floral design, rangoli making, python, ethical hacking, etc. Moreover, learning new skills helps one find work and empowers oneself.
• Source to news: social media is a source of news nowadays; people watch news more on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook as compared to news channels and newspapers. People believe that news on social media is more trustworthy and presented in a more interesting format than traditional news channels.
• Sharing of ideas: social media allows the sharing of ideas beyond boundaries, nations, and states. Social media facilitates the exchange of ideas about one’s culture, religion, state, nationality, and environment.
• Raising funds: social media helps many people raise funds for noble causes. Through the help of social media, people start campaigns for donations for a particular case, and everyone can participate in these donations. For Example, Fundraising for blind orphan children
• Creates communities: Social media creates communities of people from various backgrounds who share common interests. People with the same interests connect more with each other. Examples include the science community, the arts community, and the poets’ community. The nature of a community depends on the interests of its members.
• Multiple sources of learning: social media is a hub of knowledge where you can learn anything and everything. The education is provided at no cost. There is not only educational or academic learning, but also other types of learning; you can learn how to improve your personality, improve your communication skills, be more confident, and develop your public speaking skills.

Negative impacts of social media on society

• Contributes to the digital divide: The “digital divide” refers to the gap between those who can access the internet and those who cannot because of illiteracy, poverty, and a lack of resources. Social media is contributing to this by setting trends and engaging more youth, and youth who cannot access or understand the trends, as well as adults, are falling behind.
• Increasing cybercrimes and cyberfrauds : An increase in the use of social media is leading to an increase in cybercrimes and frauds. Cyberbullying, harassment, and stalking are on the rise nowadays, and mostly teenage women are becoming victims of them. Cyber fraud is also on the rise because most people lack digital literacy and are unaware of things like when fraudsters create an account to impersonate someone you know and demand money from you for various reasons.The nature of the frauds varied and could cause confusion and restlessness in your minds.
• Negative information, news, and rumours spread quickly: As the elders say, negativity spreads faster than positivity; similarly, false news or negative news, rumours, and information spread quickly and cause chaos and instability in the social order.Because of the rapid transfer of information, false news or information spreads in no time, which furthers the happenings in society. For example, if you come across WhatsApp messages that claim prejudice or hatred against a particular community, they will spread with more intensity and rage. This false claim creates a false image among people regarding the thing, and the false information is spread. Sometimes, it leads to violent situations in society.
• Social media affects the mental health of individuals: The stalking, cybercrimes, frauds, and hate comments adversely affect people; problems of depression, anxiety, severe tension, and fear are emerging. Sometimes, the conditions get worse, leading to suicide as well. As Durkheim mentioned, suicide is a social fact; either more or less social involvement leads to suicide in an individual, and social media manifests and roots both. For instance, if a user posts her critical view on a sensitive topic, chances are high that she will feel instant backlash from those who are against her views. Another example is that victims of cyberfraud fear using social media. Because of social media, people get traumatised and spend years of their lives living in that trauma and fear.
• People are becoming more addicted to their phones as a result of being disconnected from social reality. People frequently ignore and neglect those around them; they are unaware of what is going on in society because they are constantly immersed in their virtual world, engaging with entertainment and people in their virtual world. People who lack social and communication skills use social media to escape and ignore people in the real world. For instance, we all know a person who has no friends in the real world but has a following of hundreds of thousands on their social media account.
• Effects on health: Social media has an impact not only on mental health, but also on physical health. The constant use of screens such as phones, laptops, and tablets directly impacts the eyes by weakening the eyesight. It also negatively impacts our creativity; it basically lessens our level of creativity. The constant use of social media also makes us lazy and less active, as we are constantly using our devices. People also suffer from insomnia, irritation, and the fear of missing out. As Parsons stated, when an individual is sick, it becomes a non-functional member of society, and sickness is socially sanctioned deviance. In our opinion, social media is also making functional members of society non-functional.
• Unverified information: While social media is undeniably a knowledge hub, not all knowledge and information on it is correct or verified. Due to the large amount of data present on social media, most of it is unverified, and the chances of receiving false information are high. For example, on Facebook and Instagram, you’ll frequently see a post with the words “more you cry, the stronger you become,” and above or below it, “psychological facts”. People consume this false information as fact. There are enormous posts like this. But, in reality, this is far from factual knowledge or information.
• Undermine people: social media do not support people; they often lack support, empathy, and rational behavior. The moment people post something sad or controversial, they start getting backlash, hate comments, and threats, because of which people suffer from anxiety, stress, and depression. People who are unable to follow trends feel isolated. People who are not on social media also feel alienated. People on social media also spread hatred and prejudices against others instead of supporting and appreciating them. People compare themselves to others on social media, which lowers their self-esteem and confidence.
• Make conscious decisions about yourself: People post pictures according to socially constructed beauty standards, in which they seem slim, have radiant skin, and have clear lips (by using filters). Other people who are overweight or slimmer, have acne or pimples on their skin, lack makeup skills, and become self-conscious about their bodies. Teens start to diet, go to the gym, and try to maintain the trending body. Adults also suffer from this. People become self-conscious, which leads to feelings of inadequacy about their bodies and appearance.
• Increased use of poor language: on social media, people use language that has poor grammar, speech, and spelling. LOL, WYD, etc. words are used while chatting with people on social media. The quality of language is deteriorating, and people are losing their culture.

Conclusion-

From the above discussion, we can conclude that despite the various uses of social media, there are many misuses and negative impacts of it on society as a whole as well as on individuals.

Also read: Why do people share everything online?

Yachika Yadav is a sociology post graduate student at Banasthali Vidyapith. She loves to capture moments in nature, apart from drawing and writing poetries. Field of research attracts her the most and in future she want to be a part of that. She is a good listener, learner. And tries to always help others.

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• v.12(6); 2020 Jun

Social Media Use and Its Connection to Mental Health: A Systematic Review

Fazida karim.

1 Psychology, California Institute of Behavioral Neurosciences and Psychology, Fairfield, USA

2 Business & Management, University Sultan Zainal Abidin, Terengganu, MYS

Azeezat A Oyewande

3 Family Medicine, California Institute of Behavioral Neurosciences and Psychology, Fairfield, USA

4 Family Medicine, Lagos State Health Service Commission/Alimosho General Hospital, Lagos, NGA

Lamis F Abdalla

5 Internal Medicine, California Institute of Behavioral Neurosciences and Psychology, Fairfield, USA

Reem Chaudhry Ehsanullah

Safeera khan.

Social media are responsible for aggravating mental health problems. This systematic study summarizes the effects of social network usage on mental health. Fifty papers were shortlisted from google scholar databases, and after the application of various inclusion and exclusion criteria, 16 papers were chosen and all papers were evaluated for quality. Eight papers were cross-sectional studies, three were longitudinal studies, two were qualitative studies, and others were systematic reviews. Findings were classified into two outcomes of mental health: anxiety and depression. Social media activity such as time spent to have a positive effect on the mental health domain. However, due to the cross-sectional design and methodological limitations of sampling, there are considerable differences. The structure of social media influences on mental health needs to be further analyzed through qualitative research and vertical cohort studies.

Introduction and background

Human beings are social creatures that require the companionship of others to make progress in life. Thus, being socially connected with other people can relieve stress, anxiety, and sadness, but lack of social connection can pose serious risks to mental health [ 1 ].

Social media

Social media has recently become part of people's daily activities; many of them spend hours each day on Messenger, Instagram, Facebook, and other popular social media. Thus, many researchers and scholars study the impact of social media and applications on various aspects of people’s lives [ 2 ]. Moreover, the number of social media users worldwide in 2019 is 3.484 billion, up 9% year-on-year [ 3 - 5 ]. A statistic in Figure  1  shows the gender distribution of social media audiences worldwide as of January 2020, sorted by platform. It was found that only 38% of Twitter users were male but 61% were using Snapchat. In contrast, females were more likely to use LinkedIn and Facebook. There is no denying that social media has now become an important part of many people's lives. Social media has many positive and enjoyable benefits, but it can also lead to mental health problems. Previous research found that age did not have an effect but gender did; females were much more likely to experience mental health than males [ 6 , 7 ].

Impact on mental health

Mental health is defined as a state of well-being in which people understand their abilities, solve everyday life problems, work well, and make a significant contribution to the lives of their communities [ 8 ]. There is debated presently going on regarding the benefits and negative impacts of social media on mental health [ 9 , 10 ]. Social networking is a crucial element in protecting our mental health. Both the quantity and quality of social relationships affect mental health, health behavior, physical health, and mortality risk [ 9 ]. The Displaced Behavior Theory may help explain why social media shows a connection with mental health. According to the theory, people who spend more time in sedentary behaviors such as social media use have less time for face-to-face social interaction, both of which have been proven to be protective against mental disorders [ 11 , 12 ]. On the other hand, social theories found how social media use affects mental health by influencing how people view, maintain, and interact with their social network [ 13 ]. A number of studies have been conducted on the impacts of social media, and it has been indicated that the prolonged use of social media platforms such as Facebook may be related to negative signs and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress [ 10 - 15 ]. Furthermore, social media can create a lot of pressure to create the stereotype that others want to see and also being as popular as others.

The need for a systematic review

Systematic studies can quantitatively and qualitatively identify, aggregate, and evaluate all accessible data to generate a warm and accurate response to the research questions involved [ 4 ]. In addition, many existing systematic studies related to mental health studies have been conducted worldwide. However, only a limited number of studies are integrated with social media and conducted in the context of social science because the available literature heavily focused on medical science [ 6 ]. Because social media is a relatively new phenomenon, the potential links between their use and mental health have not been widely investigated.

This paper attempt to systematically review all the relevant literature with the aim of filling the gap by examining social media impact on mental health, which is sedentary behavior, which, if in excess, raises the risk of health problems [ 7 , 9 , 12 ]. This study is important because it provides information on the extent of the focus of peer review literature, which can assist the researchers in delivering a prospect with the aim of understanding the future attention related to climate change strategies that require scholarly attention. This study is very useful because it provides information on the extent to which peer review literature can assist researchers in presenting prospects with a view to understanding future concerns related to mental health strategies that require scientific attention. The development of the current systematic review is based on the main research question: how does social media affect mental health?

Research strategy

The research was conducted to identify studies analyzing the role of social media on mental health. Google Scholar was used as our main database to find the relevant articles. Keywords that were used for the search were: (1) “social media”, (2) “mental health”, (3) “social media” AND “mental health”, (4) “social networking” AND “mental health”, and (5) “social networking” OR “social media” AND “mental health” (Table  1 ).

Out of the results in Table  1 , a total of 50 articles relevant to the research question were selected. After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, duplicate papers were removed, and, finally, a total of 28 articles were selected for review (Figure  2 ).

PRISMA, Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Peer-reviewed, full-text research papers from the past five years were included in the review. All selected articles were in English language and any non-peer-reviewed and duplicate papers were excluded from finally selected articles.

Of the 16 selected research papers, there were a research focus on adults, gender, and preadolescents [ 10 - 19 ]. In the design, there were qualitative and quantitative studies [ 15 , 16 ]. There were three systematic reviews and one thematic analysis that explored the better or worse of using social media among adolescents [ 20 - 23 ]. In addition, eight were cross-sectional studies and only three were longitudinal studies [ 24 - 29 ].The meta-analyses included studies published beyond the last five years in this population. Table  2  presents a selection of studies from the review.

IGU, internet gaming disorder; PSMU, problematic social media use

This study has attempted to systematically analyze the existing literature on the effect of social media use on mental health. Although the results of the study were not completely consistent, this review found a general association between social media use and mental health issues. Although there is positive evidence for a link between social media and mental health, the opposite has been reported.

For example, a previous study found no relationship between the amount of time spent on social media and depression or between social media-related activities, such as the number of online friends and the number of “selfies”, and depression [ 29 ]. Similarly, Neira and Barber found that while higher investment in social media (e.g. active social media use) predicted adolescents’ depressive symptoms, no relationship was found between the frequency of social media use and depressed mood [ 28 ].

In the 16 studies, anxiety and depression were the most commonly measured outcome. The prominent risk factors for anxiety and depression emerging from this study comprised time spent, activity, and addiction to social media. In today's world, anxiety is one of the basic mental health problems. People liked and commented on their uploaded photos and videos. In today's age, everyone is immune to the social media context. Some teens experience anxiety from social media related to fear of loss, which causes teens to try to respond and check all their friends' messages and messages on a regular basis.

On the contrary, depression is one of the unintended significances of unnecessary use of social media. In detail, depression is limited not only to Facebooks but also to other social networking sites, which causes psychological problems. A new study found that individuals who are involved in social media, games, texts, mobile phones, etc. are more likely to experience depression.

The previous study found a 70% increase in self-reported depressive symptoms among the group using social media. The other social media influence that causes depression is sexual fun [ 12 ]. The intimacy fun happens when social media promotes putting on a facade that highlights the fun and excitement but does not tell us much about where we are struggling in our daily lives at a deeper level [ 28 ]. Another study revealed that depression and time spent on Facebook by adolescents are positively correlated [ 22 ]. More importantly, symptoms of major depression have been found among the individuals who spent most of their time in online activities and performing image management on social networking sites [ 14 ].

Another study assessed gender differences in associations between social media use and mental health. Females were found to be more addicted to social media as compared with males [ 26 ]. Passive activity in social media use such as reading posts is more strongly associated with depression than doing active use like making posts [ 23 ]. Other important findings of this review suggest that other factors such as interpersonal trust and family functioning may have a greater influence on the symptoms of depression than the frequency of social media use [ 28 , 29 ].

Limitation and suggestion

The limitations and suggestions were identified by the evidence involved in the study and review process. Previously, 7 of the 16 studies were cross-sectional and slightly failed to determine the causal relationship between the variables of interest. Given the evidence from cross-sectional studies, it is not possible to conclude that the use of social networks causes mental health problems. Only three longitudinal studies examined the causal relationship between social media and mental health, which is hard to examine if the mental health problem appeared more pronounced in those who use social media more compared with those who use it less or do not use at all [ 19 , 20 , 24 ]. Next, despite the fact that the proposed relationship between social media and mental health is complex, a few studies investigated mediating factors that may contribute or exacerbate this relationship. Further investigations are required to clarify the underlying factors that help examine why social media has a negative impact on some peoples’ mental health, whereas it has no or positive effect on others’ mental health.

Conclusions

Social media is a new study that is rapidly growing and gaining popularity. Thus, there are many unexplored and unexpected constructive answers associated with it. Lately, studies have found that using social media platforms can have a detrimental effect on the psychological health of its users. However, the extent to which the use of social media impacts the public is yet to be determined. This systematic review has found that social media envy can affect the level of anxiety and depression in individuals. In addition, other potential causes of anxiety and depression have been identified, which require further exploration.

The importance of such findings is to facilitate further research on social media and mental health. In addition, the information obtained from this study can be helpful not only to medical professionals but also to social science research. The findings of this study suggest that potential causal factors from social media can be considered when cooperating with patients who have been diagnosed with anxiety or depression. Also, if the results from this study were used to explore more relationships with another construct, this could potentially enhance the findings to reduce anxiety and depression rates and prevent suicide rates from occurring.

The content published in Cureus is the result of clinical experience and/or research by independent individuals or organizations. Cureus is not responsible for the scientific accuracy or reliability of data or conclusions published herein. All content published within Cureus is intended only for educational, research and reference purposes. Additionally, articles published within Cureus should not be deemed a suitable substitute for the advice of a qualified health care professional. Do not disregard or avoid professional medical advice due to content published within Cureus.

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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Teens and social media use: What's the impact?

Social media is a term for internet sites and apps that you can use to share content you've created. Social media also lets you respond to content that others post. That can include pictures, text, reactions or comments on posts by others, and links to information.

Online sharing within social media sites helps many people stay in touch with friends or connect with new ones. And that may be more important for teenagers than other age groups. Friendships help teens feel supported and play a role in forming their identities. So, it's only natural to wonder how social media use might affect teens.

Social media is a big part of daily life for lots of teenagers.

How big? A 2022 survey of 13- to 17-year-olds offers a clue. Based on about 1,300 responses, the survey found that 35% of teens use at least one of five social media platforms more than several times a day. The five social media platforms are: YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

Social media doesn't affect all teens the same way. Use of social media is linked with healthy and unhealthy effects on mental health. These effects vary from one teenager to another. Social media effects on mental health depend on things such as:

• What a teen sees and does online.
• The amount of time spent online.
• Psychological factors, such as maturity level and any preexisting mental health conditions.
• Personal life circumstances, including cultural, social and economic factors.

Here are the general pros and cons of teen social media use, along with tips for parents.

Healthy social media

Social media lets teens create online identities, chat with others and build social networks. These networks can provide teens with support from other people who have hobbies or experiences in common. This type of support especially may help teens who:

• Lack social support offline or are lonely.
• Are going through a stressful time.
• Belong to groups that often get marginalized, such as racial minorities, the LGBTQ community and those who are differently abled.
• Have long-term medical conditions.

Sometimes, social media platforms help teens:

• Express themselves.
• Connect with other teens locally and across long distances.
• Learn how other teens cope with challenging life situations and mental health conditions.
• View or take part in moderated chat forums that encourage talking openly about topics such as mental health.
• Ask for help or seek healthcare for symptoms of mental health conditions.

These healthy effects of social media can help teens in general. They also may help teens who are prone to depression stay connected to others. And social media that's humorous or distracting may help a struggling teen cope with a challenging day.

Unhealthy social media

Social media use may have negative effects on some teens. It might:

• Distract from homework, exercise and family activities.
• Disrupt sleep.
• Lead to information that is biased or not correct.
• Become a means to spread rumors or share too much personal information.
• Lead some teens to form views about other people's lives or bodies that aren't realistic.
• Expose some teens to online predators, who might try to exploit or extort them.
• Expose some teens to cyberbullying, which can raise the risk of mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression.

What's more, certain content related to risk-taking, and negative posts or interactions on social media, have been linked with self-harm and rarely, death.

The risks of social media use are linked with various factors. One may be how much time teens spend on these platforms.

In a study focusing on 12- to 15-year-olds in the United States, spending three hours a day using social media was linked to a higher risk of mental health concerns. That study was based on data collected in 2013 and 2014 from more than 6,500 participants.

Another study looked at data on more than 12,000 teens in England between the ages of 13 to 16. The researchers found that using social media more than three times a day predicted poor mental health and well-being in teens.

But not all research has found a link between time spent on social media and mental health risks in teens.

How teens use social media also might determine its impact. For instance, viewing certain types of content may raise some teens' mental health risks. This could include content that depicts:

• Illegal acts.
• Self-harm or harm to other people.
• Encouragement of habits tied to eating disorders, such as purging or restrictive eating.

These types of content may be even more risky for teens who already have a mental health condition. Being exposed to discrimination, hate or cyberbullying on social media also can raise the risk of anxiety or depression.

What teens share about themselves on social media also matters.

With the teenage brain, it's common to make a choice before thinking it through. So, teens might post something when they're angry or upset, and regret it later. That's known as stress posting.

Teens who post content also are at risk of sharing sexual photos or highly personal stories. This can lead to teens being bullied, harassed or even blackmailed.

Protecting your teen

You can take steps to help your teens use social media responsibly and limit some of the possible negative effects.

Use these tips:

Set rules and limits as needed. This helps prevent social media from getting in the way of activities, sleep, meals or homework.

For example, you could make a rule about not using social media until homework is done. Or you could set a daily time limit for social media use.

You also could choose to keep social media off-limits during certain times. These times might include during family meals and an hour before bed.

Set an example by following these rules yourself. And let your teen know what the consequences will be if your rules aren't followed.

• Manage any challenging behaviors. If your teen's social media use starts to challenge your rules or your sense of what's appropriate, talk with your teen about it. You also could connect with parents of your teen's friends or take a look at your teen's internet history.
• Turn on privacy settings. This can help keep your teen from sharing personal information or data that your teen didn't mean to share. Each of your teen's social media accounts likely has privacy setting that can be changed.

Monitor your teen's accounts. The American Psychological Association recommends you regularly review your child's social media use during the early teen years.

One way to monitor is to follow or "friend" your child's social accounts. As your teen gets older, you can choose to monitor your teen's social media less. Your teen's maturity level can help guide your decision.

Have regular talks with your teen about social media. These talks give you chances to ask how social media has been making your teen feel. Encourage your teen to let you know if something online worries or bothers your teen.

Regular talks offer you chances to give your child advice about social media too. For example, you can teach your teen to question whether content is accurate. You also can explain that social media is full of images about beauty and lifestyle that are not realistic.

• Be a role model for your teen. You might want to tell your child about your own social media habits. That can help you set a good example and keep your regular talks from being one-sided.

Explain what's not OK. Remind your teen that it's hurtful to gossip, spread rumors, bully or harm someone's reputation — online or otherwise.

Also remind your teen not to share personal information with strangers online. This includes people's addresses, telephone numbers, passwords, and bank or credit card numbers.

• Encourage face-to-face contact with friends. This is even more important for teens prone to social anxiety.

Talk to your child's healthcare professional if you think your teen has symptoms of anxiety, depression or other mental health concerns related to social media use. Also talk with your child's care professional if your teen has any of the following symptoms:

• Uses social media even when wanting to stop.
• Uses it so much that school, sleep, activities or relationships suffer.
• Often spends more time on social platforms than you intended.
• Lies in order to use social media.

Your teen might be referred to a mental healthcare professional who can help.

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• Hagan JF, et al., eds. Promoting the healthy and safe use of social media. In: Bright Futures: Guidelines for Health Supervision of Infants, Children, and Adolescents. 4th ed. https://publications.aap.org/pediatriccare. American Academy of Pediatrics; 2017. Accessed Oct. 3, 2023.
• Social media can help connect: Research-based tips from pediatricians for families. Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health. https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-children/center-of-excellence-on-social-media-and-youth-mental-health/. Accessed Oct. 3, 2023.
• Health advisory on social media use in adolescence. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advisory-adolescent-social-media-use. Accessed Oct. 3, 2023.
• Social media and teens. American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Families/FFF-Guide/Social-Media-and-Teens-100.aspx. Accessed Oct. 3, 2023.
• Social media and youth mental health: The U.S. surgeon general's advisory. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/youth-mental-health/social-media/index.html. Accessed Oct. 3, 2023.
• Teens, social media and technology 2022. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology-2022/. Accessed Oct. 3, 2023.
• Popat A, et al. Exploring adolescents' perspectives on social media and mental health and well-being — A qualitative literature review. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 2023; doi:10.1177/13591045221092884.
• Valkenburg PM, et al. Social media use and its impact on adolescent mental health: An umbrella review of the evidence. Current Opinion in Psychology. 2022; doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.08.017.
• Berger MN, et al. Social media use and health and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth: Systematic Review. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2022; doi:10.2196/38449.
• Self-Harm. Pediatric Patient Education. https://publications.aap.org/patiented. Accessed Oct. 3, 2023.
• Liu M, et al. Time spent on social media and risk of depression in adolescents: A dose-response meta-analysis. 2022; doi:10.3390/ijerph19095164.
• Coyne SM, et al. Does time spent using social media impact mental health? An eight year longitudinal study. Computers in Human Behavior. 2020; doi:10.1016/j.chb.2019.106160.
• Viner RM, et al. Roles of cyberbullying, sleep, and physical activity in mediating the effects of social media use on mental health and wellbeing among young people in England: A secondary analysis of longitudinal data. The Lancet. Child & Adolescent Health. 2019; doi:10.1016/S2352-4642(19)30186-5.
• Riehm KE, et al. Associations between time spent using social media and internalizing and externalizing problems among US youth. JAMA Psychiatry. 2019; doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.2325.
• Hoge E, et al. Digital media, anxiety, and depression in children. Pediatrics. 2017; doi:10.1542/peds.2016-1758G.
• How to help kids navigate friendships and peer relationships. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/topics/parenting/navigating-friendships. Accessed Oct. 24, 2023.
• Hoecker JL (expert opinion). Mayo Clinic. Oct. 31, 2023.
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Essay on Is Social Media Good or Bad

Students are often asked to write an essay on Is Social Media Good or Bad in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Is Social Media Good or Bad

Introduction.

Social media, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, have become a significant part of our lives. But is social media good or bad?

The Good Side

Social media connects us with people worldwide. It helps us share ideas, learn new things, and even raise awareness about important issues.

The Bad Side

However, social media can also be harmful. It can lead to addiction, cyberbullying, and can sometimes spread false information.

In conclusion, social media can be both good and bad. It depends on how we use it. We should use it responsibly to enjoy its benefits and avoid its drawbacks.

250 Words Essay on Is Social Media Good or Bad

The advent of social media has revolutionized the way we communicate, share information, and perceive the world. However, its impact on society is a topic of intense debate, with proponents highlighting its benefits and critics cautioning about its potential harm.

The Bright Side of Social Media

Social media platforms serve as powerful tools for connection and communication. They have facilitated the democratization of information, allowing anyone to share their perspectives and experiences. Furthermore, they have become crucial for modern businesses, providing cost-effective marketing strategies and customer engagement.

The Dark Side of Social Media

Despite the benefits, social media also has its drawbacks. It can contribute to mental health issues, with studies linking excessive use to depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem. Additionally, it can facilitate the spread of misinformation, with the potential to incite public panic and influence political outcomes.

In conclusion, social media is a double-edged sword. It can connect us, promote free expression, and boost businesses, but it can also harm mental health and spread misinformation. As users, it is essential to navigate this digital landscape responsibly, understanding its potential benefits and pitfalls. As a society, it is crucial to promote digital literacy and regulate social media platforms to mitigate their negative impacts.

500 Words Essay on Is Social Media Good or Bad

Social media, a technological innovation of the 21st century, has become an integral part of our daily lives. It has radically transformed the way we communicate, interact, and share information. However, the debate about whether social media is good or bad is ongoing, with valid arguments on both sides.

The Benefits of Social Media

Arguably, the most significant benefit of social media is its ability to connect people worldwide. It breaks geographical barriers, allowing us to interact with individuals from different cultures, backgrounds, and perspectives. This global interaction fosters a sense of unity and understanding among diverse populations.

Social media also plays a crucial role in information dissemination. It provides a platform for news outlets, corporations, and individuals to share updates and critical information in real time. This instant access to information has proven invaluable in times of crisis.

Furthermore, social media has created new opportunities for business and marketing. Companies can reach a global audience, gather consumer insights, and engage with customers in a more personalized way. It has also paved the way for influencer marketing, a new-age promotional strategy.

The Detriments of Social Media

Despite its benefits, social media has its pitfalls. One of the most pressing issues is its impact on mental health. Studies have linked excessive social media use to increased levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. The pressure to maintain an idealized online persona and the constant comparison with others can lead to low self-esteem and dissatisfaction.

Another major concern is the spread of misinformation or “fake news”. Given the ease with which information can be shared, false narratives can quickly gain traction, leading to harmful consequences. This issue has been particularly noticeable in recent political climates and during public health crises.

Furthermore, social media can be a breeding ground for cyberbullying and harassment. The anonymity it offers can embolden individuals to engage in harmful behaviors with little fear of repercussions.

In conclusion, social media is neither inherently good nor bad. Its value is determined by how it is used. On one hand, it has the power to connect people, disseminate information, and create business opportunities. On the other hand, it can negatively impact mental health, spread misinformation, and facilitate cyberbullying.

As responsible users, we must strive to maximize the benefits while mitigating the drawbacks. This could involve setting boundaries for usage, critically evaluating the information received, and promoting respectful online interactions. Ultimately, the key lies in mindful and ethical use of social media.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Social Media and Youth
• Essay on Influence of Social Media
• Essay on Impact of Social Media on Youth

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Is Social Media Good or Bad for Students?

The benefits of a more connected world through social media far outweigh the downsides. With proper education about the dangers of social media, the downsides can be mitigated. As with all advances in the way we lead our lives, it’s never a clear path!

Remember when they said the internet would close all libraries? I say this because I am currently sat in a library writing this!

Allowing young people to connect with others all over the world will teach them so much and help them become more rounded individuals.

Before the Digital Era and the Rise of Social Media, life used to be pleasurable and straightforward, with no pressure of constantly updating your life. Everything you do use to be personal to you, with no fear of getting hacked or data leakage.

With the continued and increasing dominance of social media, the way of communication has changed.

You can communicate with anyone you like just in a couple of clicks.

Social media has shrunk physical distance and has made people closer than ever before. You can now move to any part of the world without fear of being far away from your family members and loved ones.

According to Statista, currently, there are more than 3.6 billion social media users worldwide. And this number is projected to increase by 0.81 billion by 2025.

According to Statista, here are the most popular social media site by the end of January 2022:

How Old Are the People Using Social Media?

People in the age group 18 to 30 are the biggest social media users, most of them being students. Here, the data prepared by Pew shows social media users according to the age:

The increase in the number of students on social media has changed the education system . Social Media has both positive and negative impacts on students .

Here we discuss the Pros and Cons of Students using Social Media

How Is Social Media Useful for Students?

• Social media connects people from across the globe.
• Social media makes education more accessible for all students.
• Connection with family and friends is easy and simple, regardless of physical distance.
• Young people can showcase their individual talents much easier with social media platforms.
• Social media allows young people to get a more unbiased view of current affairs by having multiple sources at their fingertips.
• Job opportunities are more accessible, both in social media itself and any other career path.

Social Media Connects Students From All Over the World

Social media is all about connecting people from all around the world. There are no geographical boundaries when it comes to connecting people through social media.

For many students, social media has been useful for connecting students studying the same courses as they are.

If you are a student, you may have come across many social media groups created to connect students studying the same subject as you are.

Students solve each other’s problems in such groups and share their experiences while learning a particular subject or topic.

You may also share much other important information like the scope of subjects you are studying, job opportunities, etc. This kind of data can be helpful for the group members.

Moreover, social media can also provide a platform for students’ exchange programs that many colleges and universities offer.

How Can Social Media Platform Connect Students With Teachers?

With specific education “social media” platforms such as Google Classroom , Zoom and Google Hangouts, teachers can connect and educate students remotely.

Social media provides a platform to connect students and provides a platform to connect students and teachers. Social media has made it easy for students to solve their queries anytime they want.

Now students do not have to make an appointment with their teachers to solve their queries. This can be either through built-in secure messaging or via in-app class chats, e.g. in Google Classroom .

This is beneficial not just for students but also for teachers, as sometimes when teachers cannot physically meet students, they can give effective feedback and assistance assignments through these platforms.

Furthermore, they can even conduct classes through social media. You might have come across many YouTube channels of teachers to make videos related to their subject matters. This has made the teaching and learning process easier and effortless for both students and teachers.

How Does Social Media Connect Students With Family Members?

Social media can connect students with family, regardless of physical location and with the advent of platforms such as Zoom , Google Hangouts and Microsoft Teams, multiple people can have a video conversation at the same time.

This is a huge benefit of social media among students, especially those living away from home, either at university or boarding school.

You may be aware that some of your students are living away from their homes. Students can get homesick if they do not habitually stay away from their house.

If the Covid pandemic has taught us anything it’s that connection with those we love is something that we all need.

Social media has reduced this physical distance by being a medium of connecting students with their family members.

There are so many video-calling photo-sharing educational apps now that the world feels smaller, the distances reduced.

Can Social Media Provide a Platform to Showcase Talent?

Platforms such as YouTube and TikTok can easily and inexpensively allow young people to showcase their talents and launch very profitable careers. Anything from singing to dancing, from baking to making, there is an audience out there.

You cannot deny that social media is one of the biggest platforms to showcase up and coming talent. Many students are using social media to show their hidden talent.

YouTube videos of children, teenagers, and even adults showing off their talents are now commonplace, in fact, many YouTube channels have launched successful careers.

From singing to dancing, reciting poetry to cooking, there are students out there making waves and showing the world what they can do.

One of the best things about making a career through social media is it requires zero investment. And importantly, it has potentially global attention.

As teachers we strive to help our students become the best version of themselves, surely this form of social media feeds right into this?

How does Social Media Provide a Broad Range of Opportunities?

Social media job boards provide up to date relevant job opportunities more efficiently than before. Also, the rise of social media has created a wealth of job opportunities itself. There is also the role of brand influencers which is a whole new avenue of opportunity.

These days social media is not just used for communication. It has been working as a pool for both job seekers and job providers.

There are even groups on social media that are specifically created to post about job opportunities that students of working age can do.

Moreover, social media has been one of the best platforms for business students to conduct and grow their businesses.

From Facebook Groups to Telegram chats, there is support, help and opportunities that would simply be out of reach without social media.

Students Can Use Social Media to Keep Up To Date With Current Affair s

Gone are the days where the only current affairs students had access to was their parent’s newspaper of choice. Now young people can keep up to date with news from a global melting pot of news agencies, that may report on something not covered in their own country.

You might have come across many posts on social media where people share current affairs. Obviously, we should instil a sense of objectivity in our students.

If we prepare students to spot biases and agendas, “Fake news” will become less of an issue.

Similarly, many news channels are sharing breaking news and other important current news on social media platforms.

Students do not need to read a newspaper or sit in front of the TV to watch the news. They can read or watch the news anytime they want.

What are the Drawbacks of Social Media for Students?

• Social Media can reduce the time spent on studies.
• The “perfect life/body” images can lead to low self-esteem in young people through social media.
• Bullying has moved to an online arena which is more difficult to track and remedy.
• Cases of teenage anxiety and depression are rapidly rising. There are strong links to social media being, in part to blame.
• Social media is 24/7 and young people can lack the maturity to switch off, leading to sleep deprivation.
• A reduction of physical activity is a real effect of social media. Even “hanging out” with friends is now commonly done over social media.

Reduced Concentration on Studies

Many parents agree that social media has been one of the main reasons for a decline in their kids’ academic performance.

You may have experienced this yourself; whenever you start to study, you get distracted by your notifications from social media.

Whenever you try to work or learn, you constantly check social media, thinking you might be missing some significant events.

Lowers Self-Esteem Among Children

It’s well understood that the life painted on most social media channels is not a true reflection of someones actual life. As adults, we understand this and take it with a pinch of salt.

This is not the case with children !

Children lack the life experience to be objective in what they see on social media.

They compare themselves with the “perfect” bodies and lifestyles they see and this can heavily contribute to low self-esteem and can lead to further problems affecting their mental health.

Social media influencers try to show “ The Most Perfect ” lifestyle, which a student cannot afford and start making students feel inferior about themselves.

Cyberbullying and Cyberstalking

One of the biggest and most dangerous issues students face while on social media is cyberbullying and cyberstalking.

Cyberbullying is one of the biggest problems among teenagers in schools. Students used to bully each other physically; now the bullying has moved to the virtual world.

Kids usually bully their peers whenever they post some picture or status on social media. They even harass your kids and blackmail them, which reduces kids’ self-confidence.

Online cyberbullying is even worse because it is not done face to face so people can easily say things that they wouldn’t dare say in person.

These instances of serious cyberbullying can and have, in many cases lead to teen suicide.

There are some brilliant charities that give help and advice around cyberbullying, cybersmile.org is a great international example.

Social Media is a Big Cause of Anxiety and Depression in Children

This point is related to the issues mentioned above. Unfortunately, cases of anxiety and depression in children are rising rapidly.

It is commonly assumed that the rise of social media platforms is a driving factor behind this.

In the UK the statistics are frightening, to say the least; youngminds.org.uk reports the following:

• 1 in 8 children have a diagnosable mental health disorder – that’s roughly 3 children in every classroom.
• 1 in 6 young people aged 16-24 has symptoms of a common mental disorder such as depression or an anxiety disorder.
• Half of all mental health problems manifest by the age of 14, with 75% by age 24.
• In 2017, suicide was the most common cause of death for both boys (16.2% of all deaths) and girls (13.3%) aged between 5 and 19.
• Nearly half of 17-19-year-olds with a diagnosable mental health disorder has self-harmed or attempted suicide at some point, rising to 52.7% for young women.

Whilst these statistics are for the UK, they are mirrored in many other countries, where social media is common.

Sleep Deprivation

As a working teacher in the UK, I have noticed over the last few years that more and more of my students are reporting to be awake long into the night and in some cases the early hours of the morning.

Students can spend the whole night on their social media, chatting and posting random pictures and videos.

When I have spoken to my students about it, the most common thing I hear is that they didn’t want to miss out on anything (gossip, chat etc).

This FOMO (fear of missing out) is driven by their worries of being ostracized if they don’t know what happened “in the chat”.

This lack of sleep sadly has two major effects on students. Their academic progress suffers as well as their mental health.

Top Tip: Turn your wifi off when you go to bed (or earlier) then you know your children are not online all night!

Reduces Physical Activities

These days many students log in to their social media in their free time. As soon as they have some time, they get on their social media, reducing their physical exercise.

Students are either spending their time on their studies or their social media. Many children prefer to stay inside their room all day and night and use their devices instead of going out to get some fresh air, even if it is just for a walk.

How to Protect Students from Social Media (For Parents)?

• Communicate and educate young people about the benefits and dangers of social media.
• Use parental control platforms such as Google Family Link .
• Only allow young people to use a social media platform when they are old enough (many platforms require a user to be 13).
• Encourage young people to make their profiles private and only talk to people they already know.

If you are a parent, you might be worried about protecting your kids away from the dark side of social media. Adults might understand their dark side of social media, but kids and teenagers may not have the perspective adulthood gives us.

Communicate With Your Kids About the Dangers of Social Media

Communication is the key to solving any problem. As a teacher or parent, you should communicate with your kids about the dark side of social media. It would be best to make them aware of what happens when they use social media for a long time.

You should guide them on using social media and taking advantage of it and what things they should avoid, thus turning social media into a benefit.

Use of Parental Control Software

Sometimes, even when you communicate with your kids about social media, they might ignore you. Even when your kids are aware of social media, they may use it all the time.

To know what your kids are doing on social media, you can use parental control apps. Parental control apps help you to monitor your kids what your kids are doing on their devices.

Some parental control apps monitor your kid’s social media activities like their post, comments, messages, etc. They even show you random screenshots of your kid’s device activities.

One of my personal favorite parental control apps is fenced.ai which helps you monitor your kid’s online activities.

Restrict the Use of Some Social Media Sites

If your kids are using social media apps beyond their age limit, you should block such websites from your kid’s device.

It would help if you talked to your kids about using social media and their age limit to join social media.

Most social media requires an age limit of 13; it’s better to restrict kids from using social media until 13.

Encourage Your Kids To Make their Social Media Private

Many students, especially teenagers, make their social media public gain more followers and likes.

In short, to gain popularity on social media, kids and teenagers add random people on social media and make their posts public.

As adults, we can immediately see the danger here, but again, for teenagers the risk/reward ratio is different!

Thus, always encourage your kids to make their social media private and only add people they know in their real life.

Overall, it can be said that social media can be both detrimental and a benefit for students. It all comes down to education and being lead by responsible adults

Is Social Media Good or Bad for Students? FAQ

Social media can be both beneficial and detrimental. As with most new innovations, used correctly, it can be great, used poorly, it leads to problems. Regardless of the answer, the important thing is teachers and parents must lead by example and educate students.

Social media helps connect students studying the same subject in different parts of countries or even the world. Students can use social media to interact with their teachers, getting feedback on their work. Caveat : This interaction should only ever be conducted on school-approved social media like Google Hangouts or Microsoft Teams. NEVER INTERACT WITH STUDENTS ON YOUR PERSONAL SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS!

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2 thoughts on “Is Social Media Good or Bad for Students?”

so i agree and disagree at the same time because social media can really help you at some points and some times it can make you feel really bad about yourself and your physical appearance , people are open to do anything they want on the internet and it will most likely be allowed unless its some graphic type of content so im in the middle of agreeing and disagreeing at the same time.

My parents completely agree with this article. I am not allowed to get a phone until 9th grade at the least, and after things I have heard, I think this is a good idea. We are allowed onto specific websites and are blocked from others, and though that can get annoying when I search up videos about things for school projects, it’s the wisest thing to do.

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Just how bad are energy drinks for you? Heart attack is only one risk among many

Are you heading towards the refrigerator to grab a can of your favourite energy drink don't, as this drink is nothing but bottled trouble..

Listen to Story

• Energy drinks predominantly contain methylxanthines, caffeine, taurine, and sugar
• They increase the risk of strokes, epileptic seizures, palpitations, and restlessness
• Experts say that such drinks do not boost athletic performance

Red Bull gives you wings, but it can also give you a heart attack; at least, that's what is going around on social media.

Multiple users on Instagram have been posting warnings to alert consumers about the potential impacts of energy drinks.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Kunal Sood, MD (@doctorsoood)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Vicky Nelson (@vickyleenelson)

• Monster Energy contains 98 per cent artificial flavours, taurine, and L-Carnitine. This drink can cause heart disease, obesity, and blood clots.
• Red Bull contains aspartame and can lead to diabetes, heart disease, and anxiety.
• Dunkin' iced coffee contains 40 gms of added sugar, 98 per cent artificial sweetener and flavour, and inorganic coffee. This drink can lead to weight gain, brain fog, kidney damage, and diabetes.
• Starbucks Double Shot Energy contains maltodextrin, dextrose, and syrups. This drink causes high blood pressure, cognitive inflammation, and artery inflammation.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Bobbi Allison (@psychicmediumbobbiallison)

Meanwhile, a study conducted in 2020 also states that sugar-sweetened beverages, including energy drinks, can increase the risk of high blood pressure in young people.

When you consume an energy drink...

• Firstly, the caffeine content can lead to increased alertness and temporary improvement in cognitive function.
• The sugar and other stimulants can provide a quick burst of energy.
• However, the body may also experience increased heart rate and blood pressure due to stimulants like caffeine and taurine.

Mumbai-based senior physician and critical care specialist Dr Roohi Pirzada explains, "When the caffeine peaks in the blood levels, it stimulates the nervous system and makes a person more alert, increases concentration, and elevates the mood."

Adding to this, Mumbai-based senior interventional cardiologist and member of DocTube, Dr Kaushal Chhatrapati says, "Energy drinks also cause heart attack, commonly known as myocardial infarctions, and are linked to many of the so-called gym deaths when a person dies while exercising because what happens is energy drink increases the confidence and the strength of the person to exercise even more vigorously than what they intend to do."

There is no good here

• Consuming energy drinks may cause irritability, nervousness, increased heartbeats, and various heart arrhythmias.
• They can also cause dehydration.
• When consumed daily, energy drinks can also cause sleeplessness.

As per the doctor, such drinks do not boost athletic performance, unlike it is commonly perceived.

He says, "They are a marketing fad and should be stayed away from. As it is, cold drinks are bad enough, but energy drinks take that badness to an entirely new level."

If you still want to consume energy drinks

• You should keep in mind your caffeine intake from other sources and be aware of their tolerance levels.
• Those with underlying heart conditions, high blood pressure, anxiety disorders, or caffeine sensitivity should avoid or limit their consumption.
• Pregnant women, children, and adolescents should also be cautious and consult with healthcare professionals before consuming energy drinks.
• Overall, focusing on a balanced diet, adequate hydration, and getting sufficient rest and exercise is crucial for maintaining optimal health and energy levels without relying on energy drinks.

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Trump's Truth Social is losing money and has scant sales. Yet it could trade at a $5 billion value.

By Aimee Picchi

Edited By Anne Marie Lee

Updated on: March 22, 2024 / 5:48 PM EDT / CBS News

Former President Donald Trump will soon be at the helm of a publicly traded company that will trade under the ticker "DJT," after his initials, and boast a potential valuation of more than $5 billion — a lofty amount for a business that's losing money and has scant revenue. 

Trump's next career move as head of a publicly traded company comes after shareholders of Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC), a so-called blank-check company, also known as a SPAC ,  approved a merger on Friday morning with the Trump Media & Technology Group. With the nod, DWAC will combine with Trump Media & Technology Group and could soon begin trading under the latter name. 

Typically, investors put their money into companies they believe will provide solid returns for their investment, though time-honored fundamentals such as profit and revenue growth, dividends and share appreciation. But Trump Media's main business, Truth Social, is a social media platform that is lagging rivals such as Facebook and "X" (formerly Twitter), with scant revenue and mounting losses, according to regulatory filings. 

That hasn't fazed investors in DWAC, some of whom appear to be supporters of Trump, who are touting the stock on Truth Social. "I am holding and not selling! I believe in TRUTH and MAGA," one member of a Truth Social group focused on the DWAC stock posted on Friday morning. 

Typically, a company with the financial profile of Trump Media & Technology Group would be hard-pressed to reach a valuation of $5 billion, but the stock does not appear to be trading on traditional financial mileposts like revenue and profit, said Kristi Marvin, chief executive of SPACInsider.com. 

"This has never traded on fundamentals, and I don't expect it to, going forward," Marvin told CBS MoneyWatch. "This is almost like a barometer for Trump and how he's doing in the election."

The majority of the DWAC shareholders are retail investors, meaning they are individual investors rather than institutional , Marvin noted. Essentially, she added, DWAC, as well as its next iteration as Trump Media, is a "retail meme stock." 

Meme stocks and SPACs

Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, are shell companies created to take a private business public without conducting an initial public offering. 

In 2021, DWAC announced its intent to merge with Trump's media group, sending shares of Digital World upward by more than 800%, sparking comparisons  with meme stock businesses like GameStop. At that time, SPACs were also drawing outsized attention from small investors after some gained endorsements from celebrities and investors alike.

Investors who own DWAC stock will receive one share of the new company for each share of DWAC they owned, according to a regulatory filing. 

With about 136 million shares outstanding after the merger, the new business could have a valuation of $5.4 billion, based on DWAC's current price. Trump, who will serve as chairman of Trump Media & Technology Group, will own about 58% of the company, which would value his stake at about $3.5 billion .

To be sure, there's no guarantee the newly merged company will continue to trade at the same price as DWAC. Companies can sometimes trade lower in the months after a SPAC merger, as some early investors sell their stock, Marvin noted. 

"You have a washing out of the original shareholders," she said.

But it's likely the newly merged company will continue to appeal primarily to individual investors, as some institutional investors may shy away from the company based on political concerns, among other issues, Marvin added. 

Risk factors: Bankruptcy, failure and jail 

Investors in Trump Media & Technology Group are buying shares in a fledgling social media business that booked $3.3 million in revenue for the first nine months of 2023, according to a regulatory filing. 

But like many other tech startups, Trump Media is hemorrhaging money, with its losses mounting to $49 million during that same period last year. Of course, a company's financial struggles aren't necessarily a hindrance to earning a lofty public valuation, as seen in the case of money-losing Reddit, whose IPO this week gave it an $8 billion market cap.

Truth Social had roughly 5 million active members in February of this year — including mobile users as well as website visitors, according to research firm Similarweb estimates. Truth Social doesn't disclose its user numbers.

By comparison, TikTok has 2 billion users and Facebook 3 billion. However, in the so-called "alt-tech" space, Truth Social fares better than rivals such as Parler, which just returned to Apple's app store this week  after being offline for more than a year , and Gettr, which had less than 2 million visitors in February.

The question is whether Truth Social can ramp up revenue by attracting new advertisers to a platform that critics say is squarely focused on Trump's personality and conservative views. Expanding its user base will be key to its success, according to risk factors listed in a regulatory filing related to the merger. 

That isn't the only risk for the business, according to the filing. Among others are the "death, incarceration or incapacity" of Trump, as well as Trump's history with some of his earlier businesses, including the bankruptcy of the Trump Taj Mahal in 1991 and the bankruptcy of the Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts in 2004, among other bankruptcies. 

"A number of companies that were associated with President Trump have filed for bankruptcy," the filing states. "There can be no assurances that [Trump Media & Technology Group] will not also become bankrupt."

—with reporting by the Associated Press Board of Directors.

• Donald Trump
• Truth Social

Aimee Picchi is the associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and personal finance. She previously worked at Bloomberg News and has written for national news outlets including USA Today and Consumer Reports.

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The Newest Tech Start-Up Billionaire? Donald Trump.

Trump media, which went public this week, attracted a frenzy of interest on its first day of trading..

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Over the past few years, Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, has been dismissed as a money-losing boondoggle.

This week, that all changed. Matthew Goldstein, a New York Times business reporter, explains how its parent venture, Truth Media, became a publicly traded company worth billions of dollars.

On today’s episode

Matthew Goldstein , a New York Times business reporter.

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What to know about Trump Media’s high-flying stock debut .

Ethics experts say the publicly traded company could present a new way for foreign actors or others to influence Mr. Trump , if he is elected president.

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