Social media is a very helpful tool to maintain communication with loved ones and keep up with current trends. Nevertheless, as time passes they have brought several negative effects to society, especially to teenagers.
At the moment, social media is used often by teenagers despite the fact that they were created for adults. This is because influencers became famous on “YouTube” and expanded to other platforms since they wanted to reach more public. In return, this public joined the different platforms to keep up with the influencers.
There are many types of influencers, such as travelers and vloggers, the ones who inform us about beauty, fashion trends, and more. However, as time passed, the influence of social media became an unsafe place for some people.
Despite the fact that social media have many advantages, in this article we will talk about the negative side of it.
They tend to be addictive
The daily use of social media tends to become an addiction for some people, this can cause bad effects on them such as leading them to a sedentary life and causing diseases related to nutrition due to the lack of workouts and vision-related issues because of the excessive use of a digital screen. A student’s academic life can also be affected since they prefer to spend hours using social media instead of doing their homework.
They can cause self-esteem problems in young people
It’s a reality that many influencers have a different lifestyle than most people, some of them also have been caught pretending to have a luxurious lifestyle just for views and likes.
Since people want the same lifestyle as influencers, many of them have developed eating and self-esteem problems, because of this unattainable fantasy, some have started to compare and despise their own lives and bodies.
Users can develop different disorders
According to several studies, if we use our smartphone hours before going to sleep, the brain tends to continue working up to 2 hours after the last use of the cell phone, which over time can cause a person to develop sleep disorders.
If a person who maintains a daily use of social networks can not use their cell phone for a prolonged period of time, they will develop an anxiety disorder, since they are used to being glued to their cell phone and will feel great anguish when they can not use it.
Teenagers can develop depression due to the pressure that social media gives, such as the constant idealism of a perfect body, bullying problems, and cyber threats.
Nowadays, cyber-attacks are more often seen in social media. Some users tend to share private information on their profiles consciously or unconsciously, this can generate many problems, such as harassment and threats. It’s a fact that teenagers are an easy target for cyber attacks.
We asked a number of students around 15-18 years old about the negative experiences that they have had with social media, here are some of their answers:
“I changed my appearance and the way I acted only because I wanted to be like several TikTokers that appeared on my Fyp (For you page), this brought me too many problems with my self-esteem, I didn’t feel comfortable with my body and I felt excluded from my friend’s group.”
Anonymous (16 years old)
“TikTok made me want to establish a romantic relationship with someone, so I looked for someone who wanted to be my partner, after a few days of talking I asked him to be my boyfriend, this was the worst decision of my life, so far, because at the end it was someone who didn’t know how to value or treat me well and I ended up hurt both physically and emotionally.”
Anonymous (18 years old)
“I pretended to have a perfect life on Instagram to please my followers, however, one day my closest friends discovered that I was faking it, and since that day I lost all the people who were important to me.”
Anonymous (15 years old)
“One day I uploaded a scantily clad picture on my stories as I wanted to impress my crush, but someone used the picture to threaten me, in the end, I had to tell my parents so they could help me”
Anonymous (18 years old)
Interviews made by Andréé Roldan.
In this article, we wanted to highlight a few of the many reasons why we must know how to control our use of social media, here are some tips to prevent these problems from happening:
- Do not let yourself be guided by the opinions of others.
- You must be clear that not everything you see on social media is real.
- Avoid sharing personal data, such as your current location, passwords, credit card numbers, and full names of your family members, among others.
- If you want to upload a photo with the location of a place you are at, wait long enough after you have left to post it.
- Moderate the screen time on your device and alternate it with productive activities.
- Be careful with what you upload, as there are people with bad intentions roaming. the Internet.
- Feel free to ask a responsible adult you trust for help if you think you have social media issues.
