essay on negative impact

Subscribe or renew today

Every print subscription comes with full digital access

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.

Carol Yepes/Getty Images

Share this:

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.”

More Stories from Science News on Science & Society

Privacy remains an issue with several women’s health apps

Should we use AI to resurrect digital ‘ghosts’ of the dead?

A hidden danger lurks beneath Yellowstone

Online spaces may intensify teens’ uncertainty in social interactions

Want to see butterflies in your backyard? Try doing less yardwork

Ximena Velez-Liendo is saving Andean bears with honey

‘Flavorama’ guides readers through the complex landscape of flavor

Rain Bosworth studies how deaf children experience the world

Subscribers, enter your e-mail address for full access to the Science News archives and digital editions.

Not a subscriber? Become one now .

How social media’s toxic content sends teens into ‘a dangerous spiral’

October 8, 2021 –  Eating disorders expert Bryn Austin , professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences , discusses the recent revelation that Facebook has long known that its Instagram app is harming teens ’ mental health .

Q: Leaked documents from Facebook show that the company has known for at least two years that its Instagram app is making body image issues worse for teens, particularly girls. What’s your reaction to this news?

A: I was aghast at the news—but not surprised. We’ve known for years that social media platforms—especially image-based platforms like Instagram—have very harmful effects on teen mental health, especially for teens struggling with body image, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. From experimental research, we know that Instagram, with its algorithmically-driven feeds of content tailored to each user’s engagement patterns, can draw vulnerable teens into a dangerous spiral of negative social comparison and hook them onto unrealistic ideals of appearance and body size and shape. Clinicians and parents have been sounding the alarms about this for years. So to hear that Instagram’s own research shows this too is not surprising. What astounds me, though, is what whistleblower Frances Haugen exposed: that, in internal conversations at Instagram, staff and senior leadership acknowledged these very damning findings, and yet the actions they’ve taken in response have been little more than window dressing, sidestepping the fundamental problem of the platform’s predatory algorithms. This revelation is what leaves me aghast.

Q: In a recent  blog post , Instagram’s head of public policy wrote that the company knows that social media “can be a place where people have negative experiences” and that they’re working to mitigate the problem, but added, “Issues like negative social comparison and anxiety exist in the world, so they’re going to exist on social media too.” What do you make of this argument?

A: Instagram is peddling a false narrative that the platform is simply a reflection of its users’ interests and experiences, without distortion or manipulation by the platform. But Instagram knows full well that this not true. In fact, their very business model is predicated on how much they can manipulate users’ behavior to boost engagement and extend time spent on the platform, which the platform then monetizes to sell to advertisers. Instagram is literally selling users’ attention. The company knows that strong negative emotions, which can be provoked by negative social comparison, keep users’ attention longer than other emotions—and Instagram’s algorithms are expressly designed to push teens toward toxic content so that they stay on the platform. For teens struggling with body image, anxiety, or other mental health issues, negative social comparison is a dangerous trap, intensifying their engagement with the platform while worsening their symptoms. But with Instagram’s nefarious business model, every additional minute of users’ attention—regardless of the mental health impact—translates into more profits.

Keep in mind that this is not about just about putting teens in a bad mood. Over time, with exposure to harmful content on social media, the negative impacts add up. And we now have more cause for worry than ever, with the pandemic worsening mental health stressors and social isolation for teens, pushing millions of youth to increase their social media use. We are witnessing dramatic increases in clinical level depression, anxiety, and suicidality , and eating disorders cases have doubled or even tripled at children’s hospitals across the country.

Q: What steps are necessary to lessen potential harm to teens from Instagram?

A: If we have learned anything from the recent Congressional hearings with the whistleblower, the Wall Street Journal investigative reporting, and other important research, it’s that Instagram and Facebook will not—and likely cannot—solve this very serious social problem on their own. The business model, which has proven itself to be exquisitely profitable, is self-reinforcing for investors and top management. The platform’s predatory algorithms have been aggressively guarded, keeping them from being scrutinized by the public, researchers, or government. In fact, U.S. federal regulation on social media hasn’t been meaningfully updated in decades, leaving protections for users and society woefully inadequate.

But with the new revelations, society’s opinion of the industry may have soured and there may be a new willingness to demand meaningful oversight and regulation. What’s encouraging is that on the heels of the recent Congressional hearings, there are already several pieces of legislation in the works to establish a new government system of algorithm auditors, who would have the expertise and authority to require social media algorithms to meet basic standards of safety and transparency for children and users of all ages on Instagram and other social media platforms.

Q: What advice do you have for parents, and for teens who use the platform?

A: Until we have meaningful government oversight in place, there is still a lot that teens and parents can do. Although it’s a real struggle for parents to keep their kids off social media, they can set limits on its use, for instance by requiring that everyone’s phones go into a basket at mealtimes and at bedtime. Parents can also block upsetting content and keep dialogue open about how different types of content can make a young person feel about themselves. Equally important, teens and parents can get involved in advocacy, with groups such as the Eating Disorders Coalition and others, to advance federal legislation to strengthen oversight of social media platforms. With all that we know today about the harmful effects of social media and its algorithms, combined with the powerful stories of teens, parents, and community advocates, we may finally have the opportunity to get meaningful federal regulation in place.

– Karen Feldscher

photo: iStock

Social Media: Negative Impacts

Introduction, intrusive advertising, bullying/harassment, privacy threats, works cited.

Social media is a natural phenomenon of modern hi-tech life. The impact of virtual communication is significant as people are often willing to pay more attention to online interaction. Besides, due to the development of technology, social media plays the role of platforms not only for communication but also fir effective advertising and entertainment. Digital content that is published in various groups has a large target audience, which allows influencing people and providing demand for specific goods or services. However, the controversy of the benefits of social media lies in the potentially negative impacts they have. In addition to using specialized web resources for communication, many Internet users utilize them as tools for bullying, intimidation, humiliation, and even violence. An opportunity to remain anonymous opens up significant prospects for cybercriminals, which complicates the task for law enforcement agencies. As a counterargument, today, there are various means of account verification and support services that are ready to ensure the safety of communication on social media and provide users with protection from scammers or blackmailers. Nevertheless, people who are well versed in the digital field can bypass such locks easily. Among the real negative effects that social media have, one can note intrusive advertising, bullying and harassment, privacy threats, fake news, and violence. Social media are gradually losing the function of communication tools and gaining the status of platforms that allow posting any content, including illegal and immoral materials.

Advertising on social media has become so intrusive and widespread that it has ceased to have its promotional function and often causes users more negative emotions than interest. At the same time, it is hard to get rid of advertising completely since many creators of digital content sign contracts with advertisers, and profit depends directly on the activity of the public. However, in case of excess advertising, people feel annoyed and ignore certain offers deliberately. According to Shareef et al., “irritation due to any advertisement can distract consumers from receiving the intended meaning of the statement, and thus can have a negative effect on the value of the advertising” (p. 61). Such a statement is logical because, in their quest for profit, advertisers provoke a natural reaction from the target audience to condemn the excess of promoting content. Customer perception largely depends not only on the essence of specific offers but also on the way marketers deliver them. Therefore, in case of intrusiveness, advertising content on social media causes rejection and is often blocked by users. Shareef et al. confirm this and argue that the context of marketing materials may be more important as a driver to convince the public of the value of specific goods or services (p. 66). The objectivity of such an idea is due to the fact that initially, social media were not intended for advertising, and only the creativity of marketers can be an effective way to attract public attention. Finally, Shareef et al. mention viral marketing as one of the methods of intrusive advertising on social media and note that this form of promotion are relevant only among a narrow target audience. In other words, the more annoying the advertisement is, the lower is the chance to attract a wide range of new consumers. Nevertheless, intrusive advertising is significantly less dangerous than bullying or harassment, which are found in modern social media.

The anonymity factor that may persist when interacting on social media is one of the reasons for bullying that some Internet users are forced to experience. A sense of impunity for aggressive behavior and insults towards another person exacerbate the situation. Moreover, bullying is a trend that is common in children’s communication on social media, which poses a serious threat to the fragile psyche of young users. According to Canty et al., online bullying is a unique phenomenon that has expanded in the virtual space due to the emergence of means to preserve anonymity and, in particular, the ability to go unpunished (p. 52). These factors are most obvious reasons why children, who are often humiliated by their peers on social media, become self-absorbed and cannot figure out the wrongdoers. Harassment is a similar problem, which, however, is characteristic of the adult population and often has a sexual background. Chadha et al. state that modern digital technologies “amplify attacks on gender-based and sexual minorities,” thereby acting as negative consequences of progress (p. 241). This statement assumes that the context of harassment is not limited to one topic. In addition, as findings show, virtual space is a favorable environment for this phenomenon:

Online communities and social media platforms offer many benefits, but they also have become breeding grounds for an assortment of sexist and misogynist behaviors. Importantly, the harassment behaviors evident today differ from off-line and pre-social media-era harassment, given the affordances of these networked spaces, including – but not limited to – the visibility and persistence of content, the anonymity/pseudonymity of users, the spreadability of content, and the multimediality of smartphones (Chadha et al, p. 250).

As a result, the openness of online communication creates a favorable environment for harassment and affects user behavior. Chadha et al. mention requests for personal data and addresses as easy consequences of harassment and note that people who have faced with real threats see this phenomenon as an extremely dangerous and aggressive trend (p. 243). This conclusion is logical because, despite different environments, online and real-life harassment have a common background. In this regard, the issues of privacy and accompanying risks are negative consequences of social media.

Privacy threats are fraught not only with identity theft but also with other problems that may entail anonymous bullying or blackmail. Today, for users of social media, communication options are not limited solely to correspondence. Interlocutors can comment on each other, share links, and perform other actions that go beyond a particular platform. As a result, as Aghasian et al. note, “the distribution of information in real world is almost local, the publically shared information in online social media can be retrieved on the internet anytime, anywhere and by anyone” (p. 13118). The significance of this statement is that virtually no one can be fully protected, and precautions should be taken. Aghasian et al. argue that users should be able to protect their personal data not only from intruders but also from familiar people who can become intermediaries in the leak of information (p. 13118). Those people who face privacy threats may lose their money or valuable digital content through negligence by providing their data to third parties. Due to the widespread use of virtual interaction, various leakage channels are discussed:

For example, a user normally share his/her personal information in Facebook which may pose a privacy risk. This user may share his/her occupation history and background in another site such as LinkedIn. His/her job information has again its own privacy risk, but a combination of the information from two social media accounts can pose the user to higher risk as more information is revealed. Consequently, by considering the overall information from multiple source, a more accurate quantification of the privacy disclosure score can be obtained. (Aghasian et al, p. 13118)

In addition to individual data leakage channels, the forms of privacy risks themselves are numerous. Aghasian et al. mention the threat of government data theft, the disclosure of confidential information about trade transactions, and even religious secrets (13119). Such a variety of risks explains the need for comprehensive protection. Social media, in turn, are a favorable environment for such fraud since the predominant number of Internet users have accounts at least at one specialized site. Wherein, according to Aghasian et al., “one of the challenges in addressing privacy concerns is how to measure the privacy of a user participating in multiple social networks” (p. 13129). The increasing role of social media in people’s lives inevitably leads to threats to personal data, especially if they are stored on different platforms. However, not all negative aspects of virtual communication are aimed at interacting with a particular person, and the example of fake news distributed online is a confirmation.

Social media are becoming the most common sources of news, including both entertaining content and serious political and economic reports, which, however, are not always reliable. One of the main reasons is the desire to attract a large target audience. The greater the news resonance is, the greater is the potential success of a particular media platform. For example, Shu et al. give the following statistics: “62 percent of U.S. adults get news on social media in 2016, while in 2012, only 49 percent reported seeing news on social media” (p. 22). This ratio proves that even the adult population of the country began to use virtual platforms more often. In addition, this growth may be due to the wider use of social media by numerous agencies that have individual accounts. The authors emphasize that fake news as a negative consequence of digital communication is disseminated most actively through social media due to an opportunity to create a public outcry quickly (Shu et al, p. 23). News groups fight for the target audience in any way possible, which entails publications based on unverified or false facts. Spohr explains the reasons and argues that “the producers and curators of fake news content are able to monetize their content through advertising platforms from Facebook and Google” (p. 156). This conclusion is logical since material gain is the most objective explanation for such publications. In addition, the researcher notes that fake news creates a resonance that, regardless of whether it is positive or negative, serves as a means of popularization (Spohr, p. 150). Therefore, the ability to influence the masses opens up prospects for fraudulent actions, although fake news cannot do such harm as violence, which is another negative effect of social media.

Despite the fact that violence in its natural sense cannot be realized online, the manifestations of violent acts through social media are possible. This phenomenon is similar to cyberbullying, but it involves strict measures of intimidation or harassment, while bullying can be superficial. Today, particular attention is paid to youth virtual violence, as children and adolescents are vulnerable groups. As Tripathi notes, “most children and adolescents (65-91%) report little or no involvement in violence over social media platforms” (2). At the same time, the author argues that time spent online is one of the factors on which the risk of violence depends (Tripathi, p. 3). In other words, the longer and more actively a child interacts with other users, the higher is the threat of psychological violence. This statement is reasonable and carries an open message about the need to reduce the access of young users to free online communication. Also, gender-based online violence is another form of bullying, and its consequences can be extremely dangerous from a social perspective:

Gender-based violence online is rampant, ranging from harassment of women who are public figures on social media to stalking intimate partners using purpose-built apps. This is not an issue that can be addressed by individual states alone, nor can it be addressed satisfactorily through legal means. The normalization of misogyny and abuse online both reflects and reinforces systemic inequalities. (Suzor et al, p. 84)

This position on gender-based violence proves the effect that indifference to this problem may cause. According to Suzor et al., most modern social media promote themselves as platforms for expressing individuality and personal opinions, which can be dangerous in conditions of the freedom of speech and anonymity (p. 89). Not only women but also other vulnerable groups can experience the effects of virtual violence, and impunity is one of the most dangerous consequences. The authors are convinced that “deeply entrenched structural features of existing social media platforms often exacerbate the effects of online harassment and abuse” (Suzor et al, p. 94). Thus, social media carry many negative implications, and an opportunity to go unpunished for aggressive or annoying behavior is a severe social omission.

• Aghasian, Erfan, et al. “Scoring Users’ Privacy Disclosure Across Multiple Online Social Networks.” IEEE Access , vol. 5, 2017, pp. 13118-13130.
• Canty, Justin, et al. “The Trouble with Bullying – Deconstructing the Conventional Definition of Bullying for a Child‐Centred Investigation into Children’s Use of Social Media.” Children & Society , vol. 30, no. 1, 2016, pp. 48-58.
• Chadha, Kalyani, et al. “Women’s Responses to Online Harassment.” International Journal of Communication , vol. 14, 2020, pp. 239-257.
• Shareef, Mahmud Akhter, et al. “Social Media Marketing: Comparative Effect of Advertisement Sources.” Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services , vol. 46, 2019, pp. 58-69.
• Shu, Kai, et al. “Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective.” ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter , vol. 19, no. 1, 2017, pp. 22-36.
• Spohr, Dominic. “Fake News and Ideological Polarization: Filter Bubbles and Selective Exposure on Social Media.” Business Information Review , vol. 34, no. 3, 2017, pp. 150-160.
• Suzor, Nicolas, et al. “Human Rights by Design: The Responsibilities of Social Media Platforms to Address Gender‐Based Violence Online.” Policy & Internet , vol. 11, no. 1, 2019, pp. 84-103.
• Tripathi, Vivek. “Youth Violence and Social Media.” Journal of Social Sciences , vol. 52, no. 1-3, 2017, pp. 1-7.

Cite this paper

• Chicago (N-B)
• Chicago (A-D)

StudyCorgi. (2022, March 10). Social Media: Negative Impacts. https://studycorgi.com/social-media-negative-impacts/

"Social Media: Negative Impacts." StudyCorgi , 10 Mar. 2022, studycorgi.com/social-media-negative-impacts/.

StudyCorgi . (2022) 'Social Media: Negative Impacts'. 10 March.

1. StudyCorgi . "Social Media: Negative Impacts." March 10, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/social-media-negative-impacts/.

Bibliography

StudyCorgi . "Social Media: Negative Impacts." March 10, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/social-media-negative-impacts/.

StudyCorgi . 2022. "Social Media: Negative Impacts." March 10, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/social-media-negative-impacts/.

This paper, “Social Media: Negative Impacts”, was written and voluntary submitted to our free essay database by a straight-A student. Please ensure you properly reference the paper if you're using it to write your assignment.

Before publication, the StudyCorgi editorial team proofread and checked the paper to make sure it meets the highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, fact accuracy, copyright issues, and inclusive language. Last updated: May 25, 2022 .

If you are the author of this paper and no longer wish to have it published on StudyCorgi, request the removal . Please use the “ Donate your paper ” form to submit an essay.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

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.”

New Yorker Favorites

First she scandalized Washington. Then she became a princess .

What exactly happened between Neanderthals and humans ?

The unravelling of an expert on serial killers .

When you eat a dried fig, you’re probably chewing wasp mummies, too .

The meanings of the Muslim head scarf .

The slippery scams of the olive-oil industry .

Critics on the classics: our 1991 review of “Thelma & Louise.”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Zach Helfand

By Helen Shaw

• Entertainment

Essay Sample about Social Media: Negative Impacts

Social media, the interactive technology that seems to be affecting people like you just by itself. It is becoming increasingly clear that social networks have become a big part of people’s lives. What effect does social media have on you? Just one out of ten Americans say social media has a positive effect on them, that alone says a lot about how negatively social media impacts peoples lives. The latest social media statistics show that there are 3.78 billion social media users worldwide in 2021 and this number is only going to continue growing over the next few years.

Social media is taking away all of the originality and authenticity in us individual human beings. Everything has been generated from social media, we’re all influenced or motivated in a way to change or to do certain things. Influencers on social media present unrealistic body types and they’re labeled as this “perfect body image” . The unrealistic beauty standards and false expectations being pushed onto younger kids can seriously knock down their level of confidence/ self esteem and make people self conscious. with photoshop, images are everywhere and lead to distorted body image among a number of teenagers. People constantly compare themselves to other women or men because they dont look like them, society sets a standard. People start doing more and more fashion trends, making people feel obligated to wear something that they don't feel comfortable in.

Cyberbullying is the use of electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature. Cyberbullying is often done by children, who have early access to these technologies. It causes depression and anxiety which can lead to suicidal thoughts or suicide. About 10% of teens report being bullied on social media and many other users are subjected to offensive comments. Social media platforms can be hotspots for spreading hurtful rumors, lies and abuse that can leave lasting emotional sears.

Human beings need face to face interaction to be mentally healthy. The more you prioritize social media interaction over in person relationships, the more you’re at risk for developing mood disorders such as anxiety and depression. 

The idea that you’re missing out on certain things can impact your self-esteem, trigger anxiety, and fuel even greater social media use. FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out, can compel you to pick up your phone every few minutes to check for updates, or respond to every alert. A study found that high usage of social media such as facebook, snapchat and instagram have increased rather than decreased feelings of loneliness.This study found that reducing social media usage can make you feel less lonely and isolated and improve your overall wellbeing.

You're scrolling on a little rectangle in your hand, but why? Turning to social media when you’re feeling down, lonely, or bored, you're potentially using it as a way to distract yourself from unpleasant feelings. You’re constantly scrolling through negative news articles or social media posts, seeking out one negative piece of content after another as a coping mechanism. ( meh- kuh-ni-zm) 

But is it even working? Social media can become an unhealthy way of coping with uncomfortable emotions. The more we consume social media  the worse we feel.

Society today spends most of their time on social media without even realizing the effects. Social skills are important in our everyday lives, sports for instance is a phenomenal way to socialize and stay fit at the same time. We must stop spending so much time staring at a screen in order to bond with family and start interacting face to face. So why don't we all just stop the loop?

Related Samples

• Essay About Profession: Production Assistant
• The Incredibles Movie Analysis Essay Example
• Analysis of Charlie Chaplin's Speech from The Great Dictator Essay Sample
• Hadestown Musical Review
• The Perfect Game Movie Analysis
• Compare and Contrast Essay: Watching Movie At Home And Cinema
• How Social Media Can Affect Youth (Essay Sample)
• The Castle Movie Analysis
• Media Literacy Essay Example
• The Vampire Diaries Analysis Essay Example

Didn't find the perfect sample?

You can order a custom paper by our expert writers

• Open access
• Published: 06 July 2023

Pros & cons: impacts of social media on mental health

• Ágnes Zsila 1 , 2 &
• Marc Eric S. Reyes   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5280-1315 3  

BMC Psychology volume  11 , Article number:  201 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

453k Accesses

16 Citations

107 Altmetric

Metrics details

The use of social media significantly impacts mental health. It can enhance connection, increase self-esteem, and improve a sense of belonging. But it can also lead to tremendous stress, pressure to compare oneself to others, and increased sadness and isolation. Mindful use is essential to social media consumption.

Social media has become integral to our daily routines: we interact with family members and friends, accept invitations to public events, and join online communities to meet people who share similar preferences using these platforms. Social media has opened a new avenue for social experiences since the early 2000s, extending the possibilities for communication. According to recent research [ 1 ], people spend 2.3 h daily on social media. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat have become increasingly popular among youth in 2022, and one-third think they spend too much time on these platforms [ 2 ]. The considerable time people spend on social media worldwide has directed researchers’ attention toward the potential benefits and risks. Research shows excessive use is mainly associated with lower psychological well-being [ 3 ]. However, findings also suggest that the quality rather than the quantity of social media use can determine whether the experience will enhance or deteriorate the user’s mental health [ 4 ]. In this collection, we will explore the impact of social media use on mental health by providing comprehensive research perspectives on positive and negative effects.

Social media can provide opportunities to enhance the mental health of users by facilitating social connections and peer support [ 5 ]. Indeed, online communities can provide a space for discussions regarding health conditions, adverse life events, or everyday challenges, which may decrease the sense of stigmatization and increase belongingness and perceived emotional support. Mutual friendships, rewarding social interactions, and humor on social media also reduced stress during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 4 ].

On the other hand, several studies have pointed out the potentially detrimental effects of social media use on mental health. Concerns have been raised that social media may lead to body image dissatisfaction [ 6 ], increase the risk of addiction and cyberbullying involvement [ 5 ], contribute to phubbing behaviors [ 7 ], and negatively affects mood [ 8 ]. Excessive use has increased loneliness, fear of missing out, and decreased subjective well-being and life satisfaction [ 8 ]. Users at risk of social media addiction often report depressive symptoms and lower self-esteem [ 9 ].

Overall, findings regarding the impact of social media on mental health pointed out some essential resources for psychological well-being through rewarding online social interactions. However, there is a need to raise awareness about the possible risks associated with excessive use, which can negatively affect mental health and everyday functioning [ 9 ]. There is neither a negative nor positive consensus regarding the effects of social media on people. However, by teaching people social media literacy, we can maximize their chances of having balanced, safe, and meaningful experiences on these platforms [ 10 ].

We encourage researchers to submit their research articles and contribute to a more differentiated overview of the impact of social media on mental health. BMC Psychology welcomes submissions to its new collection, which promises to present the latest findings in the emerging field of social media research. We seek research papers using qualitative and quantitative methods, focusing on social media users’ positive and negative aspects. We believe this collection will provide a more comprehensive picture of social media’s positive and negative effects on users’ mental health.

Data Availability

Not applicable.

Statista. (2022). Time spent on social media [Chart]. Accessed June 14, 2023, from https://www.statista.com/chart/18983/time-spent-on-social-media/ .

Pew Research Center. (2023). Teens and social media: Key findings from Pew Research Center surveys. Retrieved June 14, 2023, from https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/24/teens-and-social-media-key-findings-from-pew-research-center-surveys/ .

Boer, M., Van Den Eijnden, R. J., Boniel-Nissim, M., Wong, S. L., Inchley, J. C.,Badura, P.,… Stevens, G. W. (2020). Adolescents’ intense and problematic social media use and their well-being in 29 countries. Journal of Adolescent Health , 66(6), S89-S99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2020.02.011.

Marciano L, Ostroumova M, Schulz PJ, Camerini AL. Digital media use and adolescents’ mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Front Public Health. 2022;9:2208. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2021.641831 .

Article   Google Scholar  

Naslund JA, Bondre A, Torous J, Aschbrenner KA. Social media and mental health: benefits, risks, and opportunities for research and practice. J Technol Behav Sci. 2020;5:245–57. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41347-020-00094-8 .

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Harriger JA, Thompson JK, Tiggemann M. TikTok, TikTok, the time is now: future directions in social media and body image. Body Image. 2023;44:222–6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2021.12.005 .

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Chi LC, Tang TC, Tang E. The phubbing phenomenon: a cross-sectional study on the relationships among social media addiction, fear of missing out, personality traits, and phubbing behavior. Curr Psychol. 2022;41(2):1112–23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-0135-4 .

Valkenburg PM. Social media use and well-being: what we know and what we need to know. Curr Opin Psychol. 2022;45:101294. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.101294 .

Bányai F, Zsila Á, Király O, Maraz A, Elekes Z, Griffiths MD, Urbán R, Farkas J, Rigó P Jr, Demetrovics Z. Problematic social media use: results from a large-scale nationally representative adolescent sample. PLoS ONE. 2017;12(1):e0169839. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169839 .

American Psychological Association. (2023). APA panel issues recommendations for adolescent social media use. Retrieved from https://apa-panel-issues-recommendations-for-adolescent-social-media-use-774560.html .

Download references

Acknowledgements

Ágnes Zsila was supported by the ÚNKP-22-4 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Culture and Innovation from the source of the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Institute of Psychology, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary

Ágnes Zsila

Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

Department of Psychology, College of Science, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, 1008, Philippines

Marc Eric S. Reyes

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

AZ conceived and drafted the Editorial. MESR wrote the abstract and revised the Editorial. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marc Eric S. Reyes .

Ethics declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate, consent for publication, competing interests.

The authors have no competing interests to declare relevant to the content of this article.

Additional information

Publisher’s note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Zsila, Á., Reyes, M.E.S. Pros & cons: impacts of social media on mental health. BMC Psychol 11 , 201 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-023-01243-x

Download citation

Received : 15 June 2023

Accepted : 03 July 2023

Published : 06 July 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-023-01243-x

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Social media
• Mental health

BMC Psychology

ISSN: 2050-7283

• General enquiries: [email protected]

Essay on Negative Effects of Social Media

Students are often asked to write an essay on Negative Effects of Social Media 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 Negative Effects of Social Media

The dark side of social media.

Social media is a powerful tool, but it has negative impacts too. It can lead to addiction, affecting our daily life. Many people spend hours scrolling, ignoring real-life interactions.

Mental Health Issues

Studies show excessive social media use can cause anxiety and depression. The constant comparison with others’ lives can lead to low self-esteem.

Privacy Concerns

Personal information shared on social media can be misused, leading to privacy issues. Cyberbullying is another serious concern, causing emotional distress.

Unrealistic Expectations

Social media often presents a perfect life, creating unrealistic expectations and dissatisfaction. It’s important to remember that what we see online isn’t always real.

250 Words Essay on Negative Effects of Social Media

Introduction.

Social media, despite its numerous benefits, has a dark side that is increasingly causing concern. The ubiquitous nature of these platforms has led to several negative implications, particularly among the youth.

Psychological Impact

Firstly, social media can lead to mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. The constant comparison with others’ lives, the desire for validation through likes and comments, and the fear of missing out (FOMO) can lead to feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem.

Secondly, privacy is a significant concern. Users often unknowingly share sensitive information, making them susceptible to data breaches and identity theft. The lack of stringent privacy policies on many platforms exacerbates this issue.

Spread of Misinformation

Lastly, social media contributes to the spread of fake news and misinformation. The speed and reach of these platforms make it easy for false information to spread, leading to confusion, panic, and in some cases, violence.

In conclusion, while social media has revolutionized communication, its negative effects cannot be ignored. It is incumbent upon users to use these platforms responsibly and be aware of the potential risks. As the saying goes, “With great power comes great responsibility”.

500 Words Essay on Negative Effects of Social Media

Social media has revolutionized the way we communicate, connect, and share information. However, it is not without its drawbacks. While it offers numerous benefits, it has also given rise to a myriad of negative effects, impacting individuals and society.

The Erosion of Privacy

One of the most prominent negative effects of social media is the erosion of privacy. Users often share personal information, photos, and life events without considering the potential implications. This information, once shared, is virtually impossible to retract and can be exploited by cybercriminals, marketers, or even prospective employers. The illusion of anonymity and privacy online can lead to a false sense of security, encouraging oversharing and reducing the perceived need for discretion.

Impact on Mental Health

The impact of social media on mental health is another significant concern. The pressure to maintain a perfect online persona and the constant comparison with others can lead to feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and depression. The addictive nature of social media platforms, designed to keep users engaged for as long as possible, exacerbates these issues. The dopamine hit from likes, comments, and shares can create a dependency, leading to an unhealthy relationship with these platforms.

Social media also plays a significant role in the spread of misinformation. The speed and reach of social media platforms make them a potent tool for disseminating false information, leading to real-world consequences. This phenomenon has been particularly evident in recent years, with misinformation about health, politics, and social issues spreading rapidly.

Decreased Productivity

Another negative effect of social media is a decrease in productivity. The addictive nature of these platforms can lead to significant amounts of time wasted, impacting work, studies, and personal relationships. The constant distraction of notifications and the urge to check for updates can disrupt focus and concentration.

In conclusion, while social media has transformed the way we communicate and share information, it has also given rise to several negative effects. The erosion of privacy, impact on mental health, spread of misinformation, and decreased productivity are all significant concerns that need to be addressed. It is crucial for users to be aware of these issues and use social media responsibly, considering the potential implications of their online behavior. As a society, we must also strive to mitigate these effects, through education, regulation, and the development of healthier online habits.

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

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

• Essay on Nature
• Essay on Nationalism
• Essay on My School

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Social Media: Negative and Positive Impacts

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

It is evident that social media has negative and positive impacts on the lives of many people. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and other social media networks have brought changes to the communication industry. This can be attributed to advanced technology and innovation. Equally, many people are conducting research with an aim of contributing to social media. In my opinion, social media is part of the human life in the 21st century.

In fact, it has reached a point where people cannot do without social media. However, social media has two contradicting perspectives. One of the perspectives views social media as an aspect that has made life easy as compared to the last century. On the other hand, some people view social media as an aspect that has made more harm than good to society. Thus, this paper seeks to bring out the two aspects in a clear manner.

Social media has enabled people to get connected regardless of the distance between them. For instance, social media has facilitated communication between people in different continents. It has been determined to be the best and cheapest way of communication.

Unlike the use of cellphones, there is an opportunity for video conferencing. Research shows that the only cost incurred encompasses internet services. Once a person is connected to a reliable internet service provider, they can communicate with their friends, peers, family members and other people in any part of the world.

Social media has enabled many people to get connected in many parts of the world. Equally, remarkable business operations have been accomplished through social media. In the same way, social media has enabled people that had lost contact to reunite.

Besides, people need not travel because they can use video conferencing to communicate via social media. Thus, travel costs and the burden associated with traveling have been eliminated by the use of social media.

Equally, social media is used in marketing and advertising activities. This presents customers and consumers an opportunity to make a choice of products that they need. Additionally, social media has seen to it that there is proper dissemination of information of consumer products. Thus, it has seen the proliferation of business activities across the globe.

On the other hand, some people view social media as a bad thing. In fact, some people have associated social media with negative aspects. For instance, they claim that social media makes people lazy. Before social media was invented, people travelled so that they would meet with other people. In most cases, people would walk to the place where they agreed to meet.

Equally, after meeting, some people would decide to take a walk. This made them active and made their bodies healthy. However, the introduction of social media brought about many changes. People became lazy because they would communicate at the comfort of their beds and couches.

Further, this made them have poor health. In fact, most users of social media do not travel or even go for walks. Hence, the body does not burn the extra calories resulting in excess weight gain and the associated medical conditions.

Also, some schools of thoughts say that social media has isolated people rather than connecting them. In my opinion, this is true. For instance, people do not physically meet with their relatives, neighbors, friends, and even peers.

Social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Skype detach people instead of connecting them. People spend most of their time chatting over the social media at the expense of physical meeting. This underpins isolation and personal contact is lost.

There are other times that people misunderstand each other. Research shows that some of them find solace in the use of social media. People whose relationships are not working tend to run to the social media for help. Social media has become a channel of airing their views and sentiments. They are consoled and encouraged on the social media by other social media users.

Equally, some seek fame on the social media. Likewise, some people upload photos of magnificent places and even outfits that they love with the main aim of seeking attention. True to that, they get attention from friends and other users of social media.

However, this does not solve their problems. In fact, the situation worsens. After going offline, they find themselves in the same situation. Thus, they are not even ready to reconcile with their loved ones. Besides, social media has facilitated infidelity and other social evils encompassing marriages. It has facilitated cheating that has led to sour relationships among lovers and couples.

Others social evils that have been associated with social media include sharing of illegal or unethical content. For instance, some users of social media share pornographic material on the internet. Similarly, drug and child trafficking have been associated with social media. Communication relating to the above unethical practices has been achieved through the use of social media networks owing to their security aspects.

In summary, social media is an invention that has made communication and dissemination of information easy. However, it has been associated with negative aspect and social evils. Therefore, people have the responsibility of doing the right thing or ethical things when using the social media.

• Business Proposal Project and Macroeconomics Policy
• Analysing and Presenting Complex Communication
• Facebook and Twitter: Privacy Policy
• The Effect of Social Media on Today’s Youth
• Media Ethics: Beavis and Butthead
• Intimacy and Sexuality Behaviors in Social Media
• Social media effect on the purchase decision of the young generation in Saudi Arabia
• Social Media and Globalization: Positive and Negative Effects Essay
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, June 3). Social Media: Negative and Positive Impacts. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-4/

"Social Media: Negative and Positive Impacts." IvyPanda , 3 June 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-4/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Social Media: Negative and Positive Impacts'. 3 June.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Social Media: Negative and Positive Impacts." June 3, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-4/.

1. IvyPanda . "Social Media: Negative and Positive Impacts." June 3, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-4/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Social Media: Negative and Positive Impacts." June 3, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-4/.

Negative Effects of Social Media

How it works

Social media is a vast platform, luring us in with a lot of different content. The amount of interaction one can have with people online within the span of a day is surreal. So, it becomes self-evident that platforms that have so much impact on our lives should be truly understood, and this research will seek to educate people on the negative impact of social media on society. So why is social media bad? To say good doesn’t exist without bad is appropriate in this case because as much as social media is a virtual tool, aiding information in ways that feel faster than light, it is also causing damage.

The visible damages are addictions, depression, anxiety, etc. However, the missable damages are just as bad or possibly worse. Social media creates a platform for trolls, and these trolls, with the aid of advanced technology, have dug their claws into making money from spreading information instantly. Since information travels so fast, the capitalistic market has taken an interest in it, and so the content can seem like propaganda on a large scale. New technology is what potentially makes social media a dangerous platform. With the existence of artificial intelligence, which gives life to ‘bots,’ AI has the ability to create content and disperse information at a rapid pace. So, it is obvious that they have a hand in what’s on our timelines.

If the larger population has no idea that propaganda on a global scale can occur with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), it might be difficult to control the situation when it gets out of hand, and we become quite acutely aware of the negative effects of social media. We are talking about a platform that shapes everyone’s views in the hands of artificial intelligence, and this AI is a monkey following its master’s orders. This paper seeks to show that artificial intelligence affects how controlled the information is when distributed on social media platforms through bots and whether or not users are aware of it, beyond being merely an argumentative essay on the negative effects of social media.

• 1.1 AI Interactions
• 1.2 Present Situations
• 1.3 Social Media
• 2.1 Participants
• 2.2 Materials and procedure
• 2.3 Discussion
• 2.4 Conclusion

Literature Review

Ai interactions.

In the past, a lot of importance has been placed on studying artificial intelligence, and since AI is such a complex system, its progression should be ideally looked at from all angles. In a study conducted by Mou and Xu (2017), the interaction between humans and AI helped explore the dynamics between the two. The study observed the interaction between a sample group and an artificial intelligence named “Little Ice.” The study concluded that “users tended to be more open, more agreeable, more extroverted, more conscientious and self-disclosing when interacting with humans than with AI” (Mou & Xu, 2017). There were many reasons for this, and one of them was the fact that “bot-to-bot interactions were poor,” according to a study by Tsvetkova, García-Gavilanes, Floridi, and Yasseri (2017). This study tracked bot-to-bot interactions that occurred on Wikipedia pages over the course of ten years. It was observed that bots kept editing over each other’s edits. Their edits were much higher in number when compared to humans and were sometimes repetitive.

The interaction between bots is poor since they run automated tasks and do what they are programmed to do, but nothing further. This hinders their ability to be fluid and independent with their interactions, but at the same time, they are capable of making accurate judgments with the data they have. AI can be programmed to process any kind of data, even behavioral. In a study, AI judgments “were better at predicting life outcomes and other behaviorally related traits than human judgments” (Youyou, Kosinski, and Stillwell, 2015). This study goes on to say that AI advancements have been superior and should not be underestimated.

Present Situations

The technological age is progressing at a rapid speed. Some scholars believe that the Web 4.0 age has arisen but has not fully emerged yet, and age is signified by AI integrating itself and forming a relationship with humans (2018). The previous ages were “massive information availability and searchability (Web 1.0), social media and enormous amounts of user-generated content (Web 2.0), and increasingly intrinsic connections between data and knowledge (Web 3.0)” (Schroeder, 2018). According to Schroeder, artificial intelligence has millions of accounts in cyberspace, and these accounts can be used to spread fake news. These bots are more efficient than humans because they never stop working. The article “The Death of Advertising” talks about AI in a similar manner. It brings up knowledge bots, or “knowbots,” that can create an analysis from large amounts of data about the consumers and the market. This information can then be used to improve the product.

Social Media

Overall, AI is slowly integrating with humans. According to Clay Farris Naff, the internet is “infected” with bots that spread fake news and engage in propaganda through social media. Last fall’s US elections were backed up by a vast number of Russian bots that made hashtags like #WarAgainstDemocrats popular. These bots have instigated fake rallies, causing problems between ethnic groups, and half of Trump’s Twitter followers are bots. It only takes one human troll, and his ideas are spread by 20 million bots. However, it’s not just the political system that’s in crisis, and it’s the advertising world as well. Branding is done by bots, and adding a hyper-real CGI image to these bots makes their interactions seem more akin to humans. The real problem is that, while bots aren’t capable of complex interaction like humans, they can still be deceitful by misrepresenting themselves as humans and then spreading fake news.

Concurring to this, de Lima Salge and Brent (2017) wrote that bots can behave unethically on social media, from stealing data to breaching agreements. Sale and Brent comment that whether bots act ethically or not should be identified due to the fact that they lurk on our platforms without giving away their identity (2017). They talk about “Tay,” a social bot created by Microsoft. This bot interacted with humans, and from saying, “Humans are super cool,” the bot went on to say, “Hitler was right; I hate Jews,” within 24 hours. Another social bot tweeted, “I seriously want to kill people.” If these are the points they can come to by themselves, through the interactions they have, it might be harder to control the damage they do on our platforms. If a social bot interacts with the wrong people, it might even be influenced to do something illegal (2017). While it is a gray area in regards to a bots’ sense of ethics, it is clear that the population needs to be aware of the harm they can do, how to recognize these bots, and how to retaliate against them. In this study, the potential of bots is explored (2017). Social bots are more common than people often think; Twitter has approximately 23 million of them, accounting for 8.5% of their total users, and Facebook has an estimated 140 million social bots, which make up roughly 5% of their total users. Almost 27 million Instagram users (8.2%) are estimated to be social bots. LinkedIn and Tumblr also have significant social bot activity. (Page 1)

This article discusses the ethical atmosphere in regard to bots and how it’s mostly a gray area, and it also sets the premise for their potential. The article also brings up another important point which is how bots can be deceiving, even if they aren’t breaking laws. Most social media users don’t know it when they encounter bots (2017), and from the studies discussed previously, it is clear that they have the potential to act outside of the acceptable social realm. There have also been reports from various social media platforms where bots have violated the terms and conditions of the platforms and breached data protection (2017).

To take on bots, various social media platforms have to go full force to stop them, or else they will interfere with user experience. According to Trend News Agency, “Instagram announced on Monday the latest step to purge inauthentic likes, follows, and comments from accounts that used third-party apps to boost their popularity” (2018). These bots and their activities are against the guidelines of Instagram, as it follows footsteps to get rid of these bots using a machine learning tool. This system detects the bot accounts (2018).

Participants

150 active social media users from the ages of 21-35 were surveyed online in exchange for Amazon gift cards worth $10. These users will be screened on their basic knowledge of artificial intelligence and its presence through bots in social media. The screening will be conducted online through survey websites, and the participants chosen will be contacted. The screening process will require participants to answer simple questions related to the eligibility requirements. Then for the survey, the chosen candidates will answer in-depth questions on what they know about AI, such as, ‘have you noticed any AI activity on the internet?’, ‘Can you recognize these bots?’, etc. There might be participants that answer the questions without any knowledge, but their answers will also help understand the perspective of people who view this issue from the sidelines. The sample size is going to be from all ethnicities, but a Bachelor’s degree is essential, and proof of the same will be required via an uploaded document. Gender and sexuality do not play an important role in the screening.

Materials and procedure

These participants are going to answer questionnaires online, which will be emailed to them after they are picked from the screening process. All the participants need is an email address, a device that can be connected to the internet (e.g., computer, phone, iPad, etc.), a BA degree, and active social media accounts. The online questionnaires will be easy to navigate and will only require short, brief answers about what the users think. Even if the wrong participant is screened in, the questions will compel the user to research, hence helping the accuracy of the research. In case the answers are outliers, they will still be considered, as these answers showcase how they feel about AI and what they know about its effects. Examples of the questions are: how many bots do you think exist in social media? Can you roughly explain what these bots do? Do you think the bots have a positive or a negative impact? Have you heard of any recent bot activity that was unethical? The questionnaire will also contain a list of basic instructions on how to take the survey. To help gather informative answers, the participants will be told to be as specific as they can be and not leave any questions blank in order to receive compensation. The survey will not have a time limit but can be finished in a time span of 15 minutes. It will have questions regarding a participant’s in-depth encounters with bots, how to find out if an account is controlled by AI, what is involved in the process of reporting a bot, does it feel like the bots are overpowering opinions, and how, etc. The participants will conduct the tests individually and must have their own unique answers. After receiving the answers, the data received will be categorized into various effects of AI in social media.

As established in the literature review, artificial intelligence and its development has been fairly recent. A lot of its involvement isn’t known by the general population. Bot-to-bot and bot-to-human interactions have raised various ethical questions. Bots are mostly under the control of their programming and whatever data they can gather through interaction on social media. While humans can discern what they stumble upon, bots cannot, and so it becomes dangerous for them to have a free interaction. To comprehend whether it is okay for them to freely interact on social media, the general population needs to be involved, and discussions need to be had; hence, studying the effects will bring us one step closer to understanding the situation.

A qualitative study can best showcase various opinions and can help us come to a better understanding. This is done with the help of a deeply analytical survey. In this study, it is crucial that the participants know about how to analyze problems within their complexities so an education level requirement is set in place. The other requirement is their basic knowledge about AI. This helps the study move forward with participants that can contribute with their prior knowledge; a screening process helps pick out these types of participants. Other criteria, such as gender, race, and nationality, don’t play an important role. Rather, the further the surveys reach participants, the better, so the study can have a global perspective. This is because bots are a global phenomenon. The participants, as mentioned before, will be given enough incentives to give in-depth answers to survey questions. Since the survey will have no right or wrong answers and will be based on opinions, the only variables to account for will be participants who got through the screening process without having any knowledge about AI. A problem will occur if there is a large number of these participants, and in that case, the screening will take place again for accuracy.

The literature mentioned in the study by Naff (2018) helped steer this research when it came to choosing a method of accumulating data. The article talked about bots, with their roots digging deep, controlling opinions on social media (2018). While there is quantitative data about bots, there is not enough opinion on how these bots should function and what effects they can have. A question of ethics was also raised, and for that, it was important to see the perspective of social media users themselves (2018). With these individual opinions, a greater understanding comes into place. Future studies can use this categorized data to study the same topic quantitatively. This study digs out the pros and cons, so the effects gathered will be a guiding tool to gather more data.

This study cannot gather an abundance of data, but it can lead to conversations regarding the place artificial intelligence can hold in our lives. AI isn’t completely sentient, and so, together as a society, it is important for us to take a step in understanding the extent of its reach to preserve the integrity of news media. With the recent state of political events between the two world superpowers, the need for truth holds a higher place. Hence, if artificial intelligence is allowed to exist, how should it ideally exist?

The detrimental effects of social media on society are evident in the manner it has fostered a culture of internet addiction and impaired people’s ability to engage in typical face-to-face interactions. Additionally, social media has facilitated the dissemination of misinformation and caused a deterioration of personal privacy.

The impact of social media on our daily lives can be significant as it provides a means for people to exchange information and interact. Moreover, it helps maintain connections with loved ones and stay updated with current affairs.

While social media has facilitated easy communication and connectivity between people, allowing information and ideas to spread more rapidly, it has also been criticized for its role in spreading fake news and misinformation. Moreover, it has been associated with an increase in cyberbullying and other types of online harassment.

Cite this page

Negative Effects of Social Media. (2019, Jul 02). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/negative-effects-of-social-media/

"Negative Effects of Social Media." PapersOwl.com , 2 Jul 2019, https://papersowl.com/examples/negative-effects-of-social-media/

PapersOwl.com. (2019). Negative Effects of Social Media . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/negative-effects-of-social-media/ [Accessed: 4 Jun. 2024]

"Negative Effects of Social Media." PapersOwl.com, Jul 02, 2019. Accessed June 4, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/negative-effects-of-social-media/

"Negative Effects of Social Media," PapersOwl.com , 02-Jul-2019. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/negative-effects-of-social-media/. [Accessed: 4-Jun-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2019). Negative Effects of Social Media . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/negative-effects-of-social-media/ [Accessed: 4-Jun-2024]

Don't let plagiarism ruin your grade

Hire a writer to get a unique paper crafted to your needs.

Our writers will help you fix any mistakes and get an A+!

Please check your inbox.

You can order an original essay written according to your instructions.

Trusted by over 1 million students worldwide

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

N.C.A.A. Athletes’ Pay Deal Raises Questions About Future of College Sports

The landmark settlement made many wonder what the reality — and impact — of revenue-sharing plans with college athletes would look like.

By David W. Chen ,  Jacey Fortin and Anna Betts

Brent Jacquette knows a thing or two about college sports. A former collegiate soccer player and coach in Pennsylvania who is now an executive at a consulting firm for athletic recruiting, he’s well aware of issues surrounding pay for college athletes.

But even for an industry veteran like Mr. Jacquette, the news of the N.C.A.A.’s staggering settlement in a class-action antitrust lawsuit on Thursday came as a surprise, with more than a little anxiety. The first words that came to mind, he said, were “trepidation” and “confusion.”

And he was not alone in feeling unsettled. Interviews, statements and social media posts mere hours after the settlement was announced showed that many were uncertain and concerned about what the future of collegiate sports holds.

“These are unprecedented times, and these decisions will have a seismic effect on the permanent landscape of collegiate athletics,” Phil DiStefano, chancellor of the University of Colorado Boulder, and Rick George, the school’s athletic director, said in a statement .

If the $2.8 billion settlement is approved by a judge, it would allow for a revenue-sharing plan through which Division I athletes can be paid directly by their schools for playing sports — a first in the nearly 120-year history of the N.C.A.A. Division 1 schools would be allowed to use about $20 million a year to pay their athletes as soon as the 2025 football season.

Mr. Jacquette thought of the word “trepidation” because of the impact that the settlement, shaped by the biggest and wealthiest universities with robust football programs, could have on coaches and athletes at smaller institutions and in low-profile sports.

And “confusion," because families of college athletes might soon be overwhelmed by all the possible ways for a student to get paid. In past years, the only form of compensation that students could get was athletic scholarships. But now, with the possibility of a revenue-sharing plan and pay arrangements involving students’ name, image and likeness , they have a lot more to consider when planning their collegiate sports careers.

“As this makes big news, people see this pot of gold at the end of the tunnel,” Mr. Jacquette said.

Many questioned what the financial burdens stemming from a revenue-sharing plan would look like.

Smaller conferences, such as the Big East — which includes Georgetown, Villanova and the University of Connecticut — have voiced “strong objections ” to the settlement, worried about shouldering an unfair burden of costs involved in revenue sharing. They said schools that have higher-profile sports teams and are part of bigger conferences, which often have TV contracts and much higher revenues, should be responsible for covering more of the costs.

Even coaches at powerful athletic programs, such as the University of Florida, which is part of the Southeastern Conference, had qualms. Tim Walton, the school’s softball coach, wondered in an interview with The Associated Press what this would mean for smaller sports programs on campus, and how the university would handle sharing revenues with athletes.

Another concern from critics of the settlement was whether female athletes would be compensated fairly. The settlement did not address how they would be paid compared to men, but Title IX prohibits sex-based discrimination in educational settings.

“Oftentimes, we put all of our eggs in the revenue-generating sports, which is comprised of mostly male sports,” said Jasher Cox, athletic director of Allen University, a historically Black and Division II school in South Carolina.

But many still questioned how the settlement would pan out in practice. Terry Connor, the athletic director at Thomas More University in Kentucky, said in an interview that the reality of revenue sharing felt somewhat distant. Although his school is Division II and would not necessarily be part of a revenue-sharing plan, Mr. Connor said that this still affects college sports as a whole.

The settlement is only the latest in a series of big changes at the N.C.A.A. in recent years, Mr. Connor said, and “how we’ll have to adapt to that is going to be the big question.”

Mr. Jacquette cautioned that it was still “premature” to assess the full impact of the settlement, since the details had not been released. And Sam C. Ehrlich, a professor at Boise State University who has written extensively about college athletes, said that while the settlement was a milestone, it should not be seen as the be-all and end-all of college sports.

Pointing to the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in 2021 that the N.C.A.A. could not bar payments to college athletes, Mr. Ehrlich said the college sports landscape has been ever-changing. That decision paved the way for N.I.L. arrangements, or payments based on an athlete’s name, image and likeness. He also cited Johnson v. N.C.A.A. , a pending case over whether college athletes should be classified as employees, which could have profound labor and tax implications.

“This is a big moment, for sure, but it’s not like we have reached the finish line,” Mr. Ehrlich said. “I wouldn’t even necessarily go as far to say, ‘this is the climax here.’ This is still going to be ongoing for several years.”

Billy Witz contributed reporting.

David W. Chen reports on state legislatures, state level policymaking and the political forces behind them. More about David W. Chen

Jacey Fortin covers a wide range of subjects for the National desk of The Times, including extreme weather, court cases and state politics all across the country. More about Jacey Fortin

Anna Betts reports on national events, including politics, education, and natural or man-made disasters, among other things. More about Anna Betts

Inside the World of Sports

Dive deeper into the people, issues and trends shaping professional, collegiate and amateur athletics..

The N.C.A.A.’s New Era: If a judge approves, a $2.8 billion settlement  would let colleges and universities pay athletes directly for the first time. How would it work ?

Bringing Back Reebok: Shaquille O’Neal pushed to be in charge of the company’s return to the hypercompetitive world of basketball sneakers. The Hall of Famer understands the stakes .

The Capital of Women’s Soccer: The success of Barcelona Femení has made the Spanish city, and the broader region of Catalonia, a laboratory for finding out what happens when the women’s game has prominence similar to the men’s .

A Minnesota Rallying Cry:  Fans of the Minnesota Timberwolves have picked up on a phrase  uttered by the team’s star, Anthony Edwards, and are hardly put off by its mild vulgarity.

A Beloved Manager:  A coach’s soccer legacy is often reduced to titles and trophies. In Liverpool, Jürgen Klopp will endure in murals, music and shared memories .

Home — Essay Samples — Business — Media — Television Negative Effects On Society

Television Negative Effects on Society

• Categories: Media Society

About this sample

Words: 573 |

Published: Mar 13, 2024

Words: 573 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr Jacklynne

Verified writer

• Expert in: Business Sociology

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 790 words

6 pages / 2653 words

6 pages / 2811 words

2 pages / 686 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Media

ABC News. (2011). Twitter: The Political Sex Scandal Response Tool of the 21st Century. Retrieved from [...]

Bulmer, J. G., McLeod, J. M., & Rice, R. E. (2009). Television and Political Life: Studies in Six European Countries. Springer Science & Business Media.Fulcher, J., & Scott, J. (2011). Sociology. Oxford University Press.Kitts, [...]

The Mexican American identity is complex and multifaceted, shaped by a rich history, cultural heritage, and the impact of immigration. As a Mexican American, I have personally experienced the challenges and triumphs of [...]

In Chapter 8 of Thirteen American Arguments, the author Howard Fineman delves into the pervasive influence of television in shaping public opinion and its impact on democracy. Through a blend of , cultural analysis, and critical [...]

I chose to discuss minority representation in media. I wanted to write about this because I have noticed that there is a certain shortcoming of non-white actors in media. With this is mind, questions I want to address are how [...]

Philippine news media is a powerful tool that is used by different organizations to connect, inform, and influence its subscribed audiences. Although this has plenty of potential for its users, it is often used to convey biased [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free