Social Media! How Harmful can It possibly be?

It’s being preached about everywhere, having an online presence is directly associated with plummeting mental health… Right? As seen on platforms such as Instagram they have completely removed the ability to view the number of likes on another user’s post in efforts to stifle the issue. A similar matter is explored in the article written by Scientific American, concerning a study conducted by Jensen et al. ,on a group of young teenagers to determine if being in front of a screen has harmful effects on their mental health. To summarize, the study found no correlation with the duration of screen time and negative mental health. Furthermore, there was no negative effect if there was less time spent on screen either. However, the study did find that teenagers who exchanged more messages online were more likely to feel more connected to their friends, and generally happier. This study lacks expansion on what the teens are doing online as there are varieties of different outlets on screen. Ranging from video games, the browsing videos, to different social media platforms.

This then prods the question, if screen time is not the factor that is making teens more anxious and depressed, then what is? I feel that perhaps this study was not in depth enough because it did not measure what the teens were doing specifically. Perhaps if the study was conducted with different control group and there was a comparison between different control groups on varied media platforms, there would be a correlation found. 

A different look at this issue is presented by Bailey Parnell, who stresses that social media does having long lasting implications on society. She expands that over 70% of Canadians use social media. Canadian voter turnout is not even near 70%. Further more, users are on their phones for an average of 2hours per day. We typically are not even eating for that long in a day. She justifies that anything that we do this frequently most definitely has an impact on our lives. In addition, she states that social media allows for constant comparison towards someone else’s highlights. Which can have detrimental effects on one’s own well being.

From these two sources, comes two opposite results. With my own experience with social media, my support stands behind Bailey’s. Social media usage is becoming more of an epidemic. With the users becoming younger every year, this subject should not be glazed lightly over. The initial study done was too simplistic, and further research should be conducted to truly evaluate the exact impacts of social media influence on our lives.

Written by Molly Fu