Social Media Can Be Toxic, Here’s Why

Since we spend a lot of time on social media, we are bound to internalize what we see and read on different platforms. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that the average global life span is 72 years, and many people start using social media as early as 10 years, meaning that the average person will spend 3,462,390 minutes (nearly 6 years and eight months) of their lifetime on social media, based on 2020 projections. Also, half the world’s population (3.8 billion people) use social media. Therefore, we can’t deny its spread and magnitude in the current day, and it is only going to grow from there. Social media is a place where sharing everything good about yourself, your success, your accomplishments, the people you love: your friends, your family, and your significant other, is normalized. It is where people try their best to portray a certain image of themselves; a filtered, cropped, selective version of them. 

We can easily view someone’s profile with a click of a button. Every thought, picture or video they share goes straight to our feed if we choose to follow them. We end up consuming all of this information. What may seem as aimless scrolling through social media is so much more than that because people often don’t realize how much of this information they internalize. Whether it's bad or good, this information can occupy their thoughts and actively alter their perception of themselves, others and the world around them which is not something that should be taken lightly. Dr. Ali Jazayeri, associate professor of clinical psychology at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology’s L.A. Campus stated that what concerns him the most about social media altering the way we think is, “the danger of slipping too far into a virtual world and losing a sense of real life, real self, and real priorities.”

Social media is a breeding ground for comparison. Since we have so much access to other people’s lives, whether we may know them personally or not, this type of access can be extremely unhealthy, and it would not exist without social media platforms. Nowadays, you don’t really have to attend someone’s wedding or graduation party to know how it went down; you can just watch Instagram or snapchat stories that day that will give you a 5-star coverage of the event. It's like you’re there, but you’re not. Ever wonder what your friend is up to or how they’re feeling? Just check their Instagram, Twitter or Facebook they won’t even know. Most of the time, only the good things make it to social media, which leave us under the false impression that everyone else’s life is so much better, especially if we look at their social media when we’re having a bad day, our lives seem so much more dull and depressing in comparison. The social comparison theory has existed way before social media, and it is based on how we measure our self-worth depending on how we compare to other people. Social media has only heightened this. 

Another thing that falls under the umbrella of comparison, is people often use social media to follow celebrities, especially young girls who look up to certain women who are popular on social media and are mostly models like Kylie Jenner and Kendall Jenner for example. These young girls keep getting exposed to overly edited, photoshopped, retouched and airbrushed photos of these models on Instagram, and one question pops in their minds: “Why don’t I look like this?” This leads to a follow up question, “Is there something wrong with me and am I not beautiful?” Social media is setting unrealistic beauty standards that young girls, who don’t know any better, feel that they have to fit into and end up hating themselves if they don’t. Little do they know, these models don’t even look like themselves in real life. These same young girls feel like they need to take actions to change themselves, to “better” themselves, and they may go as far as getting plastic surgeries to alter their physical appearance. A social media experiment conducted by Science Direct on a group of female participants found that Facebook usage resulted in these women being in a negative mood due to making appearance related comparisons which gave them a desire to change their faces, hair and skin.

In conclusion, the real danger of social media mainly lies in its users not being aware of the extent with which it impacts them. This awareness is needed in order for them to take the necessary precautions to safeguard themselves from the negative implications mentioned. It’s all about how you approach social media and your mindset. You need to work on your self-acceptance, and realize that you are you, and there is no use in making such comparisons. Instead of feeling self-hatred or envy, we can choose to be inspired by the successful people we see on social media and the same goes for the real world. Realizing that the saying “Everything is not what it seems” heavily applies to social media is also an important step. (855)

References

Average Time Spent Daily on Social Media (Latest 2020 Data). (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/average-daily-time-on-social-media

Tanney, A. (2015, June 18). Social Comparison Theory: How Our Social Media Habits Make Us Unhappy. Retrieved from https://www.elitedaily.com/life/media-affects-self-worth/1055695

Thomason, S. (2019, June 24). A Virtual Life - How Social Media Changes Our Perceptions: TCSPP. Retrieved from https://www.thechicagoschool.edu/insight/from-the-magazine/a-virtual-life/