Essay Sample about Dangers of Social Media

Did you know that in a lifetime the average person spends more than 6 years of their life on social media? Today I am going to talk about why social media is bad for you. Social media is increasingly becoming a growing problem for us and our families. Today I am arguing that social media is devasting for us as our interactions with it may lead us into a false sense of reality, provide misinformation, and lead to addiction.

We are now living in a world where people exaggerate their lives online and how they live on social to gain attention and increase their likes and views. For example in the news recently there was a story of Gabby Petito, a social media star who was killed by her abusive boyfriend. She was busy projecting this perfect life on Instagram with her and her boyfriend. But behind the screen was another story. Which lead to her murder. Perhaps if she was not busy projecting this perfect life and spoke up about what was happening, she would not have been killed. This is just one example of how living in a false reality is devastating for us. Post can also dangerously build our expectations on how our lives should look. Making us compare our ordinary life to others who seemingly live exciting life’s. This causes teens to live in a false reality instead of embracing their true, original selves. Teens disengaged from social media lead healthier and more fulfilling lives compared to those trying to impress others through living a false reality. This demonstrates how social media is harmful to teenagers.

Can we believe everything we read online? Unfortunately, due to opinions, biases, authors purposes and resharing we can’t. The majority of online posts contain false information. Due to people who believe that no matter what they post it does not matter if they can gain views, likes, shares and followers. According to a recent Harvard University study, which proved fake news spreads 8 times faster than actual news, and 18% of information shared on social media is inaccurate. Misinformation on social media makes it more difficult for us to recognize the truth, which can be harmful to our mental and physical health.

While people say social media cures boredom, the fact that we resort to social media to cure our boredom shows how reliant and addicted we are to our devices and social media. Teens should be making connections with other people face to face, picking up hobbies anything other than hiding behind a screen pressing buttons. A study showed us that in a lifetime on average we would spend 6 years and 3 months of our lives on social media, time we could have spent doing anything else.

Today I have talked about the dangers of social media and how it is devasting for us, due to a false sense of reality, misinformation and addictiveness. This proves how the use of social media leaves a long-lasting effect for its users and people who are involved with social media. The use of social media in the community creates more problems than it solves. As technology advances in the future, and more people are going to be online, the addiction is only going to increase, so we will have to stop now as much as we can before we can’t. Ultimately, social media is not good.