The Negative Effect of Social Media Essay Example

📌Category: Entertainment, Social Media
📌Words: 1016
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 23 April 2022

4.54 billion are on the internet. That is about 57% of all people on earth being online. With many of these people on social media, there have been some new problems in this electronically connected world, with the net being shown it can hinder users' mental health, negatively affect their lives, and give social media companies more power than they should have over the individual user. 

Users have had positive experiences using social media causing a boost in their mental health. These instances have been shown to not always happen if you take into consideration the number of people using social networks. With social media being known to make some people's mental health worse when they go online, most notably with the emotions of shame and guilt. Experts believe these are classified as self-conscious emotions associated with the feelings of powerlessness and being worthless. Having these bad feelings becoming easy to get online, psychologist Taya Cohen gives an example that happens normally: “if you post an angry rant about a friend you might feel guilty and later Apologize. A so-called shame response, Stefan says “‘I don't know whether making people feel small and Powerless is ever a good thing.”’ (Source 4). In other words, it’s never good for a human to feel all those self-hating emotions daily. With shame and guilt growing abnormally fast in someone's life if they use social media. Another example showing this is the hate Asian Americans have got during the pandemic with “Asian Americans reporting the biggest increase of online hate and harassment in the past year... [having] social media significantly contribute to the hate against Asain populations globally.” (source 5). With social media being the main proprietor of this harassment and growing hate for people of Asian descent for the pandemic. Allowing this to be said easily and without consequence worldwide. which then spills into actual violence making internet harassment get darker and more aggressive both in turn causing worse mental health than if users didn’t use it. Therefore, social media could lead to lower happiness and worse mental health with everything going on than if social media was not in use. 

Amidst cancel, culture becoming more involved within people's lives than ever, where one wrong move and that users' life could be negatively impacted forever. Fueling people's news feeds and rage cycles with the internet granting thousands of its users to potentially get infuriated simultaneously. Hurting themselves mentally down the road and hurting the person getting lots of hate which could be justified or not. The first example of this was when the internet was just starting to take shape in 1998’s Monica Lewinsky, who’s part of history’s most famous sex scandal. Involving past president Bill Clinton which Monica Lewinsky talks about in her TED talk declaring, ‘“I went from being a private figure to a publicly humiliated one, [being] patient zero of losing a personal reputation almost instantaneously'” (source 4). This is important because Lewinsky went viral even before the internet bloomed. Showing that reputation has increasingly gotten easier to break with the internet being around, going from a bad action which led to the destruction of one's life to in the present where a user posts words deemed offensive and may get their life hurt in the future. Another example of this is 2013 Justine Sacco, the test dummy of cancel culture posting one bad tweet being ‘“going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. just kidding, I'm white!’” (Source 4).  By the time she landed, tens of thousands of people responded calling her racist and Sacco was immediately fired from her job and became the subject of endless articles and a book. This is critical because she was the first victim of the internet's cancel culture resulting in bad attention she didn’t want that gravely hurt her life. acquiring thousands of hate comments, news coverage, and getting laid off from a high-paying job, all because of 12 words. Having social media makes anyone’s reputation, even a highly admired celebrity easy to destroy in the present.  Considering Social media isn’t a normal back and forth conversation but a pile-up of people with no context whatsoever, ultimately ending in no consequences for the hate pile but mental and physical consequences for the victim.

One of the media’s issues that could become problematic is the site’s own rules, either having favoritism, hypocrisy, and overriding people's freedoms with bias. With the owners of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook being shown largely biased against certain people with exceptions for some and silencing others. These companies sometimes become inconsistent with their own rules, censoring people they disagree with and turning a blind eye on people they like. One example out of many was one that even led to the arrest of Filipino journalist Maria Ressa. When she wrote an exposé that showed “violence-inciting fake accounts on Facebook linked to [president] Duterte’s administration… Ressa had provided information to Facebook but they remained up… facebook ultimately banned some of the accounts though, critics ask why such a delay.” (Source 6). This specifically shows facebook not following their own rules, having trump make a comment which could be taken as inciting violence or not, and getting banned. Then have the Philippines president use Facebook to start violence, only get taken down since there was backlash hurting the company. Showing their bias with almost the exact situation, one more example involving facebook’s flip-flopping policies was with a policy executive of Facebook giving favoritism. Refusing to apply hate speech rules, To the Indian politician T. Raja Singh, who has posted that “Muslims should be shot, called Muslim traitors and threatened to raze [ destroy] mosques,” this is crucial in showing Facebook favoritism having past president trump tweet something which could be taken as threatening and have it taken down but have an Indian politician wanting to shoot and destroy Muslims and their religious buildings. posts stay up and get special treatment which could be a major issue. Trying to put a one size fits all policy on free speech, not explaining what you can and can’t say on their platform. 

As a result, social media in the right way is a great tool to reconnect people, give users more information and make a better impact on their daily lives. But it isn't perfect and requires a few things to change. With social media, needing to take a look at their AI system that deals with information and hate speech, minimizing their influential power and mostly making all social media companies unbiased against certain groups and beliefs so everyone is given a proper voice on their platforms.

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