Social Media

Negative Effects of Social Media on Teens

Article #1 Teen Girls and Mental Health

Article Link: "Teen Girls are Facing a Mental Health Epidemic. We're Doing Nothing About It" by: Jean M. Twenge

 

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Being a female and using social media, really had this article stick out to me. As I have talked about mental health before and have done all the things with social media like compare myself and my life to others. I was wondering how it can affect teens growing up with social media now. This article by Jean M. Twenge talked about many reasons why there is a huge growth in mental health issues among teens. In the article, it talks about how 90% of teen girls use social media every day and they don't hang out with friends in person anymore. With social media teens run the risk of seeing sexual exploitation, body image issues, cyberbullying and more. All of this is linked to depression in teenage girls and can worsen their mental health.

In order to help our teens, there are a few ways we can try to protect them. The first is making sure the child does not have social media until they are 16 or they understand what comes with having social media. If they have social media, parents can control the hours they are spending on it or have it also monitored by their parents. Ultimately, a child could sneak the social media account without having their guardian know. Social media apps needs to have better security and authorization where the child is not able to have social media until they are old enough in order to protect their mental health.

 

Article #2 Digital Self-Harm

Article Link: "Digital self-harm: What to do when kids cyberbully themselves" by: Juli Fraga

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I have been using social media for awhile and I am very familiar with cyberbullying but I was not familiar with digital self-harm. However, after reading this article it is a topic that is growing in today's society. There is a lot of research behind it and professional analysis which I was not familiar with until now. In this article, Juli Fraga talks about what self-cyberbullying or digital self-harm is. It is the act of creating fake social media accounts in order to post negative comments about themselves. In this article, they talk about a study with data of 10,000 students and over 10% of students admitted in bullying themselves through social media. 

Looking deeper into the topic, teen's have admitted to digital self-harm in order to gain control over negative comments about themselves. If they are the ones posting negative comments, they are hoping that other people will defend them and have sympathy towards that person. They also can then be in control of what the negative comments being said about them are, versus someone else saying something negative or spreading a rumor. 

In order to help teens feel safe and not to self-harm, we need to make sure we are monitoring them. It can be tricky to discover and monitor since these accounts can be hidden online with fake names and email addresses, an open and non-judgmental approach to teens makes them more comfortable asking for help if they do feel as though they are in trouble. 

Overall

There wasn't anything I was completely shocked about after reading these articles, I always knew there can be some negative effects of social media but I believe the negatives are increasing with time. There are so many new ways for something to be going on behind the scenes of social media, and all of social media growing with time I feel like there needs to be more security and privacy with it. As long as children and teens understand what can happen with having social media, I believe they can have it and use it in the right ways.

How do you think parents and guardians should protect their teen from digital self-harm?