Students learn best when they are feeling good about themselves and others. Teachers have a vested interest in ensuring that their students are not subject to the negative effects of social media use. Here are three ways educators can help promote positive social media use in their students.
negative effects of facebook on the youth
A recurring theme in the resources and advice about counteracting the negative impact of social media on youth mental health is to focus on the positive aspects of the technology. For parents and teachers, the challenge is to monitor children for signs of the negative effects of social media. They must also ensure that children are taught safe online practices to prevent them from becoming victims, whether by exposing their personal information or putting themselves at risk of abuse.
Facebook was found to have similar negative effects to Instagram in the categories of bullying, FOMO, body image, anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Facebook also has a particularly negative impact on sleep. However, Facebook had some strong positive effects as well, particularly in the categories of emotional support and community building.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has warned about the potential for negative effects of social media in young kids and teens, including cyber-bullying and "Facebook depression." But the same risks may be true for adults, across generations. Here's a quick run-down of the studies that have shown that social media isn't very good for mental well-being, and in some ways, it can be pretty damaging.
Thus, social media establishes a group mind. The social media has profound impacts on group mind and peer pressure particularly on the youth. Social media such as Facebook have both negative and positive impacts on the youth, who form the majority of the users. Social media represents a convergence of minds leading to crowd behavior, which has both negative and positive impacts on the society. While social media may have negative impacts on the society, they also facilitate positive social development.
The negative effects of social media, especially among teenagers, have been a primary concern influencing the adoption of these social media. According to Luca, Facebook along with other websites, have many side effects many of which are not so social (Para.5). The social media is usually addictive.
Social media such as Facebook has both positive and negative impacts on the society. It creates a platform, majority of who are teenagers, to connect, discuss public and private issues, and learn the society norms and rules. Studies indicate that social media promotes self-esteem, social participation, and interaction compared to face-to-face interactions. However, social media also has potential negative effects. Concerns over privacy, addiction and risky behaviors among teenagers affect the adoption and usage of these social networks.
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Teenage social media addiction can be described as preoccupation and obsession. A teenager with a social media addiction has become so engrossed in the virtual world that it has impacted the real world, causing harmful effects. While many teens engage in social media through platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vine, Snapchat, and others, teens who are addicted to social media see a negative impact on their real life relationships and responsibilities.
A new study concludes that there is in fact a causal link between the use of social media and negative effects on well-being, primarily depression and loneliness. The study was published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.
Social media is a term for numerous technologies that allow instantaneous communication, status updates, and social networking among individuals. Social media platforms today include text messaging via cellular phones and social networking sites such as Facebook. The use of social media by youth (preadolescents and adolescents) continues to increase across the world on a yearly basis. Youth in nearly every country use social media to maintain nearly constant contact with their friends. Given the importance of both social media and friendships to youth, this review examines the impact of social media on the emotional experiences of youth. Social media can have a positive impact upon loneliness, intimacy, and relationship maintenance during adolescence. However, adolescents also experience relational issues via social media and are more reckless online. Social media, particularly Facebook, may have both a positive and a negative impact on mood symptoms and other mental disorders. Social media may play a role in identity formation by allowing younger users to experiment with different behaviours and interactional styles. The effects of social media may lead to more positive outcomes for boys than for girls. There is need for research on social media use during preadolescence, since work is largely conducted with adolescents, and for further research to be conducted with potential mediators between social media and well-being (e.g., friendship).
Much of the research on the negative consequences of social media use has focused on depressed affect. For example, it has been reported that troubled adolescents (i.e., those experiencing victimization and depression) form closer online relationships than other adolescents, which suggests that online relationships may attract more socially and emotionally vulnerable adolescents (Wolak et al. 2003). It has also been shown that, for college students, approximately one third express mild depressive symptom references on Facebook (Moreno et al. 2011) and that Facebook use has a negative impact on their cognitive and emotional well-being (Kross et al. 2013). While Jelenchick et al. (2013) reported that there is no association between depression and Facebook use, Cooper (2006) reported that ineffectiveness, a self-reported measure of depressive symptomatology, is related to Internet use in childhood, but these results were correlational and as such do not suggest patterns of causality. Morgan and Cotten (2003) reported that the impact of Internet use on depression differs depending on the activity that one engages in. For example, college students who use the Internet for communication via instant messaging and chat rooms experience a decrease in depressive symptoms, whereas depressive symptoms increase when the Internet is used for other purposes (e.g., shopping). However, their target populations were much older. On the other hand, van den Eijnden et al. (2008) found that feelings of depression were positively related to instant messaging but not to e-mail or chat use for adolescents. These authors argue that psychological well-being in youth is compromised by frequent Internet use since these interactions displace those everyday face-to-face interactions with friends and family. It should be noted that not all of these findings are specific to Facebook use, pointing to a lack of depth, breadth, and consensus within the literature. In fact, studies which correlated increased Internet use with greater depressive symptomatology have failed to show a similar correlation between SNS use and depression, which further supports that not all Internet use is equal (Banjanin et al. 2015).
Selfhout et al. (2009) investigated the association between perceived friendship quality, social anxiety, depression, and Internet usage over a 1-year period consisting of two waves of data collection. This particular study focused on surfing the Internet (i.e., browsing that does not involve online communication) and instant messaging. The results of this study suggest that the impact of Internet usage on young people is manifested differently for adolescents depending on whether they believe that they possess high or low quality friendships. Specifically, youth who report having high quality friendships are not affected either positively or negatively by their Internet usage, whereas in adolescents with low perceived friendship quality, more time spent surfing the Internet predicts increased depression and anxiety while more instant messaging was associated with lower levels of depression.
Further support comes from literature on adults. Amichai-Hamburger and Ben-Artzi (2003) reported that personality traits influence Internet usage. Specifically, these authors found that neurotic women are lonelier and thus tend to use the Internet more frequently. They argue that the Internet does not cause loneliness per se, but that Internet use is affected by the personality characteristics of the users. Kraut et al. (2002) also found that extraverted young adults benefit from using the Internet in that they experience increases in self-esteem, decreases in loneliness, increased community involvement, and reduced negative affect, whereas introverted individuals experience opposite effects.
The content that is shared online by youth is found to differ between shy and non-shy adolescents. Specifically, adolescents who are shy appear to communicate negative experiences and feelings via technology more frequently than their non-shy peers, whereas disclosure of negative content does not differ in face-to-face encounters (Laghi et al. 2013). Laghi et al. (2013) also reported that shy adolescents who express more negative experiences and negative affect online also have greater feelings of loneliness. These authors suggest that shy adolescents risk damaging their offline peer relationships by sharing such negative content with the online world.
The current research review has highlighted several important findings within the social media literature, as well as important limitations. The limitations underscored here serve as important points of departure for future research. Notably, one of the major limitations within the literature on youth and social media is that older adolescents are overwhelmingly sampled, and a dearth of information is available on social media use among children and preadolescents despite evidence that they frequently use SNSs such as Facebook. Future research would also benefit from the consideration of more complex studies and subsequent data analyses that include mediation and/or moderation effects rather than focusing on cross-sectional samples. 2ff7e9595c
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