essay on impact of media on society

The Impact of Media on Society Cause and Effect Essay

Introduction, role of media in the society, impact of media on society, works cited.

Media is one of the world’s power and force that can not be undermined. Media has a remarkable control in almost every aspect of our lives; in politics, social and cultural or economic welfares. Perhaps the best analysis of the impact that media has played in the society is through first acknowledging its role in information flow and circulation.

It is would be unjust to overlook the importance of information to the society. Information is the significant to the society in the sense that, all that happens in the society must be channeled and communicated among the society’s habitats. Without media, the habitats or else the population will be left clueless on what is happening or what is ought to happen.

From another perspective, the society benefits from the media in a number of ways and as well it derives a lot of misfortunes from the society. However, regardless of the impact that is made by media on the society, the media remains to be one of the strongest forces that influence the pillars of the society. This essay paper highlights the impacts that media has continued to assert on the society either in a positive or in a negative manner.

The most common role that media has played in the society has been; to inform people, to educate people and sometimes to offer leisure or entertainment. The role of media in the society is stretched back in the ancient traditions when, there were approaches on which media role in the society was perceived. Some of these approaches included a positive approach, critical approach, production approach, technological approach, information approach and finally a post colonial approach.

A positivist approach assumed that media’s role in the society was to achieve predetermined objectives of the society, usually from a beneficial perspective. The critical approach assumes that media is pertinent can be used in struggle for power and other issues in the society that were preceded by a spark of a new or old ideology.

The production approach is that media plays a greater role in society by providing a new experience of reality to the masses by providing an avenue of new perceptions and visions. The information approach assumes that the key role of media in the society is to provide information channels for the benefit of the society (Fourie178).

With the above roles being achieved in one of the most remarkable means over centuries, media has some solid impacts that have been imprinted on the society. Some of these impacts and effects are to remain for ever as long as media existence will remain while others require control and monitoring due to their negative effects on the society. The best approach to look at this is by first describing the positive impacts that media has had on the society (Fourie 25).

The development of media and advancement of mass media is such positive impact that media has accomplished in recent times. It has been proven that mass communication has influenced social foundation and governments to means that only can be termed pro-social (Preiss 485). An example of such can be use of mass media in campaigns to eradicate HIV and AIDS in the society.

Mass communication through media avenues such as the internet, television and radio has seen great co-operation of government, government agencies, non-government organizations, private corporations and the public in what is seen as key society players in mutual efforts towards constructing better society. In this context, media has contributed to awareness, education of the society and better governance of the society.

Were it not for media, the worlds most historical moments would probably be forgotten today especially in the manner they reshape our contemporary society in matters regarding politics, economics and culture (Fourie 58).

However, media has had its shortcomings that have negative influence on the society. These negatives if not counterchecked or controlled will continue to ruin the values and morals of a society that once treasured morality and value of information.

These negative impacts include: media has contributed to immense exposure of violence and antisocial acts from media program that are aimed at entertaining the public. Media roles in the society have been reversed by merely assuming a role of society visibility thus controlling the society rather than being controlled by society.

Media has continued to use biased tactics to attract society attention and thus having a negative impact on the society’s culture due to stereotyping of other cultures. Media has continued to target vulnerable groups in the society such as children and youths be exposing them to pornographic materials that has sexual immorality consequence on the society’s young generations.

It is through such shortcomings that the cognitive behavior’s which shape the moral fiber of the society gets threatened by media (Berger 106). However, regardless of the impacts of the media on the society, the future of the media will evolve with time and its role in the society will unlikely fade.

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The Significance and Impact of the Media in Contemporary Society

• First Online: 10 March 2018

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• Faith Gordon 3  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies ((PSLS))

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This chapter explores the significance of the media and the impact it has on the meaning-making processes in contemporary society. It draws on key national and international academic literature and previous studies on the role and functions of the media. This includes the key theoretical debates on deviancy amplification, folk devils and moral panics. It assesses the media’s impact on criminal justice policies and on public opinion of, and support for authoritarian ideologies and policies. In particular, it will focus on exploring how the media can influence popular culture and the impact of media portrayals of crime on societal perceptions, responses and reactions directed towards social groups, in particular children and young people ‘in conflict with the law’.

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It has long been acknowledged that the media are difficult to capture and define (Craig 2004 : 3). As outlined in Chap. 1 , the terms ‘media’ or ‘mass media’ refer to the traditional definition of the media, as consisting of newspapers (the print media), radio (broadcast media) and news bulletins and programs (televised media). While choosing to focus on the contemporary media, this book acknowledges from the outset that there is an extensive body of work existing on the historical origins of the media; mass communication and its impact, and the role of technological development (see Downing 1980 ; Frost 2000 ; Curran 2002 ).

There has been much criticism of pluralist theories on the media, including the arguments that pluralism is an ideological justification for the media and that the basis of the theory is not grounded in evidence. Rather the pluralist model assumes that the content of the media is diverse, without presenting evidence to reinforce or prove this theory (see Blumler and Gurevitch 1995 ).

Rupert Murdoch’s ownership of a range of media outlets in the United Kingdom (UK) and United States (US) is a prime example of the concentration of power and the influence of owners on media content (see Golding and Murdock 1991 ; Horrie 2003 ; Cole 2005 ). Further to this, academics such as Barker ( 1999 : 46) argue that conglomeration has aided a general concentration of media ownership, with research such as Bagdikian’s ( 2004 ) stating that the US media were controlled by 50 corporations in the 1980s, and by 2003 this had been reduced to five controlling the majority of the 178,000 media outlets. Significantly as Tait ( 2012 : 518) observes, the ‘scale and intensity’ of the phone hacking scandal in 2011, saw the resignation of the chief executive of one of the UK’s most influential newspaper groups, the resignation of one of the UK’s most senior police officers, the arrest of Andy Coulson, who had acted as the then Prime Minister, David Cameron’s head of communications, the resignation of two senior executives from key companies in the Murdoch empire, as well as the collapse of the takeover deal in relation to BSkyB and the closure of the News of the World (see also Keeble and Mair 2012 ; McKnight 2012 ; Watson and Hickman 2012 ).

As Barrat ( 1994 : 61) notes, the majority of media organisations are influenced by ‘a variety of commercial influences’, including the need to be profitable and also obtaining revenue through ‘advertising’. Some media outlets are part of the public sector, such as the BBC and they have the requirement ‘to provide a public service’, by ‘informing, educating, and entertaining audiences’ (Barrat 1994 : 61).

Tait’s ( 2012 : 520) analysis of the phone hacking scandal asserts that it has ‘revealed some fundamental issues in British political communications, the political system and the practice and regulation of journalism’. His analysis also documents ‘a secret history’ between Murdoch and British politics (Tait 2012 : 520–523).

Semiology provides a suitable vehicle for studying the meanings behind media content (see O’Connor 1989 ; Hall 1997 ; Berger 1998 ; Barker 2000 ; Schirato and Yell 2000 ). In contemporary literature it is now referred to as semiotics and was first developed by the Swiss linguist, Saussure, who proposed that meaning was ‘produced through … language systems’ (Schirato and Yell 2000 : 19). He focused on the ‘linguistic sign’, which he divided into the ‘signifier’, ‘the signified’ and the ‘sign’ (Schirato and Yell 2000 : 19).

As the findings of a number of content analysis studies highlight, the media exaggerate the levels of crime, in particular violent crime in the UK (see Ditton and Duffy 1983 ; Schlesinger and Murdock 1991 ; Williams and Dickinson 1993 ; Callanan 2005 ; Greer 2005 ; Reiner 2007 ).

Dorfman and Schiraldi’s ( 2001 ) research found that 76 percent of the public said they formed their opinions about crime from the media, whereas 22 percent reported that their knowledge of crime was formed through their personal experiences.

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Gordon, F. (2018). The Significance and Impact of the Media in Contemporary Society. In: Children, Young People and the Press in a Transitioning Society. Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60682-2_2

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Are you on social media a lot? When is the last time you checked Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram? Last night? Before breakfast? Five minutes ago?

If so, you are not alone — which is the point, of course. Humans are highly social creatures. Our brains have become wired to process social information, and we usually feel better when we are connected. Social media taps into this tendency.

“Human brains have essentially evolved because of sociality more than any other thing,” says Sinan Aral, an MIT professor and expert in information technology and marketing. “When you develop a population-scale technology that delivers social signals to the tune of trillions per day in real-time, the rise of social media isn’t unexpected. It’s like tossing a lit match into a pool of gasoline.”

The numbers make this clear. In 2005, about 7 percent of American adults used social media. But by 2017, 80 percent of American adults used Facebook alone. About 3.5 billion people on the planet, out of 7.7 billion, are active social media participants. Globally, during a typical day, people post 500 million tweets, share over 10 billion pieces of Facebook content, and watch over a billion hours of YouTube video.

As social media platforms have grown, though, the once-prevalent, gauzy utopian vision of online community has disappeared. Along with the benefits of easy connectivity and increased information, social media has also become a vehicle for disinformation and political attacks from beyond sovereign borders.

“Social media disrupts our elections, our economy, and our health,” says Aral, who is the David Austin Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Now Aral has written a book about it. In “The Hype Machine,” published this month by Currency, a Random House imprint, Aral details why social media platforms have become so successful yet so problematic, and suggests ways to improve them.

As Aral notes, the book covers some of the same territory as “The Social Dilemma,” a documentary that is one of the most popular films on Netflix at the moment. But Aral’s book, as he puts it, "starts where ‘The Social Dilemma’ leaves off and goes one step further to ask: What can we do about it?”

“This machine exists in every facet of our lives,” Aral says. “And the question in the book is, what do we do? How do we achieve the promise of this machine and avoid the peril? We’re at a crossroads. What we do next is essential, so I want to equip people, policymakers, and platforms to help us achieve the good outcomes and avoid the bad outcomes.”

When “engagement” equals anger

“The Hype Machine” draws on Aral’s own research about social networks, as well as other findings, from the cognitive sciences, computer science, business, politics, and more. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, for instance, have found that people obtain bigger hits of dopamine — the chemical in our brains highly bound up with motivation and reward — when their social media posts receive more likes.

At the same time, consider a 2018 MIT study by Soroush Vosoughi, an MIT PhD student and now an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth College; Deb Roy, MIT professor of media arts and sciences and executive director of the MIT Media Lab; and Aral, who has been studying social networking for 20 years. The three researchers found that on Twitter, from 2006 to 2017, false news stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true ones. Why? Most likely because false news has greater novelty value compared to the truth, and provokes stronger reactions — especially disgust and surprise.

In this light, the essential tension surrounding social media companies is that their platforms gain audiences and revenue when posts provoke strong emotional responses, often based on dubious content.

“This is a well-designed, well-thought-out machine that has objectives it maximizes,” Aral says. “The business models that run the social-media industrial complex have a lot to do with the outcomes we’re seeing — it’s an attention economy, and businesses want you engaged. How do they get engagement? Well, they give you little dopamine hits, and … get you riled up. That’s why I call it the hype machine. We know strong emotions get us engaged, so [that favors] anger and salacious content.”

From Russia to marketing

“The Hype Machine” explores both the political implications and business dimensions of social media in depth. Certainly social media is fertile terrain for misinformation campaigns. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russia spread  false information to at least 126 million people on Facebook and another 20 million people on Insta­gram (which Facebook owns), and was responsible for 10 million tweets. About 44 percent of adult Americans visited a false news source in the final weeks of the campaign.

“I think we need to be a lot more vigilant than we are,” says Aral.

We do not know if Russia’s efforts altered the outcome of the 2016 election, Aral says, though they may have been fairly effective. Curiously, it is not clear if the same is true of most U.S. corporate engagement efforts.

As Aral examines, digital advertising on most big U.S. online platforms is often wildly ineffective, with academic studies showing that the “lift” generated by ad campaigns — the extent to which they affect consumer action — has been overstated by a factor of hundreds, in some cases. Simply counting clicks on ads is not enough. Instead, online engagement tends to be more effective among new consumers, and when it is targeted well; in that sense, there is a parallel between good marketing and guerilla social media campaigns.

“The two questions I get asked the most these days,” Aral says, “are, one, did Russia succeed in intervening in our democracy? And two, how do I measure the ROI [return on investment] from marketing investments? As I was writing this book, I realized the answer to those two questions is the same.”

Ideas for improvement

“The Hype Machine” has received praise from many commentators. Foster Provost, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, says it is a “masterful integration of science, business, law, and policy.” Duncan Watts, a university professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says the book is “essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got here and how we can get somewhere better.”

In that vein, “The Hype Machine” has several detailed suggestions for improving social media. Aral favors automated and user-generated labeling of false news, and limiting revenue-collection that is based on false content. He also calls for firms to help scholars better research the issue of election interference.

Aral believes federal privacy measures could be useful, if we learn from the benefits and missteps of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and a new California law that lets consumers stop some data-sharing and allows people to find out what information companies have stored about them. He does not endorse breaking up Facebook, and suggests instead that the social media economy needs structural reform. He calls for data portability and interoperability, so “consumers would own their identities and could freely switch from one network to another.” Aral believes that without such fundamental changes, new platforms will simply replace the old ones, propelled by the network effects that drive the social-media economy.

“I do not advocate any one silver bullet,” says Aral, who emphasizes that changes in four areas together — money, code, norms, and laws — can alter the trajectory of the social media industry.

But if things continue without change, Aral adds, Facebook and the other social media giants risk substantial civic backlash and user burnout.

“If you get me angry and riled up, I might click more in the short term, but I might also grow really tired and annoyed by how this is making my life miserable, and I might turn you off entirely,” Aral observes. “I mean, that’s why we have a Delete Facebook movement, that’s why we have a Stop Hate for Profit movement. People are pushing back against the short-term vision, and I think we need to embrace this longer-term vision of a healthier communications ecosystem.”

Changing the social media giants can seem like a tall order. Still, Aral says, these firms are not necessarily destined for domination.

“I don’t think this technology or any other technology has some deterministic endpoint,” Aral says. “I want to bring us back to a more practical reality, which is that technology is what we make it, and we are abdicating our responsibility to steer technology toward good and away from bad. That is the path I try to illuminate in this book.”

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Press mentions.

Prof. Sinan Aral’s new book, “The Hype Machine,” has been selected as one of the best books of the year about AI by Wired . Gilad Edelman notes that Aral’s book is “an engagingly written shortcut to expertise on what the likes of Facebook and Twitter are doing to our brains and our society.”

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Danny Crichton of TechCrunch about his new book, “The Hype Machine,” which explores the future of social media. Aral notes that he believes a starting point “for solving the social media crisis is creating competition in the social media economy.” 

New York Times

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with New York Times editorial board member Greg Bensinger about how social media platforms can reduce the spread of misinformation. “Human-in-the-loop moderation is the right solution,” says Aral. “It’s not a simple silver bullet, but it would give accountability where these companies have in the past blamed software.”

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Kara Miller of GBH’s Innovation Hub about his research examining the impact of social media on everything from business re-openings during the Covid-19 pandemic to politics.

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with NPR’s Michael Martin about his new book, “The Hype Machine,” which explores the benefits and downfalls posed by social media. “I've been researching social media for 20 years. I've seen its evolution and also the techno utopianism and dystopianism,” says Aral. “I thought it was appropriate to have a book that asks, 'what can we do to really fix the social media morass we find ourselves in?'”

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• Social Media Seen as Mostly Good for Democracy Across Many Nations, But U.S. is a Major Outlier

2. Views of social media and its impacts on society

Table of contents.

• Most do not think they can influence politics in their country
• The perceived impacts of the internet and social media on society
• Majorities view social media as a way to raise awareness among the public and elected officials
• Widespread smartphone ownership while very few do not own a mobile phone at all
• Most say they use social media sites
• Frequent posting about social or political issues on social media is uncommon
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A: Classifying democracies
• Appendix B: Negative Impact of the Internet and Social Media Index
• Appendix C: Political categorization
• Classifying parties as populist
• Classifying parties as left, right or center
• Appendix E: Country-specific examples of smartphones
• Appendix F: Country-specific examples of social media sites
• Pew Research Center’s Spring 2022 Global Attitudes Survey
• The American Trends Panel survey methodology

When asked whether social media is a good or bad thing for democracy in their country, a median of 57% across 19 countries say that it is a good thing. In almost every country, close to half or more say this, with the sentiment most common in Singapore, where roughly three-quarters believe social media is a good thing for democracy in their country. However, in the Netherlands and France, about four-in-ten agree. And in the U.S., only around a third think social media is positive for democracy – the smallest share among all 19 countries surveyed.

In eight countries, those who believe that the political system in their country allows them to have an influence on politics are also more likely to say that social media is a good thing for democracy. This gap is most evident in Belgium, where 62% of those who feel their political system allows them to have a say in politics also say that social media is a good thing for democracy in their country, compared with 44% among those who say that their political system does not allow them much influence on politics.

Those who view the spread of false information online as a major threat to their country are less likely to say that social media is a good thing for democracy, compared with those who view the spread of misinformation online as either a minor threat or not a threat at all. This is most clearly observed in the Netherlands, where only four-in-ten (39%) among those who see the spread of false information online as a major threat say that social media has been a good thing for democracy in their country, as opposed to the nearly six-in-ten (57%) among those who do not consider the spread of misinformation online to be a threat who say the same. This pattern is evident in eight other countries as well.

Views also vary by age. Older adults in 12 countries are less likely to say that social media is a good thing for democracy in their country when compared to their younger counterparts. In Japan, France, Israel, Hungary, the UK and Australia, the gap between the youngest and oldest age groups is at least 20 percentage points and ranges as high as 41 points in Poland, where nearly nine-in-ten (87%) younger adults say that social media has been a good thing for democracy in the country and only 46% of adults over 50 say the same.

The publics surveyed believe the internet and social media are affecting societies. Across the six issues tested, few tend to say they see no changes due to increased connectivity – instead seeing things changing both positively and negatively – and often both at the same time. 

A median of 84% say technological connectivity has made people easier to manipulate with false information and rumors – the most among the six issues tested. Despite this, medians of 73% describe people being more informed about both current events in other countries and about events in their own country. Indeed, in most countries, those who think social media has made it easier to manipulate people with misinformation and rumors are also more likely to think that social media has made people more informed.

When it comes to politics, the internet and social media are generally seen as disruptive, with a median of 65% saying that people are now more divided in their political opinions. Some of this may be due to the sense – shared by a median of 44% across the 19 countries – that access to the internet and social media has led people to be less civil in the way they talk about politics. Despite this, slightly more people (a median of 45%) still say connectivity has made people more accepting of people from different ethnic groups, religions and races than say it has made people less accepting (22%) or had no effect (29%). 

There is widespread concern over misinformation – and a sense that people are more susceptible to manipulation

Previously reported results indicate that a median of 70% across the 19 countries surveyed believe that the spread of false information online is a major threat to their country. In places like Canada, Germany and Malaysia, more people name this as a threat than say the same of any of the other issues asked about. 

This sense of threat is related to the widespread belief that people today are now easier to manipulate with false information and rumors thanks to the internet and social media. Around half or more in every country surveyed shares this view. And in places like the Netherlands, Australia and the UK, around nine-in-ten see people as more manipulable.

In many places, younger people – who tend to be more likely to use social media (for more on usage, see Chapter 3 ) – are also more likely to say it makes people easier to manipulate with false information and rumors. For example, in South Korea, 90% of those under age 30 say social media makes people easier to manipulate, compared with 65% of those 50 and older. (Interestingly, U.S.-focused research has found older adults are more likely to share misinformation than younger ones.) People with more education are also often more likely than those with less education to say that social media has led to people being easier to manipulate.

In 2018, when Pew Research Center asked a similar question about whether access to mobile phones, the internet and social media has made people easier to manipulate with false information and rumors, the results were largely similar. Across the 11 emerging economies surveyed as part of that project , at least half in every country thought this was the case and in many places, around three-quarters or more saw this as an issue. Large shares in many places were also specifically concerned that people in their country might be manipulated by domestic politicians. For more on how the two surveys compare, see “ In advanced and emerging economies, similar views on how social media affects democracy and society .”

Spotlight on the U.S.: Attitudes and experiences with misinformation

Misinformation has long been seen as a source of concern for Americans. In 2016 , for example, in the wake of the U.S. presidential election, 64% of U.S. adults thought completely made-up news had caused a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current events. At the time, around a third felt that they often encountered political news online that was completely made up and another half said they often encountered news that was not fully accurate. Moreover, about a quarter (23%) said they had shared such stories – whether knowingly or not.

When asked in 2019 who was the cause of made-up news, Americans largely singled out two groups of people: political leaders (57%) and activists (53%). Fewer placed blame on journalists (36%), foreign actors (35%) or the public (26%). A large majority of Americans that year (82%) also described themselves as either “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the potential impact of made-up news on the 2020 presidential election. People who followed political and election news more closely and those with higher levels of political knowledge also tended to be more concerned.

Among adult American Twitter users in 2021, in particular, there was widespread concern about misinformation: 53% said inaccurate or misleading information is a major problem on the platform and 33% reported seeing a lot of that type of content when using the site. 

As of 2021 , around half (48%) of Americans thought the government should take steps to restrict false information, even if it meant losing freedom to access and publish content – a share that had increased somewhat substantially since 2018, when 39% felt the same.

Most say people are more informed about current events – foreign and domestic – thanks to social media and the internet

A majority in every country surveyed thinks that access to the internet and social media has made people in their country more informed about domestic current events. In Sweden, Japan, Greece and the Netherlands, around eight-in-ten or more share this view, while in Malaysia, a smaller majority (56%) says the same.

Younger adults tend to see social media making people more informed than older adults do. Older adults, for their part, don’t necessarily see the internet and social media making people less informed about what’s happening in their country; rather, they’re somewhat more likely to describe these platforms as having little effect on people’s information levels. In the case of the U.S., for example, 71% of adults under 30 say social media has made people more informed about current events in the U.S., compared with 60% of those ages 50 and older. But those ages 50 and older are about twice as likely to say social media has not had much impact on how informed people are compared with those under 30: 19% vs. 11%, respectively.

In seven of the surveyed countries, people with higher levels of education are more likely than those with lower levels to see social media informing the public on current events in their own country.

Majorities in every country also agree that the internet and social media are making people more informed about current events happening in other countries. The two questions are extremely highly correlated ( r = 0.94), meaning that in most places where people say social media is making people more informed about domestic events, they also say the same of international events. (See the topline for detailed results for both questions, by country.)

In the 2018 survey of emerging economies , results of a slightly different question also found that a majority in every country – and around seven-in-ten or more in most places – said people were more informed thanks to social media, the internet and smartphones, rather than less. 

In some countries, those who think social media has made it easier to manipulate people with misinformation and rumors are also more likely to think that social media has made people more informed. This finding, too, was similar in the 2018 11-country study of emerging economies: Generally speaking, individuals who are most attuned to the potential benefits technology can bring to the political domain are also the ones most anxious about the possible harms. 

Spotlight on the U.S.: Social media use and news consumption

In the U.S. , around half of adults say they either get news often (17%) or sometimes (33%) from social media. When it comes to where Americans regularly get news on social media, Facebook outpaces all other social media sites. Roughly a third of U.S. adults (31%) say they regularly get news from Facebook. While Twitter is only used by about three-in-ten U.S. adults (27%), about half of its users (53%) turn to the site to regularly get news there. And a quarter of U.S. adults regularly get news from YouTube, while smaller shares get news from Instagram (13%), TikTok (10%) or Reddit (8%). Notably, TikTok has seen rapid growth as a source of news among younger Americans in recent years.

On several social media sites asked about, adults under 30 make up the largest share of those who regularly get news on the site. For example, half or more of regular news consumers on Snapchat (67%), TikTok (52%) or Reddit (50%) are ages 18 to 29. 

While this survey finds that 64% of Americans think the public has become more informed thanks to social media, results of Center analyses do show that Americans who mainly got election and political information on social media during the 2020 election were less knowledgeable and less engaged than those who primarily got their news through other methods (like cable TV, print, etc.).

Majorities or pluralities tend to see social media leading to more political divisions

Around half or more in almost every country surveyed think social media has made people more divided in their political opinions. The U.S., South Korea and the Netherlands are particularly likely to hold this view. As a separate analysis shows, the former two also stand out for being the countries where people are most likely to report conflicts between people who support different political parties . While perceived political division in the Netherlands is somewhat lower, it, too, stands apart: Between 2021 and 2022, the share who said there were conflicts increased by 23 percentage points – among the highest year-on-year shifts evident in the survey.

More broadly, across each of the countries surveyed, people who see social division between people who support different political parties, are, in general, more likely to see social media leading people to be more divided in their political opinions.

In a number of countries, younger people are somewhat more likely to see social media enlarging political differences than older people. More educated people, too, often see social media exacerbating political divisions more than those with less education. 

Similarly, in the survey of 11 emerging economies conducted in 2018, results of a slightly different question indicated that around four-in-ten or more in every country – and a majority in most places – thought social media had made people more divided.

Publics diverge over whether social media has made people more accepting of differences

There is less consensus over what role social media has played when it comes to tolerance: A 19-country median of 45% say it has made people more accepting of people from different ethnic backgrounds, religions and races, while a median of 22% say it has made them less so, and 29% say that it has not had much impact either way.

South Korea, Singapore, Italy and Japan are the most likely to see social media making people more tolerant. On the flip side, the Netherlands and Hungary stand out as the two countries where a plurality says the internet and social media have made people less accepting of people with racial or religious differences. Most other societies are somewhat divided, as in the case of the U.S., where around a third of the public falls into each of the three groups.

Younger people are more likely than older ones in most countries to say that social media has increased tolerance. This is the case, for example, in Canada, where 54% of adults under 30 say social media has contributed to people being more accepting of people from different ethnic groups, religions and races, compared with a third of those ages 50 and older. In some places – and in Canada – older people are more likely to see social media leading to less tolerance, though in other places, older people are simply less likely to see much impact from the technology.

In most countries, people who see social media leading to more divisions between people with different political opinions are more likely to say social media has made people less accepting of those racially and religiously different from them than those who say social media is having no effect on political division. People who see more conflicts between partisans in their society are also more likely than those who see fewer divisions to place some of the blame on social media, describing it as making people less accepting of differences.  

Results of an analysis of the 11-country poll did find that people who used smartphones and social media were more likely to regularly interact with people from diverse backgrounds – though the question did not ask about acceptance , just about interactions. The publics in these emerging economies were also somewhat divided when it came to their opinions on how social media has led to people being more or less accepting of those with different viewpoints.

Mixed views on whether social media has made people discuss politics civilly

Across the countries surveyed, a median of 46% say access to the internet and social media has made people less civil when they talk about politics. This is more than the 23% who say it has made them more civil – though a median of 26% see little impact either way.

In the U.S., the Netherlands and Australia, a majority sees the internet and social media making people less civil. Roughly seven-in-ten Americans say this. Singapore stands out as the only country where around half see these technologies increasing civility. All other countries surveyed are somewhat divided.

People with higher levels of education tend to see less civility thanks to social media relative to those with lower levels of education.

In most places surveyed, those who think social media has made people more divided politically, compared with those who say it has had no impact on divisions, are also more likely to say social media has made people less civil in how they talk about politics.

Across advanced economies, people generally recognize social media as useful for bringing the public’s and elected officials’ attention to certain issues, for changing people’s minds and for influencing policy choices. A median of 77% across the 19 countries surveyed say social media is an effective way to raise public awareness about sociopolitical issues. Those in the UK are particularly optimistic about social media as a way of bringing public attention to a topic, with about nine-in-ten holding this belief. People in France and Belgium are the least convinced about social media’s role in raising public awareness, but majorities in both countries still say it’s effective for highlighting certain issues among the public.

Many also consider social media effective for changing people’s minds on social or political issues (65% median). Confidence in social media’s effect on changing people’s minds is strongest in South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia. Germans, Belgians, Israelis and French adults are more skeptical, with no more than about half seeing social media as effective for changing people’s minds on sociopolitical issues.

Views on social media as a way to bring the attention of elected officials to certain issues are similar. A median of 64% consider social media effective for directing elected officials’ attention to issues, and this view is especially prevalent in South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia. People in Belgium, Hungary and France are less convinced.

Somewhat fewer consider social media effective for influencing policy decisions (61% median). Israelis are particularly doubtful of social media as a way for affecting policy change: A majority of Israelis say social media is an ineffective way of influencing policy decisions, and about half in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany agree. About a fifth in Poland also did not provide an answer.

An additional question was asked in the U.S. about social media’s role in creating sustained social movements; roughly seven-in-ten Americans say social media is effective for this. Younger Americans, as well as those with more education or higher incomes, are more likely than others to hold this view. Social media users and those who say social media has been generally good for U.S. democracy are also more likely to believe social media is effective at creating sustained social movements.

Age plays a role in how people in many of the 19 nations surveyed view social media’s role in public discourse. Those ages 18 to 29 are especially likely to see social media as effective for raising public awareness. For example, in France, 70% of those ages 18 to 29 see social media as an effective way of raising public awareness. Only 48% of those 50 and older share this view, a difference of 22 percentage points.

Similarly, younger adults are also more likely to consider social media an effective way for changing people’s minds on issues. The difference is greatest in Poland and Germany, where younger adults are 24 points more likely than their older counterparts to see social media this way. There are fewer differences between younger and older adults when it comes to social media’s effectiveness for directing elected officials’ attention and influencing policy decisions. Younger adults are also generally more likely to be social media users and provide answers to these questions.

Education and income are other demographic characteristics related to people’s view of social media as a way to influence public discourse. In 11 countries, those with incomes higher than the median income are more likely than those with lower incomes to consider social media effective for raising public awareness about sociopolitical issues. Those with more education are similarly more likely to consider social media effective for elevating sociopolitical issues in the public consciousness in eight countries. People with lower levels of education and income are somewhat less likely than others to provide answers to questions about social media’s effectiveness for influencing policies, changing minds and bringing attention to issues.

Social media usage is also connected to how people evaluate these platforms as a way to affect public discourse and policy choices. In nearly all countries, social media users are more likely than those who are not on social media to say social media is effective for raising public awareness, and social media users are also more likely to consider social media useful for changing people’s minds in 11 of 19 countries. The differences are greatest in Israel in both cases. Israeli social media users are 47 points more likely than non-users to say social media is effective for raising awareness and 38 points more likely to consider it effective for changing people’s minds on sociopolitical issues. Different views between social media users and non-users are less common when it comes to social media as an effective way for bringing elected officials’ attention to issues or influencing policy decisions. Social media users are also more likely than non-users to answer these questions.

Among social media users, those who are more active are more likely to consider social media an effective avenue for shaping people’s views and attention. Those who post about political or social issues at least sometimes on social media have a greater chance of seeing social media as effective for raising awareness for sociopolitical issues than those who post rarely or never in 16 countries. For example, in Spain, 84% of social media users who post sometimes or often see social media as an effective way to bring awareness to issues, compared to 71% of users who never or rarely post. Similarly, social media users who post more frequently are more likely to see social media as effective for changing minds in 13 countries, for influencing policy decisions in 15 countries, and bringing elected officials’ attention to issues in 12 nations.

People’s views of social media as a way to spread awareness or affect change are additionally related to how they see democracy. The beliefs that social media is effective for influencing policy decisions and for bringing issues to the attention of elected officials or the public are especially common among people who also believe they have a say in politics. For example, in Germany, 60% of people who say people like them have at least a fair amount of influence on politics also say social media is effective for affecting policy choices. In comparison, 43% of Germans who do not think they have a say in politics also think social media can influence policy decisions.

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A business journal from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

The Impact of Social Media: Is it Irreplaceable?

July 26, 2019 • 15 min read.

Social media as we know it has barely reached its 20th birthday, but it’s changed the fabric of everyday life. What does the future hold for the sector and the players currently at the top?

• Public Policy

In little more than a decade, the impact of social media has gone from being an entertaining extra to a fully integrated part of nearly every aspect of daily life for many.

Recently in the realm of commerce, Facebook faced skepticism in its testimony to the Senate Banking Committee on Libra, its proposed cryptocurrency and alternative financial system . In politics, heartthrob Justin Bieber tweeted the President of the United States, imploring him to “let those kids out of cages.” In law enforcement, the Philadelphia police department moved to terminate more than a dozen police officers after their racist comments on social media were revealed.

And in the ultimate meshing of the digital and physical worlds, Elon Musk raised the specter of essentially removing the space between social and media through the invention — at some future time — of a brain implant that connects human tissue to computer chips.

All this, in the span of about a week.

As quickly as social media has insinuated itself into politics, the workplace, home life, and elsewhere, it continues to evolve at lightning speed, making it tricky to predict which way it will morph next. It’s hard to recall now, but SixDegrees.com, Friendster, and Makeoutclub.com were each once the next big thing, while one survivor has continued to grow in astonishing ways. In 2006, Facebook had 7.3 million registered users and reportedly turned down a $750 million buyout offer. In the first quarter of 2019, the company could claim 2.38 billion active users, with a market capitalization hovering around half a trillion dollars.

“In 2007 I argued that Facebook might not be around in 15 years. I’m clearly wrong, but it is interesting to see how things have changed,” says Jonah Berger, Wharton marketing professor and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On . The challenge going forward is not just having the best features, but staying relevant, he says. “Social media isn’t a utility. It’s not like power or water where all people care about is whether it works. Young people care about what using one platform or another says about them. It’s not cool to use the same site as your parents and grandparents, so they’re always looking for the hot new thing.”

Just a dozen years ago, everyone was talking about a different set of social networking services, “and I don’t think anyone quite expected Facebook to become so huge and so dominant,” says Kevin Werbach, Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics. “At that point, this was an interesting discussion about tech start-ups.

“Today, Facebook is one of the most valuable companies on earth and front and center in a whole range of public policy debates, so the scope of issues we’re thinking about with social media are broader than then,” Werbach adds.

Cambridge Analytica , the impact of social media on the last presidential election and other issues may have eroded public trust, Werbach said, but “social media has become really fundamental to the way that billions of people get information about the world and connect with each other, which raises the stakes enormously.”

Just Say No

“Facebook is dangerous,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) at July’s hearing of the Senate Banking Committee. “Facebook has said, ‘just trust us.’ And every time Americans trust you, they seem to get burned.”

Social media has plenty of detractors, but by and large, do Americans agree with Brown’s sentiment? In 2018, 42% of those surveyed in a Pew Research Center survey said they had taken a break from checking the platform for a period of several weeks or more, while 26% said they had deleted the Facebook app from their cellphone.

A year later, though, despite the reputational beating social media had taken, the 2019 iteration of the same Pew survey found social media use unchanged from 2018.

Facebook has its critics, says Wharton marketing professor Pinar Yildirim, and they are mainly concerned about two things: mishandling consumer data and poorly managing access to it by third-party providers; and the level of disinformation spreading on Facebook.

“Social media isn’t a utility. It’s not like power or water where all people care about is whether it works. Young people care about what using one platform or another says about them.” –Jonah Berger

“The question is, are we at a point where the social media organizations and their activities should be regulated for the benefit of the consumer? I do not think more regulation will necessarily help, but certainly this is what is on the table,” says Yildirim. “In the period leading to the [2020 U.S. presidential] elections, we will hear a range of discussions about regulation on the tech industry.”

Some proposals relate to stricter regulation on collection and use of consumer data, Yildirim adds, noting that the European Union already moved to stricter regulations last year by adopting the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) . “A number of companies in the U.S. and around the world adopted the GDPR protocol for all of their customers, not just for the residents of EU,” she says. “We will likely hear more discussions on regulation of such data, and we will likely see stricter regulation of this data.”

The other discussion bound to intensify is around the separation of Big Tech into smaller, easier to regulate units. “Most of us academics do not think that dividing organizations into smaller units is sufficient to improve their compliance with regulation. It also does not necessarily mean they will be less competitive,” says Yildirim. “For instance, in the discussion of Facebook, it is not even clear yet how breaking up the company would work, given that it does not have very clear boundaries between different business units.”

Even if such regulations never come to pass, the discussions “may nevertheless hurt Big Tech financially, given that most companies are publicly traded and it adds to the uncertainty,” Yildirim notes.

One prominent commentator about the negative impact of social media is Jaron Lanier, whose fervent opposition makes itself apparent in the plainspoken title of his 2018 book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now . He cites loss of free will, social media’s erosion of the truth and destruction of empathy, its tendency to make people unhappy, and the way in which it is “making politics impossible.” The title of the last chapter: “Social Media Hates Your Soul.”

Lanier is no tech troglodyte. A polymath who bridges the digital and analog realms, he is a musician and writer, has worked as a scientist for Microsoft, and was co-founder of pioneering virtual reality company VPL Research. The nastiness that online existence brings out in users “turned out to be like crude oil for the social media companies and other behavior manipulation empires that quickly came to dominate the internet, because it fuelled negative behavioral feedback,” he writes.

“Social media has become really fundamental to the way that billions of people get information about the world and connect with each other, which raises the stakes enormously.” –Kevin Werbach

Worse, there is an addictive quality to social media, and that is a big issue, says Berger. “Social media is like a drug, but what makes it particularly addictive is that it is adaptive. It adjusts based on your preferences and behaviors,” he says, “which makes it both more useful and engaging and interesting, and more addictive.”

The effect of that drug on mental health is only beginning to be examined, but a recent University of Pennsylvania study makes the case that limiting use of social media can be a good thing. Researchers looked at a group of 143 Penn undergraduates, using baseline monitoring and randomly assigning each to either a group limiting Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat use to 10 minutes per platform per day, or to one told to use social media as usual for three weeks. The results, published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology , showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks in the group limiting use compared to the control group.

However, “both groups showed significant decreases in anxiety and fear of missing out over baseline, suggesting a benefit of increased self-monitoring,” wrote the authors of “ No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression .”

Monetizing a League (and a Reality) All Their Own

No one, though, is predicting that social media is a fad that will pass like its analog antecedent of the 1970s, citizens band radio. It will, however, evolve. The idea of social media as just a way to reconnect with high school friends seems quaint now. The impact of social media today is a big tent, including not only networks like Facebook, but also forums like Reddit and video-sharing platforms.

“The question is, are we at a point where the social media organizations and their activities should be regulated for the benefit of the consumer?” –Pinar Yildirim

Virtual worlds and gaming have become a major part of the sector, too. Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader says gamers are creating their own user-generated content through virtual worlds — and the revenue to go with it. He points to one group of gamers that use Grand Theft Auto as a kind of stage or departure point “to have their own virtual show.” In NoPixel, the Grand Theft Auto roleplaying server, “not much really happens and millions are tuning in to watch them. Just watching, not even participating, and it’s either live-streamed or recorded. And people are making donations to support this thing. The gamers are making hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“Now imagine having a 30-person reality show all filmed live and you can take the perspective of one person and then watch it again from another person’s perspective,” he continues. “Along the way, they can have a tip jar or talk about things they endorse. That kind of immersive media starts to build the bridge to what we like to get out of TV, but even better. Those things are on the periphery right now, but I think they are going to take over.”

Big players have noticed the potential of virtual sports and are getting into the act. In a striking example of the physical world imitating the digital one, media companies are putting up real-life stadiums where teams compete in video games. Comcast Spectator in March announced that it is building a new $50 million stadium in South Philadelphia that will be the home of the Philadelphia Fusion, the city’s e-sports team in the Overwatch League.

E-sports is serious business, with revenues globally — including advertising, sponsorships, and media rights — expected to reach $1.1 billion in 2019, according to gaming industry analytics company Newzoo.

“E-sports is absolutely here to stay,” says Fader, “and I think it’s a safe bet to say that e-sports will dominate most traditional sports, managing far more revenue and having more impact on our consciousness than baseball.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Facebook has begun making deals to carry e-sports content. In fact, it is diversification like this that may keep Facebook from ending up like its failed upstart peers. One thing that Facebook has managed to do that MySpace, Friendster, and others didn’t, is “a very good job of creating functional integration with the value they are delivering, as opposed to being a place to just share photos or send messages, it serves a lot of diversified functions,” says Keith E. Niedermeier, director of Wharton’s undergraduate marketing program and an adjunct professor of marketing. “They are creating groups and group connections, but you see them moving into lots of other services like streaming entertainment, mobile payments, and customer-to-customer buying and selling.”

“[WeChat] has really instantiated itself as a day-to-day tool in China, and it’s clear to me that Facebook would like to emulate that sort of thing.” –Keith Niedermeier

In China, WeChat has become the biggest mobile payment platform in the world and it is the platform for many third-party apps for things like bike sharing and ordering airplane tickets. “It has really instantiated itself as a day-to-day tool in China, and it’s clear to me that Facebook would like to emulate that sort of thing,” says Niedermeier.

Among nascent social media platforms that are particularly promising right now, Yildirim says that “social media platforms which are directed at achieving some objectives with smaller scale and more homogenous people stand a higher chance of entering the market and being able to compete with large, general-purpose platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.”

Irreplaceable – and Damaging?

Of course, many have begun to believe that the biggest challenge around the impact of social media may be the way it is changing society. The “attention-grabbing algorithms underlying social media … propel authoritarian practices that aim to sow confusion, ignorance, prejudice, and chaos, thereby facilitating manipulation and undermining accountability,” writes University of Toronto political science professor Ronald Deibert in a January essay in the Journal of Democracy .

Berger notes that any piece of information can now get attention, whether it is true or false. This means more potential for movements both welcome as well as malevolent. “Before, only media companies had reach, so it was harder for false information to spread. It could happen, but it was slow. Now anyone can share anything, and because people tend to believe what they see, false information can spread just as, if not more easily, than the truth.

“It’s certainly allowed more things to bubble up rather than flow from the top down,” says Berger. Absent gatekeepers, “everyone is their own media company, broadcasting to the particular set of people that follow them. It used to be that a major label signing you was the path to stardom. Now artists can build their own following online and break through that way. Social media has certainly made fame and attention more democratic, though not always in a good way.”

Deibert writes that “in a short period of time, digital technologies have become pervasive and deeply embedded in all that we do. Unwinding them completely is neither possible nor desirable.”

His cri de coeur argues: that citizens have the right to know what companies and governments are doing with their personal data, and that this right be extended internationally to hold autocratic regimes to account; that companies be barred from selling products and services that enable infringements on human rights and harms to civil society; for the creation of independent agencies with real power to hold social-media platforms to account; and the creation and enforcement of strong antitrust laws to end dominance of a very few social-media companies.

“Social media has certainly made fame and attention more democratic, though not always in a good way.” –Jonah Berger

The rising tide of concern is now extending across sectors. The U.S. Justice Department has recently begun an anti-trust investigation into how tech companies operate in social media, search, and retail services. In July, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the award of nearly $50 million in new funding to 11 U.S. universities to research how technology is transforming democracy. The foundation is also soliciting additional grant proposals to fund policy and legal research into the “rules, norms, and governance” that should be applied to social media and technology companies.

Given all of the reasons not to engage with social media — the privacy issues, the slippery-slope addiction aspect of it, its role in spreading incivility — do we want to try to put the genie back in the bottle? Can we? Does social media definitely have a future?

“Yes, surely it does,” says Yildirim. “Social connections are fabrics of society. Just as the telegraph or telephone as an innovation of communication did not reduce social connectivity, online social networks did not either. If anything, it likely increased connectivity, or reduced the cost of communicating with others.”

It is thanks to online social networks that individuals likely have larger social networks, she says, and while many criticize the fact that we are in touch with large numbers of individuals in a superficial way, these light connections may nevertheless be contributing to our lives when it comes to economic and social outcomes — ranging from finding jobs to meeting new people.

“We are used to being in contact with more individuals, and it is easier to remain in contact with people we only met once. Giving up on this does not seem likely for humans,” she says. “The technology with which we keep in touch may change, may evolve, but we will have social connections and platforms which enable them. Facebook may be gone in 10 years, but there will be something else.”

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Feb 15, 2023

6 Example Essays on Social Media | Advantages, Effects, and Outlines

Got an essay assignment about the effects of social media we got you covered check out our examples and outlines below.

Social media has become one of our society's most prominent ways of communication and information sharing in a very short time. It has changed how we communicate and has given us a platform to express our views and opinions and connect with others. It keeps us informed about the world around us. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn have brought individuals from all over the world together, breaking down geographical borders and fostering a genuinely global community.

However, social media comes with its difficulties. With the rise of misinformation, cyberbullying, and privacy problems, it's critical to utilize these platforms properly and be aware of the risks. Students in the academic world are frequently assigned essays about the impact of social media on numerous elements of our lives, such as relationships, politics, and culture. These essays necessitate a thorough comprehension of the subject matter, critical thinking, and the ability to synthesize and convey information clearly and succinctly.

But where do you begin? It can be challenging to know where to start with so much information available. Jenni.ai comes in handy here. Jenni.ai is an AI application built exclusively for students to help them write essays more quickly and easily. Jenni.ai provides students with inspiration and assistance on how to approach their essays with its enormous database of sample essays on a variety of themes, including social media. Jenni.ai is the solution you've been looking for if you're experiencing writer's block or need assistance getting started.

So, whether you're a student looking to better your essay writing skills or want to remain up to date on the latest social media advancements, Jenni.ai is here to help. Jenni.ai is the ideal tool for helping you write your finest essay ever, thanks to its simple design, an extensive database of example essays, and cutting-edge AI technology. So, why delay? Sign up for a free trial of Jenni.ai today and begin exploring the worlds of social networking and essay writing!

Want to learn how to write an argumentative essay? Check out these inspiring examples!

We will provide various examples of social media essays so you may get a feel for the genre.

6 Examples of Social Media Essays

Here are 6 examples of Social Media Essays:

The Impact of Social Media on Relationships and Communication

Introduction:.

The way we share information and build relationships has evolved as a direct result of the prevalence of social media in our daily lives. The influence of social media on interpersonal connections and conversation is a hot topic. Although social media has many positive effects, such as bringing people together regardless of physical proximity and making communication quicker and more accessible, it also has a dark side that can affect interpersonal connections and dialogue.

Positive Effects:

Connecting People Across Distances

One of social media's most significant benefits is its ability to connect individuals across long distances. People can use social media platforms to interact and stay in touch with friends and family far away. People can now maintain intimate relationships with those they care about, even when physically separated.

Improved Communication Speed and Efficiency

Additionally, the proliferation of social media sites has accelerated and simplified communication. Thanks to instant messaging, users can have short, timely conversations rather than lengthy ones via email. Furthermore, social media facilitates group communication, such as with classmates or employees, by providing a unified forum for such activities.

Negative Effects:

Decreased Face-to-Face Communication

The decline in in-person interaction is one of social media's most pernicious consequences on interpersonal connections and dialogue. People's reliance on digital communication over in-person contact has increased along with the popularity of social media. Face-to-face interaction has suffered as a result, which has adverse effects on interpersonal relationships and the development of social skills.

Decreased Emotional Intimacy

Another adverse effect of social media on relationships and communication is decreased emotional intimacy. Digital communication lacks the nonverbal cues and facial expressions critical in building emotional connections with others. This can make it more difficult for people to develop close and meaningful relationships, leading to increased loneliness and isolation.

Increased Conflict and Miscommunication

Finally, social media can also lead to increased conflict and miscommunication. The anonymity and distance provided by digital communication can lead to misunderstandings and hurtful comments that might not have been made face-to-face. Additionally, social media can provide a platform for cyberbullying , which can have severe consequences for the victim's mental health and well-being.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, the impact of social media on relationships and communication is a complex issue with both positive and negative effects. While social media platforms offer many benefits, such as connecting people across distances and enabling faster and more accessible communication, they also have a dark side that can negatively affect relationships and communication. It is up to individuals to use social media responsibly and to prioritize in-person communication in their relationships and interactions with others.

The Role of Social Media in the Spread of Misinformation and Fake News

Social media has revolutionized the way information is shared and disseminated. However, the ease and speed at which data can be spread on social media also make it a powerful tool for spreading misinformation and fake news. Misinformation and fake news can seriously affect public opinion, influence political decisions, and even cause harm to individuals and communities.

The Pervasiveness of Misinformation and Fake News on Social Media

Misinformation and fake news are prevalent on social media platforms, where they can spread quickly and reach a large audience. This is partly due to the way social media algorithms work, which prioritizes content likely to generate engagement, such as sensational or controversial stories. As a result, false information can spread rapidly and be widely shared before it is fact-checked or debunked.

The Influence of Social Media on Public Opinion

Social media can significantly impact public opinion, as people are likelier to believe the information they see shared by their friends and followers. This can lead to a self-reinforcing cycle, where misinformation and fake news are spread and reinforced, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

The Challenge of Correcting Misinformation and Fake News

Correcting misinformation and fake news on social media can be a challenging task. This is partly due to the speed at which false information can spread and the difficulty of reaching the same audience exposed to the wrong information in the first place. Additionally, some individuals may be resistant to accepting correction, primarily if the incorrect information supports their beliefs or biases.

In conclusion, the function of social media in disseminating misinformation and fake news is complex and urgent. While social media has revolutionized the sharing of information, it has also made it simpler for false information to propagate and be widely believed. Individuals must be accountable for the information they share and consume, and social media firms must take measures to prevent the spread of disinformation and fake news on their platforms.

The Effects of Social Media on Mental Health and Well-Being

Social media has become an integral part of modern life, with billions of people around the world using platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to stay connected with others and access information. However, while social media has many benefits, it can also negatively affect mental health and well-being.

Comparison and Low Self-Esteem

One of the key ways that social media can affect mental health is by promoting feelings of comparison and low self-esteem. People often present a curated version of their lives on social media, highlighting their successes and hiding their struggles. This can lead others to compare themselves unfavorably, leading to feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem.

Cyberbullying and Online Harassment

Another way that social media can negatively impact mental health is through cyberbullying and online harassment. Social media provides a platform for anonymous individuals to harass and abuse others, leading to feelings of anxiety, fear, and depression.

Social Isolation

Despite its name, social media can also contribute to feelings of isolation. At the same time, people may have many online friends but need more meaningful in-person connections and support. This can lead to feelings of loneliness and depression.

Addiction and Overuse

Finally, social media can be addictive, leading to overuse and negatively impacting mental health and well-being. People may spend hours each day scrolling through their feeds, neglecting other important areas of their lives, such as work, family, and self-care.

In sum, social media has positive and negative consequences on one's psychological and emotional well-being. Realizing this, and taking measures like reducing one's social media use, reaching out to loved ones for help, and prioritizing one's well-being, are crucial. In addition, it's vital that social media giants take ownership of their platforms and actively encourage excellent mental health and well-being.

The Use of Social Media in Political Activism and Social Movements

Social media has recently become increasingly crucial in political action and social movements. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have given people new ways to express themselves, organize protests, and raise awareness about social and political issues.

Raising Awareness and Mobilizing Action

One of the most important uses of social media in political activity and social movements has been to raise awareness about important issues and mobilize action. Hashtags such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, for example, have brought attention to sexual harassment and racial injustice, respectively. Similarly, social media has been used to organize protests and other political actions, allowing people to band together and express themselves on a bigger scale.

Connecting with like-minded individuals

A second method in that social media has been utilized in political activity and social movements is to unite like-minded individuals. Through social media, individuals can join online groups, share knowledge and resources, and work with others to accomplish shared objectives. This has been especially significant for geographically scattered individuals or those without access to traditional means of political organizing.

Challenges and Limitations

As a vehicle for political action and social movements, social media has faced many obstacles and restrictions despite its many advantages. For instance, the propagation of misinformation and fake news on social media can impede attempts to disseminate accurate and reliable information. In addition, social media corporations have been condemned for censorship and insufficient protection of user rights.

In conclusion, social media has emerged as a potent instrument for political activism and social movements, giving voice to previously unheard communities and galvanizing support for change. Social media presents many opportunities for communication and collaboration. Still, users and institutions must be conscious of the risks and limitations of these tools to promote their responsible and productive usage.

The Potential Privacy Concerns Raised by Social Media Use and Data Collection Practices

With billions of users each day on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, social media has ingrained itself into every aspect of our lives. While these platforms offer a straightforward method to communicate with others and exchange information, they also raise significant concerns over data collecting and privacy. This article will examine the possible privacy issues posed by social media use and data-gathering techniques.

Data Collection and Sharing

The gathering and sharing of personal data are significant privacy issues brought up by social media use. Social networking sites gather user data, including details about their relationships, hobbies, and routines. This information is made available to third-party businesses for various uses, such as marketing and advertising. This can lead to serious concerns about who has access to and uses our personal information.

Lack of Control Over Personal Information

The absence of user control over personal information is a significant privacy issue brought up by social media usage. Social media makes it challenging to limit who has access to and how data is utilized once it has been posted. Sensitive information may end up being extensively disseminated and may be used maliciously as a result.

Personalized Marketing

Social media companies utilize the information they gather about users to target them with adverts relevant to their interests and usage patterns. Although this could be useful, it might also cause consumers to worry about their privacy since they might feel that their personal information is being used without their permission. Furthermore, there are issues with the integrity of the data being used to target users and the possibility of prejudice based on individual traits.

Government Surveillance

Using social media might spark worries about government surveillance. There are significant concerns regarding privacy and free expression when governments in some nations utilize social media platforms to follow and monitor residents.

In conclusion, social media use raises significant concerns regarding data collecting and privacy. While these platforms make it easy to interact with people and exchange information, they also gather a lot of personal information, which raises questions about who may access it and how it will be used. Users should be aware of these privacy issues and take precautions to safeguard their personal information, such as exercising caution when choosing what details to disclose on social media and keeping their information sharing with other firms to a minimum.

The Ethical and Privacy Concerns Surrounding Social Media Use And Data Collection

Our use of social media to communicate with loved ones, acquire information, and even conduct business has become a crucial part of our everyday lives. The extensive use of social media does, however, raise some ethical and privacy issues that must be resolved. The influence of social media use and data collecting on user rights, the accountability of social media businesses, and the need for improved regulation are all topics that will be covered in this article.

Effect on Individual Privacy:

Social networking sites gather tons of personal data from their users, including delicate information like search history, location data, and even health data. Each user's detailed profile may be created with this data and sold to advertising or used for other reasons. Concerns regarding the privacy of personal information might arise because social media businesses can use this data to target users with customized adverts.

Additionally, individuals might need to know how much their personal information is being gathered and exploited. Data breaches or the unauthorized sharing of personal information with other parties may result in instances where sensitive information is exposed. Users should be aware of the privacy rules of social media firms and take precautions to secure their data.

Responsibility of Social Media Companies:

Social media firms should ensure that they responsibly and ethically gather and use user information. This entails establishing strong security measures to safeguard sensitive information and ensuring users are informed of what information is being collected and how it is used.

Many social media businesses, nevertheless, have come under fire for not upholding these obligations. For instance, the Cambridge Analytica incident highlighted how Facebook users' personal information was exploited for political objectives without their knowledge. This demonstrates the necessity of social media corporations being held responsible for their deeds and ensuring that they are safeguarding the security and privacy of their users.

Better Regulation Is Needed

There is a need for tighter regulation in this field, given the effect, social media has on individual privacy as well as the obligations of social media firms. The creation of laws and regulations that ensure social media companies are gathering and using user information ethically and responsibly, as well as making sure users are aware of their rights and have the ability to control the information that is being collected about them, are all part of this.

Additionally, legislation should ensure that social media businesses are held responsible for their behavior, for example, by levying fines for data breaches or the unauthorized use of personal data. This will provide social media businesses with a significant incentive to prioritize their users' privacy and security and ensure they are upholding their obligations.

In conclusion, social media has fundamentally changed how we engage and communicate with one another, but this increased convenience also raises several ethical and privacy issues. Essential concerns that need to be addressed include the effect of social media on individual privacy, the accountability of social media businesses, and the requirement for greater regulation to safeguard user rights. We can make everyone's online experience safer and more secure by looking more closely at these issues.

In conclusion, social media is a complex and multifaceted topic that has recently captured the world's attention. With its ever-growing influence on our lives, it's no surprise that it has become a popular subject for students to explore in their writing. Whether you are writing an argumentative essay on the impact of social media on privacy, a persuasive essay on the role of social media in politics, or a descriptive essay on the changes social media has brought to the way we communicate, there are countless angles to approach this subject.

However, writing a comprehensive and well-researched essay on social media can be daunting. It requires a thorough understanding of the topic and the ability to articulate your ideas clearly and concisely. This is where Jenni.ai comes in. Our AI-powered tool is designed to help students like you save time and energy and focus on what truly matters - your education. With Jenni.ai , you'll have access to a wealth of examples and receive personalized writing suggestions and feedback.

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Social Media's Impact on Society

This article was updated on: 11/19/2021

Social media is an undeniable force in modern society. With over half the global population using social platforms, and the average person spending at least two hours scrolling through them every day , it can’t be overstated that our digital spaces have altered our lives as we knew them. From giving us new ways to come together and stay connected with the world around us, to providing outlets for self-expression, social media has fundamentally changed the way we initiate, build and maintain our relationships.

But while these digital communities have become commonplace in our daily lives, researchers are only beginning to understand the consequences of social media use on future generations. Social media models are changing every day, with major platforms like Meta and Instagram evolving into primary digital advertising spaces as much as social ones. A critical responsibility falls on marketers to spread messages that inform, rather than contribute to the sea of misinformation that thrives on social media.

Read on to see what’s on marketers’ minds when it comes to the impact of social media on society:

MENTAL HEALTH

You’ve likely heard about the negative impacts that social media can have on mental health. Experts are weighing in on the role that the algorithms and design of social platforms play in exasperating these concerns.

At SXSW 2019 , Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Human Technology, talked about the “digital loneliness epidemic,” which focused on the rise of depression and loneliness as it relates to social media use. During the panel, Raskin spoke about the “infinite scroll,” the design principle that enables users to continuously scroll through their feeds, without ever having to decide whether to keep going—it’s hard to imagine what the bottom of a TikTok feed would look like, and that’s intentional. But with the knowledge that mental health concerns are undeniably linked to social media use, the dilemma we’re now facing is when does good design become inhumane design?

Arguably, Rankin’s term for social media use could now be renamed the “digital loneliness pandemic ” as the world faces unprecedented isolation during the COVID-19 outbreak. In 2020 the Ad Council released a study exploring factors that cause loneliness, and what can be done to alleviate it. Interestingly, our research found that while social isolation is one factor that can cause loneliness, 73% of respondents typically maintain interpersonal relationships via technology, including engaging with others on social media. Simply put, social media use can both contribute to and help mitigate feelings of isolation. So how do we address this Catch-22? We should ask ourselves how we can use social media as a platform to foster positive digital communities as young adults rely on it more and more to cope with isolation.

Findings like these have been useful as we reexamine the focuses of Ad Council campaigns. In May 2020, our iconic Seize the Awkward campaign launched new creative highlighting ways young people could use digital communications tools to stay connected and check in on one another’s mental health while practicing physical distancing. A year later, we launched another mental health initiative, Sound It Out , which harnesses the power of music to speak to 10-14-year-olds’ emotional wellbeing. Ad Council has seen the importance of spreading awareness around mental health concerns as they relate to social media consumption in young adults—who will become the next generation of marketers.

EXTREMISM & HATE

Another trend on experts’ minds is how the algorithms behind these massively influential social media platforms may contribute to the rise of extremism and online radicalization.

Major social networking sites have faced criticism over how their advanced algorithms can lead users to increasingly fringe content. These platforms are central to discussions around online extremism, as social forums have become spaces for extreme communities to form and build influence digitally. However, these platforms are responding to concerns and troubleshooting functionalities that have the potential to result in dangerous outcomes. Meta, for example, announced test prompts to provide anti-extremism resources and support for users it believes have been exposed to extremist content on their feeds.

But as extremist groups continue to turn to fringe chatrooms and the “dark web” that begin on social media, combing through the underbelly of the internet and stopping the spread of hateful narratives is a daunting task. Promoting public service messages around Racial Justice and Diversity & Inclusion are just some of the ways that Ad Council and other marketers are using these platforms to move the needle away from hateful messaging and use these platforms to change mindsets in a positive way.

PUBLIC HEALTH CRISES

Social media can be both a space to enlighten and spread messages of doubt. The information age we’re all living in has enabled marketers to intervene as educators and providers of informative messaging to all facets of the American public. And no time has this been more urgent than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Public health efforts around mask mandates and vaccine rollouts have now become increasingly polarized issues. Social media platforms have turned into breeding grounds for spreading disinformation around vaccinations, and as a result, has contributed to vaccine hesitancy among the American public. Meta, Instagram, and other platforms have begun to flag certain messages as false, but the work of regulating misinformation, especially during a pandemic, will be an enduring problem. To combat this, Ad Council and the COVID Collaborative have put a particular emphasis on our historic COVID-19 Vaccine Education initiative, which has connected trusted messengers with the “uncommitted” American public who feel the most uncertainty around getting the vaccine.

Living during a global pandemic has only solidified a societal need for social media as a way to stay connected to the world at large. During the pandemic, these platforms have been used to promote hopeful and educational messages, like #AloneTogether , and ensures that social media marketing can act as a public service.

DIGITAL ACTIVISM

Beyond serving as an educational resource, social media has been the space for digital activism across a myriad of social justice issues. Movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have gone viral thanks to the power of social media. What starts as a simple hashtag has resulted in real change, from passing sexual harassment legislation in response to #MeToo, to pushing for criminal justice reform because of BLM activists. In these cases, social media empowered likeminded people to organize around a specific cause in a way not possible before.

It’s impossible to separate the role of social media from the scalable impact that these movements have had on society. #MeToo and BLM are just two examples of movements that have sparked national attention due in large part to conversations that began on social media.

SO, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR MARKETERS?

Social media is a great equalizer that allows for large-scale discourse and an endless, unfiltered stream of content. Looking beyond the repercussions for a generation born on social media, these platforms remain an essential way for marketers to reach their audiences.

Whether you argue there are more benefits or disadvantages to a world run on social media, we can all agree that social media has fundamentally shifted how society communicates. With every scroll, view, like, comment and share, we’re taught something new about the impact of social media on the way we think and see the world.

But until we find a way to hold platforms more accountable for the global consequences of social media use, it’s up to marketers to use these digital resources as engines of progressive messaging. We can’t control the adverse effects of the Internet, but as marketers, we can do our part in ensuring that the right messages are being spread and that social media remains a force for social good.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Sociology of Media and Communication — Social Media

Argumentative Essays About Social Media

This is a comprehensive resource to help you find the perfect social media essay topic. Whether you're navigating the complexities of digital communication, exploring the impact of social media on society, or examining its effects on personal identity, the right topic can transform your essay into a captivating and insightful exploration. Remember, selecting a topic that resonates with your personal interests and academic goals not only makes the writing process more enjoyable but also enriches your learning experience. Let's dive into a world of creativity and critical thinking!

Essay Types and Topics

Below, you'll find a curated list of essay topics organized by type. Each section includes diverse topics that touch on technology, society, personal growth, and academic interests, along with introduction and conclusion paragraph examples to get you started.

Argumentative Essays

Introduction Example: "In the digital age, social media platforms have become central to our daily interactions and self-perception, particularly among teenagers. This essay explores the impact of social media on teen self-esteem, arguing that while it offers a space for expression and connection, it also presents significant challenges to self-image. "

Conclusion Example: "Having delved into the complex relationship between social media and teen self-esteem, it is clear that the digital landscape holds profound effects on individual self-perception. This essay reaffirms the thesis that social media can both uplift and undermine teen self-esteem, calling for a balanced approach to digital engagement."

Introduction Example: "As political landscapes evolve, social media has emerged as a powerful tool for political mobilization and engagement. This essay investigates the role of social media in shaping political movements, positing that it significantly enhances communication and organizational capabilities, yet raises questions about information authenticity. "

Conclusion Example: "Through examining the dual facets of social media in political mobilization, the essay concludes that while social media is a pivotal tool for engagement, it necessitates critical scrutiny of information to ensure a well-informed public discourse."

Compare and Contrast Essays

Introduction Example: "In the competitive realm of digital marketing, Instagram and Twitter stand out as leading platforms for brand promotion. This essay compares and contrasts their effectiveness, revealing that each platform caters to unique marketing strengths due to its specific user engagement and content dissemination strategies. "

Conclusion Example: "The comparative analysis of Instagram and Twitter highlights distinct advantages for brands, with Instagram excelling in visual storytelling and Twitter in real-time engagement, underscoring the importance of strategic platform selection in digital marketing."

Descriptive Essays

Introduction Example: "Today's social media landscape is a vibrant tapestry of platforms, each contributing to the digital era's social fabric. This essay describes the characteristics and cultural significance of current social media trends, illustrating that they reflect and shape our societal values and interactions. "

Conclusion Example: "In portraying the dynamic and diverse nature of today's social media landscape, this essay underscores its role in molding contemporary cultural and social paradigms, inviting readers to reflect on their digital footprints."

Persuasive Essays

Introduction Example: "In an era where digital presence is ubiquitous, fostering positive social media habits is essential for mental and emotional well-being. This essay advocates for mindful social media use, arguing that intentional engagement can enhance our life experiences rather than detract from them. "

Conclusion Example: "This essay has championed the cause for positive social media habits, reinforcing the thesis that through mindful engagement, individuals can navigate the digital world in a way that promotes personal growth and well-being."

Narrative Essays

Introduction Example: "Embarking on a personal journey with social media has been both enlightening and challenging. This narrative essay delves into my experiences, highlighting how social media has influenced my perception of self and community. "

Conclusion Example: "Reflecting on my social media journey, this essay concludes that while it has significantly shaped my interactions and self-view, it has also offered invaluable lessons on connectivity and self-awareness, affirming the nuanced role of digital platforms in our lives."

Engagement and Creativity

As you explore these topics, remember to approach your essay with an open mind and creative spirit. The purpose of academic writing is not just to inform but to engage and provoke thought. Use this opportunity to delve deep into your topic, analyze different perspectives, and articulate your own insights.

Educational Value

Each essay type offers unique learning outcomes. Argumentative essays enhance your analytical thinking and ability to construct well-founded arguments. Compare and contrast essays develop your skills in identifying similarities and differences. Descriptive essays improve your ability to paint vivid pictures through words, while persuasive essays refine your ability to influence and convince. Finally, narrative essays offer a platform for personal expression and storytelling. Embrace these opportunities to grow academically and personally.

Some Easy Argumentative Essay Topics on Social Media

• The Impact of Social Media: Advantages and Disadvantages
• Is Social Media Enhancing or Eroding Our Real-Life Social Skills?
• Should There Be Stricter Regulations on Social Media Content to Protect Youth?
• Social Media's Role in Relationships: Communication Enhancer or Barrier
• Does Social Media Contribute to Political Polarization?
• The Role of Social Media in Shaping Perceptions of Divorce
• The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health: Benefit or Harm?
• Can Social Media Be Considered a Reliable Source of News and Information?
• Is Social Media Responsible for the Rise in Cyberbullying?
• Impact of Social Media on Mental Health
• Does Social Media Promote Narcissism and Self-Centered Behaviors?
• The Role of Social Media in Business Marketing: Is It Indispensable?

The Impact of Social Media: Causes and Effects

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Pros and Cons of Social Media: Social Networking

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Social Media Cons and Prons: Evaluating Its Advantages and Disadvantage

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Social media refers to dynamic online platforms that enable individuals to actively engage in the generation and dissemination of various forms of content, including information, ideas, and personal interests. These interactive digital channels foster virtual communities and networks, allowing users to connect, communicate, and express themselves. By harnessing the power of technology, social media platforms provide a space for individuals to share and exchange content, fostering connections and facilitating the flow of information in an increasingly digital world.

In a peculiar manner, the inception of social media can be traced back to May 24, 1844, when a sequence of electronic dots and dashes was manually tapped on a telegraph machine. Although the origins of digital communication have deep historical roots, most contemporary narratives regarding the modern beginnings of the internet and social media often point to the emergence of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) in 1969. The year 1987 witnessed the establishment of the direct precursor to today's internet, as the National Science Foundation introduced the more robust and expansive NSFNET, a nationwide digital network. A significant milestone occurred in 1997 when Six Degrees, the first genuine social media platform, was launched.

Mark Zuckerberg is a notable figure in the realm of social media as the co-founder and CEO of Facebook. Zuckerberg played a pivotal role in transforming Facebook from a small networking platform for college students into a global social media giant with billions of users. His innovative ideas and strategic decisions have reshaped the way people connect and share information online, making him one of the most influential individuals in the digital age. Jack Dorsey is recognized as one of the key pioneers of social media, notably for co-founding Twitter. Dorsey's creation revolutionized online communication by introducing the concept of microblogging, allowing users to share short messages in real-time. Twitter quickly gained popularity, becoming a powerful platform for news dissemination, public conversations, and social movements. Dorsey's entrepreneurial spirit and vision have contributed significantly to the evolution of social media and its impact on society. Sheryl Sandberg is a prominent figure in the social media landscape, known for her influential role as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Facebook.Sandberg played a crucial part in scaling and monetizing Facebook's operations, transforming it into a global advertising powerhouse. She is also recognized for her advocacy of women's empowerment and leadership in the tech industry, inspiring countless individuals and promoting diversity and inclusion within the social media sphere. Sandberg's contributions have left an indelible mark on the growth and development of social media platforms worldwide.

Social Networking Sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Microblogging Platforms: Twitter. Media Sharing Networks: Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat. Discussion Forums and Community-Based Platforms: Reddit and Quora. Blogging Platforms: WordPress and Blogger. Social Bookmarking and Content Curation Platforms: Pinterest and Flipboard. Messaging Apps: WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat.

Facebook (2004), Reddit (2005), Twitter (2006), Instagram (2010), Pinterest (2010), Snapchat (2011), TikTok (2016)

1. Increased Connectivity 2. Information Sharing and Awareness 3. Networking and Professional Opportunities 4. Creativity and Self-Expression 5. Supportive Communities and Causes

1. Privacy Concerns 2. Cyberbullying and Online Harassment 3. Information Overload and Misinformation 4. Time and Productivity Drain 5. Comparison and Self-Esteem Issues

The topic of social media holds significant importance for students as it plays a prominent role in their lives, both academically and socially. Social media platforms provide students with opportunities to connect, collaborate, and share knowledge with peers, expanding their learning networks beyond the confines of the classroom. It facilitates communication and access to educational resources, allowing students to stay updated on academic trends and research. Additionally, social media enhances digital literacy and prepares students for the realities of the digital age. However, it is crucial for students to develop critical thinking skills to navigate the potential pitfalls of social media, such as misinformation and online safety, ensuring a responsible and balanced use of these platforms.

The topic of social media is worthy of being explored in an essay due to its profound impact on various aspects of society. Writing an essay on social media allows for an in-depth examination of its influence on communication, relationships, information sharing, and societal dynamics. It offers an opportunity to analyze the advantages and disadvantages, exploring topics such as privacy, online identities, social activism, and the role of social media in shaping cultural norms. Additionally, studying social media enables a critical evaluation of its effects on mental health, politics, and business. By delving into this subject, one can gain a comprehensive understanding of the complex and ever-evolving digital landscape we inhabit.

1. Social media users spend an average of 2 hours and 25 minutes per day on social networking platforms. This amounts to over 7 years of an individual's lifetime spent on social media, highlighting its significant presence in our daily lives. 2. Instagram has over 1 billion monthly active users, with more than 500 million of them using the platform on a daily basis. 3. YouTube has over 2 billion logged-in monthly active users. On average, users spend over 1 billion hours watching YouTube videos every day, emphasizing the platform's extensive reach and the power of video content. 4. Social media has become a major news source, with 48% of people getting their news from social media platforms. This shift in news consumption highlights the role of social media in shaping public opinion and disseminating information in real-time. 5. Influencer marketing has grown exponentially, with 63% of marketers planning to increase their influencer marketing budget in the coming year. This showcases the effectiveness of influencers in reaching and engaging with target audiences, and the value brands place on leveraging social media personalities to promote their products or services.

1. Schober, M. F., Pasek, J., Guggenheim, L., Lampe, C., & Conrad, F. G. (2016). Social media analyses for social measurement. Public opinion quarterly, 80(1), 180-211. (https://academic.oup.com/poq/article-abstract/80/1/180/2593846) 2. Appel, G., Grewal, L., Hadi, R., & Stephen, A. T. (2020). The future of social media in marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing science, 48(1), 79-95. (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-019-00695-1?error=cookies_not_support) 3. Aichner, T., Grünfelder, M., Maurer, O., & Jegeni, D. (2021). Twenty-five years of social media: a review of social media applications and definitions from 1994 to 2019. Cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking, 24(4), 215-222. (https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/cyber.2020.0134) 4. Ruths, D., & Pfeffer, J. (2014). Social media for large studies of behavior. Science, 346(6213), 1063-1064. (https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.346.6213.1063) 5. Hou, Y., Xiong, D., Jiang, T., Song, L., & Wang, Q. (2019). Social media addiction: Its impact, mediation, and intervention. Cyberpsychology: Journal of psychosocial research on cyberspace, 13(1). (https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/11562) 6. Auxier, B., & Anderson, M. (2021). Social media use in 2021. Pew Research Center, 1, 1-4. (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2021/04/PI_2021.04.07_Social-Media-Use_FINAL.pdf) 7. Al-Samarraie, H., Bello, K. A., Alzahrani, A. I., Smith, A. P., & Emele, C. (2021). Young users' social media addiction: causes, consequences and preventions. Information Technology & People, 35(7), 2314-2343. (https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/ITP-11-2020-0753/full/html) 8. Bhargava, V. R., & Velasquez, M. (2021). Ethics of the attention economy: The problem of social media addiction. Business Ethics Quarterly, 31(3), 321-359. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-ethics-quarterly/article/ethics-of-the-attention-economy-the-problem-of-social-mediaaddiction/1CC67609A12E9A912BB8A291FDFFE799)

Relevant topics

• Media Analysis
• Effects of Social Media
• Sex, Gender and Sexuality
• Discourse Community
• Social Justice
• American Identity
• Sociological Imagination
• Cultural Appropriation

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Impact of Social Media on Relationships

This essay about the impact of social media on relationships examines both the positive and negative effects of online platforms. It discusses how social media has transformed communication, making it quicker but shallower, which can weaken deeper emotional connections. The essay also explores how social media can stir jealousy and insecurity through constant visibility into one’s social interactions and the tendency for individuals to compare their relationships to idealized versions seen online. Despite these challenges, the essay acknowledges the benefits of social media, such as keeping connected with distant loved ones and sharing significant life milestones, which can strengthen bonds. It concludes by emphasizing the importance of mindful social media use, setting boundaries, and maintaining open communication to mitigate potential negative effects while harnessing its positive aspects to enhance relationships.

How it works

In this era of hashtags and handles, social media has become an inextricable part of our lives. It connects us to long-lost friends, keeps us updated on the lives of loved ones far away, and even helps forge new relationships. But as much as it draws us together, social media can also drive wedges between us. The question of whether social media is bad for relationships isn’t straightforward. It comes down to how we engage with these digital tools and how we let them influence our interactions and perceptions.

Let’s start with communication, the bread and butter of any relationship. Social media revolutionized how we communicate, making it easier and faster, with a simple like or emoji often sufficing where words once roamed. Yet, this ease comes at a cost. The brief, often superficial nature of social interactions online can erode the foundation of deeper understanding and connection that more substantial conversations build. When a couple relies too heavily on social media to communicate, they might find themselves drifting into a pattern of shallow exchanges that lack the intimacy and immediacy of face-to-face conversations.

Then there’s the green-eyed monster of jealousy, which social media seems particularly adept at feeding. Platforms like Instagram and Facebook provide a window into people’s lives that we wouldn’t normally have. It can be unsettling to see your significant other constantly interacting with others online, liking photos, and leaving comments. Without the full context of these interactions, misunderstandings can easily spiral, feeding doubts and insecurities that might not exist otherwise. This constant surveillance and the doubts it spawns can put a strain on the healthiest of relationships.

Social comparison is another pitfall. It’s hard not to compare our behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s highlight reels. Online, people often present the best versions of their lives and relationships, edited and filtered to perfection. This can set an unrealistic benchmark for what a relationship should look like. Constant exposure to such idealized images can lead individuals to view their own relationships as less exciting or fulfilling. This discrepancy between the perceived and the real can lead to dissatisfaction and a constant feeling of lacking.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom. Social media does have its silver linings when it comes to relationships. For one, it keeps us connected. For those in long-distance relationships, platforms like Skype and WhatsApp are invaluable, making the miles seem a little less daunting. They allow us to share moments instantly and feel closer to those who are physically far away. Social media can also play a celebratory role, providing a space to announce engagements, anniversaries, and other milestones. This public declaration not only reinforces the bond but also builds a shared space for friends and family to join in the celebration.

What’s crucial is finding a healthy balance. To prevent social media from souring our relationships, we need to set boundaries. This might mean designating phone-free times or agreeing not to let online interactions interfere with or overshadow real-life moments. Couples should communicate openly about their social media use and the feelings it may evoke, discussing what is or isn’t acceptable within the context of their relationship. Recognizing that the content people share online is curated can also help mitigate feelings of inadequacy or jealousy.

Ultimately, whether social media is bad for relationships depends on how we use it. Like any tool, its impact is dictated by the hands that wield it. Used thoughtfully, social media can enhance and sustain connections. Used carelessly, it can create rifts and feed insecurities. Navigating this digital terrain requires awareness, intention, and the occasional digital detox. By fostering open communication and setting clear boundaries, we can enjoy the benefits of social media without letting it undermine our most important personal connections.

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David Wallace-Wells

Are smartphones driving our teens to depression.

By David Wallace-Wells

Opinion Writer

Here is a story. In 2007, Apple released the iPhone, initiating the smartphone revolution that would quickly transform the world. In 2010, it added a front-facing camera, helping shift the social-media landscape toward images, especially selfies. Partly as a result, in the five years that followed, the nature of childhood and especially adolescence was fundamentally changed — a “great rewiring,” in the words of the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt — such that between 2010 and 2015 mental health and well-being plummeted and suffering and despair exploded, particularly among teenage girls.

For young women, rates of hospitalization for nonfatal self-harm in the United States, which had bottomed out in 2009, started to rise again, according to data reported to the C.D.C., taking a leap beginning in 2012 and another beginning in 2016, and producing , over about a decade, an alarming 48 percent increase in such emergency room visits among American girls ages 15 to 19 and a shocking 188 percent increase among girls ages 10 to14.

Here is another story. In 2011, as part of the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a new set of guidelines that recommended that teenage girls should be screened annually for depression by their primary care physicians and that same year required that insurance providers cover such screenings in full. In 2015, H.H.S. finally mandated a coding change, proposed by the World Health Organization almost two decades before, that required hospitals to record whether an injury was self-inflicted or accidental — and which seemingly overnight nearly doubled rates for self-harm across all demographic groups. Soon thereafter, the coding of suicidal ideation was also updated. The effect of these bureaucratic changes on hospitalization data presumably varied from place to place. But in one place where it has been studied systematically, New Jersey, where 90 percent of children had health coverage even before the A.C.A., researchers have found that the changes explain nearly all of the state’s apparent upward trend in suicide-related hospital visits, turning what were “essentially flat” trendlines into something that looked like a youth mental health “crisis.”

Could both of these stories be partially true? Of course: Emotional distress among teenagers may be genuinely growing while simultaneous bureaucratic and cultural changes — more focus on mental health, destigmatization, growing comfort with therapy and medication — exaggerate the underlying trends. (This is what Adriana Corredor-Waldron, a co-author of the New Jersey study, believes — that suicidal behavior is distressingly high among teenagers in the United States and that many of our conventional measures are not very reliable to assess changes in suicidal behavior over time.) But over the past several years, Americans worrying over the well-being of teenagers have heard much less about that second story, which emphasizes changes in the broader culture of mental illness, screening guidelines and treatment, than the first one, which suggests smartphones and social-media use explain a whole raft of concerns about the well-being of the country’s youth.

When the smartphone thesis first came to prominence more than six years ago, advanced by Haidt’s sometime collaborator Jean Twenge, there was a fair amount of skepticism from scientists and social scientists and other commentators: Were teenagers really suffering that much? they asked. How much in this messy world could you pin on one piece of technology anyway? But some things have changed since then, including the conventional liberal perspective on the virtues of Big Tech, and, in the past few years, as more data has rolled in and more red flags have been raised about American teenagers — about the culture of college campuses, about the political hopelessness or neuroticism or radicalism or fatalism of teenagers, about a growing political gender divide, about how often they socialize or drink or have sex — a two-part conventional wisdom has taken hold across the pundit class. First, that American teenagers are experiencing a mental health crisis; second, that it is the fault of phones.

“Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health,” the Financial Times declared last spring. This spring, Haidt’s new book on the subject, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, debuted at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. In its review of the book, The Guardian described the smartphone as “a pocket full of poison,” and in an essay , The New Yorker accepted as a given that Gen Z was in the midst of a “mental health emergency” and that “social media is bad for young people.” “Parents could see their phone-obsessed children changing and succumbing to distress,” The Wall Street Journal reflected . “Now we know the true horror of what happened.”

But, well, do we? Over the past five years, “Is it the phones?” has become “It’s probably the phones,” particularly among an anxious older generation processing bleak-looking charts of teenage mental health on social media as they are scrolling on their own phones. But however much we may think we know about how corrosive screen time is to mental health, the data looks murkier and more ambiguous than the headlines suggest — or than our own private anxieties, as parents and smartphone addicts, seem to tell us.

What do we really know about the state of mental health among teenagers today? Suicide offers the most concrete measure of emotional distress, and rates among American teenagers ages 15 to 19 have indeed risen over the past decade or so, to about 11.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2021 from about 7.5 deaths per 100,000 in 2009. But the American suicide epidemic is not confined to teenagers. In 2022, the rate had increased roughly as much since 2000 for the country as a whole, suggesting a national story both broader and more complicated than one focused on the emotional vulnerabilities of teenagers to Instagram. And among the teenagers of other rich countries, there is essentially no sign of a similar pattern. As Max Roser of Our World in Data recently documented , suicide rates among older teenagers and young adults have held roughly steady or declined over the same time period in France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, Greece, Poland, Norway and Belgium. In Sweden there were only very small increases.

Is there a stronger distress signal in the data for young women? Yes, somewhat. According to an international analysis by The Economist, suicide rates among young women in 17 wealthy countries have grown since 2003, by about 17 percent, to a 2020 rate of 3.5 suicides per 100,000 people. The rate among young women has always been low, compared with other groups, and among the countries in the Economist data set, the rate among male teenagers, which has hardly grown at all, remains almost twice as high. Among men in their 50s, the rate is more than seven times as high.

In some countries, we see concerning signs of convergence by gender and age, with suicide rates among young women growing closer to other demographic groups. But the pattern, across countries, is quite varied. In Denmark, where smartphone penetration was the highest in the world in 2017, rates of hospitalization for self-harm among 10- to 19-year-olds fell by more than 40 percent between 2008 and 2016. In Germany, there are today barely one-quarter as many suicides among women between 15 and 20 as there were in the early 1980s, and the number has been remarkably flat for more than two decades. In the United States, suicide rates for young men are still three and a half times as high as for young women, the recent increases have been larger in absolute terms among young men than among young women, and suicide rates for all teenagers have been gradually declining since 2018. In 2022, the latest year for which C.D.C. data is available, suicide declined by 18 percent for Americans ages 10 to 14 and 9 percent for those ages 15 to 24.

None of this is to say that everything is fine — that the kids are perfectly all right, that there is no sign at all of worsening mental health among teenagers, or that there isn’t something significant and even potentially damaging about smartphone use and social media. Phones have changed us, and are still changing us, as anyone using one or observing the world through them knows well. But are they generating an obvious mental health crisis?

The picture that emerges from the suicide data is mixed and complicated to parse. Suicide is the hardest-to-dispute measure of despair, but not the most capacious. But while rates of depression and anxiety have grown strikingly for teenagers in certain parts of the world, including the U.S., it’s tricky to disentangle those increases from growing mental-health awareness and destigmatization, and attempts to measure the phenomenon in different ways can yield very different results.

According to data Haidt uses, from the U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health, conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the percent of teenage girls reporting major depressive episodes in the last year grew by about 50 percent between 2005 and 2017, for instance, during which time the share of teenage boys reporting the same grew by roughly 75 percent from a lower level. But in a biannual C.D.C. survey of teenage mental health, the share of teenagers reporting that they had been persistently sad for a period of at least two weeks in the past year grew from only 28.5 percent in 2005 to 31.5 percent in 2017. Two different surveys tracked exactly the same period, and one showed an enormous increase in depression while the other showed almost no change at all.

And if the rise of mood disorders were a straightforward effect of the smartphone, you’d expect to see it everywhere smartphones were, and, as with suicide, you don’t. In Britain, the share of young people who reported “feeling down” or experiencing depression grew from 31 percent in 2012 to 38 percent on the eve of the pandemic and to 41 percent in 2021. That is significant, though by other measures British teenagers appear, if more depressed than they were in the 2000s, not much more depressed than they were in the 1990s.

Overall, when you dig into the country-by-country data, many places seem to be registering increases in depression among teenagers, particularly among the countries of Western Europe and North America. But the trends are hard to disentangle from changes in diagnostic patterns and the medicalization of sadness, as Lucy Foulkes has argued , and the picture varies considerably from country to country. In Canada , for instance, surveys of teenagers’ well-being show a significant decline between 2015 and 2021, particularly among young women; in South Korea rates of depressive episodes among teenagers fell by 35 percent between 2006 and 2018.

Because much of our sense of teenage well-being comes from self-reported surveys, when you ask questions in different ways, the answers vary enormously. Haidt likes to cite data collected as part of an international standardized test program called PISA, which adds a few questions about loneliness at school to its sections covering progress in math, science and reading, and has found a pattern of increasing loneliness over the past decade. But according to the World Happiness Report , life satisfaction among those ages 15 to 24 around the world has been improving pretty steadily since 2013, with more significant gains among women, as the smartphone completed its global takeover, with a slight dip during the first two years of the pandemic. An international review published in 2020, examining more than 900,000 adolescents in 36 countries, showed no change in life satisfaction between 2002 and 2018.

“It doesn’t look like there’s one big uniform thing happening to people’s mental health,” said Andrew Przybylski, a professor at Oxford. “In some particular places, there are some measures moving in the wrong direction. But if I had to describe the global trend over the last decade, I would say there is no uniform trend showing a global crisis, and, where things are getting worse for teenagers, no evidence that it is the result of the spread of technology.”

If Haidt is the public face of worry about teenagers and phones, Przybylski is probably the most prominent skeptic of the thesis. Others include Amy Orben, at the University of Cambridge, who in January told The Guardian, “I think the concern about phones as a singular entity are overblown”; Chris Ferguson, at Stetson University, who is about to publish a new meta-analysis showing no relationship between smartphone use and well-being; and Candice Odgers, of the University of California, Irvine, who published a much-debated review of Haidt in Nature, in which she declared “the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science.”

Does that overstate the case? In a technical sense, I think, no: There may be some concerning changes in the underlying incidence of certain mood disorders among American teenagers over the past couple of decades, but they are hard to separate from changing methods of measuring and addressing mental health and mental illness. There isn’t great data on international trends in teenage suicide — but in those places with good reporting, the rates are generally not worsening — and the trends around anxiety, depression and well-being are ambiguous elsewhere in the world. And the association of those local increases with the rise of the smartphone, while now almost conventional wisdom among people like me, is, among specialists, very much a contested claim. Indeed, even Haidt, who has also emphasized broader changes to the culture of childhood , estimated that social media use is responsible for only about 10 percent to 15 percent of the variation in teenage well-being — which would be a significant correlation, given the complexities of adolescent life and of social science, but is also a much more measured estimate than you tend to see in headlines trumpeting the connection. And many others have arrived at much smaller estimates still.

But this all also raises the complicated question of what exactly we mean by “science,” in the context of social phenomena like these, and what standard of evidence we should be applying when asking whether something qualifies as a “crisis” or “emergency” and what we know about what may have caused it. There is a reason we rarely reduce broad social changes to monocausal explanations, whether we’re talking about the rapid decline of teenage pregnancy in the 2000s, or the spike in youth suicide in the late ’80s and early 1990s, or the rise in crime that began in the 1960s: Lives are far too complex to easily reduce to the influence of single factors, whether the factor is a recession or political conditions or, for that matter, climate breakdown.

To me, the number of places where rates of depression among teenagers are markedly on the rise is a legitimate cause for concern. But it is also worth remembering that, for instance, between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, diagnoses of American youth for bipolar disorder grew about 40-fold , and it is hard to find anyone who believes that change was a true reflection of underlying incidence. And when we find ourselves panicking over charts showing rapid increases in, say, the number of British girls who say they’re often unhappy or feel they are a failure, it’s worth keeping in mind that the charts were probably zoomed in to emphasize the spike, and the increase is only from about 5 percent of teenagers to about 10 percent in the first case, or from about 15 percent to about 20 percent in the second. It may also be the case, as Orben has emphasized , that smartphones and social media may be problematic for some teenagers without doing emotional damage to a majority of them. That’s not to say that in taking in the full scope of the problem, there is nothing there. But overall it is probably less than meets the eye.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Further reading (and listening):

On Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel Substack , a series of admirable responses to critics of “The Anxious Generation” and the smartphone thesis by Haidt, his lead researcher Zach Rausch, and his sometime collaborator Jean Twenge.

In Vox, Eric Levitz weighs the body of evidence for and against the thesis.

Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie deliver a useful overview of the evidence and its limitations on the Studies Show podcast.

Five experts review the evidence for the smartphone hypothesis in The Guardian.

A Substack survey of “diagnostic inflation” and teenage mental health.

The impact of social media on news and politics

S PRINGFIELD, Mass. (WGGB/WSHM) - As the exchange of information happens more and more on social media timelines, we’re learning more about how it’s affecting the political landscape.

And in an election year, Western Mass News spoke with residents about its impact on their politics.

Longmeadow resident Lakshmi Sathiamathan told us, “It’s like you’re talking with a megaphone in your hand.”

That’s led her son, Dan, to explore the effects of misinformation for his eighth-grade project, saying, “Once we kind of realized all of the things we searched on social media, all of the things were tied to misinformation, like most of it is about 2020 election, the 2016 election, right? So, like, it’s not fully about that but it’s a big factor.”

While Sivakumar is too young to vote, he’s studied the effects of unregulated posting on social media through a survey with his classmates, explaining, “We asked this question too.. ‘Have you seen fake news or misinformation on these apps in particular?’ you can see that 80% of the kids said ‘yeah they do.’”

Lakshmi recalled. “When he told me he was getting involved in a project like this, I was taking it so light. Then as he started working on it, I was like, ‘oh my God this is a heavy subject, a heavy topic.’”

Since the 2020 election cycle, we’ve seen the evolution of Twitter into X and the invention of Truth Social.

Both operate under the premise of prioritizing free speech.

Local resident Ryan Walters said, “I like that people can say what they want to say without trying to censor it because social media has a big influence and if I can say what I want to say and you don’t agree with it, then you can just block it out, then my opinion doesn’t get hurt.”

Walters elaborated that the reliance on social media for news is higher than ever before, saying, “Everyone nowadays gets their information that way. They either look at social media, the news, maybe YouTube? I don’t know… that’s about it.”

A Pew Research study confirms that, showing three in 10 Americans get their news from Facebook.

But STCC social media professor Chris Zarlengo pointed to how that approach can be damaging, explaining, “It is an access to a free flow of information. Unfortunately, that information doesn’t have to be fact-checked, or has to be accurate. A lot of times, it isn’t news, it’s opinion.”

Sathiamathan said, it’s up to the person scrolling to differentiate between fact and fiction, adding, “People can say anything, but you have to think through your brain and come to a conclusion that this is right, this is wrong. You need to build up the facts as opposed to just building the news and then coming to a conclusion that’s incorrect.”

While users are already set in their ideologies, and algorithms feed their interests.

Zarlengo explained that candidates can instead use social media as a wide-reaching mobilization tool.

“What you find is that you have these different groups, you have the Gen-Xs and the Millennials the Zs and then you have the boomers, and these groups all favor different social platforms.”

This is a closer look at social media use by generation, according to a 2023 Statistia study.

Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are the most popular platforms for those 50 years and older.

BeReal, Snapchat and TikTok top the charts for those 39 and younger.

“Most people that go on these platforms, don’t search for new information. It’s the echo chamber that we refer to. They look for confirmation about what they already know,” Zarlengo warned.

And it’s that slippery slope that’s led parents like Sathiamathan into uncharted territory when teaching their children.

“I feel like as a parent with kids growing… my parents weren’t having these types of difficulties and monitoring kids and education kids on what to trust and what not to trust on social media.”

As of Wednesday’s closing bell, Truth Social shares are valued at $45.13.

According to the Associated Press. the platform’s staying power continues to increase as former president Donald Trump now owns 114 million shares, worth about $5.2 billion dollars.