social media has destroyed real life communication essay

Social Media Essay: Social Media vs. Real-Life Communication

Can Social Media Destroy Real-Life Communication?

Introduction

As humanity progresses, the way people communicate changes as well, with every year becoming easier and more effective. First, there was post-crossing, then phones were invented, and now, when almost all people have access to the internet, social media is used in order to not only communicate internationally, but also within short distances.

Social Media as a Threat of Real-Life Communication

With growing popularity of platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other messaging apps, some started to argue that real-life communication is on the edge of extinction. It is especially dangerous for those who are already growing up using social media. On the other hand, people also suggest that online communication is only improving the state in which people live in, and it is just a matter of time when there will be achieved a great balance between real-life and online communication. What is sure to say is that social media has definitely affected face-to-face interaction in a lot of cases, yet it is up for anyone to make their own decision if this influence is negative or positive.

The Impact of Online Communication on Verbal Skills and Emotional Intelligence

One of the arguments against excessive use of texting and online communication is the fact that children will not be able to develop verbal skills and emotional intelligence. Dr. Kate Roberts, a Boston-based school psychologist, is an owner of such an opinion, and she blames technologies on the increasing amount of people who have problems with face-to-face communication, saying that “it is like we have lost the skill of courtship and the ability to make that connection” (Johnson). She is also highly concerned about children’s brains changing because they use an easier method of communication, through online media. Yet, some parents are already taking action by limiting the time that their kids spend online, so this problem might be more about good parenting, than about how destructive Instagram and Facebook are.

The Effect on Real-Life Friendships and Social Circles

Some also argue that social media is harming friendships people have in real life. Some studies speculate that a human brain can only handle a friendship with a limited amount of people, about 150 people to be exact (Chesak), which could resonate negatively with social media’s friend groups having no limits. Due to the excessive amount of friends online to communicate with, people could find themselves having not enough time or energy to spend on real-life friends.

The Influence of Social Media on Language Skills

These are not the only negative consequences of increasing use of social media. People who text tend to use verbal language less, which could decrease language skills and make it harder to build a structurally correct sentence (“The Negative Impacts of Social Media on Face-to-Face Interactions”). What also needs to be addressed is an increasing problem with social media addiction, which might be more harmless than smoking or drinking, yet it still profoundly impairs the quality of life, and makes it harder to not only communicate in real life, but also perform other essential actions like working, driving, or even eating.

Public Opinion on the Use Of Social Media for Communication

Ordinary people tend to have different opinions even when they are not considering scientific studies, though it is evident that the most popular belief is that online communication is, in fact, harming real-life communication. To the question of whether social media destroys real human relationships, eighty percent of the people on Debate.org answered “yes,” and only twenty percent chose “no” (“Does Social Media Destroy Real Human Relationships?”). People are sharing their opinions that using phones makes people ignore what is happening around them, and online interaction cannot replace face-to-face communication.

There are quite a lot of reasons why people think that social media is affecting real-life communication negatively, yet it has not destroyed it. As it is, for now, people use social media as one of the tools to communicate, and the time when social media will entirely replace face-to-face interaction has not come yet, and it probably will never come, if people try hard enough.

Works Cited

Chesak, Jennifer. “How Social Media Is Taking Away from Your Friendships.” Healthline , Healthline Media, 9 Jan. 2018, https://www.healthline.com/health/how-social-media-is-ruining-relationships#2. “Does Social Media Destroy Real Human Relationships?” Debate.org , https://www.debate.org/opinions/does-social-media-destroy-real-human-relationships. Johnson, Chandra. “Face Time vs. Screen Time: The Technological Impact on Communication.” Desert News , Desert News Publishing Company, 29 Aug. 2014, https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865609628/How-technology-is-changing-the-way-we-communicate.html. “The Negative Impacts of Social Media on Face-to-Face Interactions.” Final Inquiry Project , 1 Dec. 2015, https://rampages.us/peasedn200/2015/12/01/final-inquiry-project/.

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We can’t imagine our life without social media. We communicate, share our emotions, order food, and work online. But what about real-life communication? The author of the social media essay suggests that Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and other services can’t destroy face-to-face interaction, but they certainly may hurt our communication.

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I believe that a social media consultant must be attuned to the company goals and aspirations if he or she is to represent them on their social media channels. I also think that outsourcing social media marketing is a good idea for a company looking to specialize in their core business. In any case, most businesses outsource marketing and advertising and I don’t see why social media marketing should be any different. You just need to be actively involved to ensure that you are represented in the way that you want

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Home > Blog > Tips for Online Students > How Social Media Affects Communication

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How Social Media Affects Communication

Updated: July 8, 2024

Published: April 4, 2020

It’s no surprise that the widespread use of social media for communicating ideas, personal and professional stories and experiences has had a profound effect on the overall way people communicate today. Just how has social media affected communication, you ask? In more ways than you may think! But not all are bad — just look at our list of social media effects on communication.

What is Social Media?

Social media can be described as the collection of online platforms that involve sharing and collaborating with an online community by posting, commenting, and interacting with one another. The most commonly used social media platforms today are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Snapchat.

Photo by Tracy Le Blanc from Pexels

Social media effects on communication.

Social media has profoundly impacted how we communicate, affecting our personal relationships, the way we receive information, and societal discussions. It has increased connectivity, allowing us to stay in touch with others more easily and share our thoughts instantly. However, it also poses challenges like the spread of misinformation and reduced face-to-face interactions. In 2024, with around 5 billion users worldwide, social media continues to shape our communication norms and behaviors, highlighting both its benefits and drawbacks.

Social Media and its Effect on Exposure to Messaging

Social media greatly influences how we encounter and engage with information. These platforms use algorithms to curate content, shaping what we see based on our preferences and behaviors. This curation impacts the diversity and balance of the messaging we encounter, often creating echo chambers where we are exposed to information that reinforces our existing beliefs. Let’s explore how this constant exposure affects our news consumption, personal expression, and reactions to social cues:

Information Overload

Many people tend to binge on social media, spending hours and hours scrolling though sites. Ultimately, this may lead to a constant craving of more internet and more social media consumption. The more people get, the more they want — and it’s hard to stop the cycle.

Photo by Kaboompics .com from Pexels

Young people read news.

Today, social media plays a significant role in how young people consume news. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center study , about one-third of Americans aged 18 to 29 regularly get their news from TikTok. This platform has seen substantial growth in news consumption among its users. This trend contrasts with other social media platforms where news consumption has either plateaued or declined. Facebook remains a leading source for news, with 30% of U.S. adults regularly using it for this purpose, while YouTube follows closely at 26%​​​​.

For young people, social media is not just a tool for staying connected but also a primary source of information, shaping their understanding of current events and global issues. This shift underscores the evolving landscape of news media, where traditional news outlets must adapt to the preferences of younger audiences who favor digital and social media platforms for their news consumption.

Getting the Full Picture

Stories — a part of Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook — mean that people get the full picture of an event, activity, or occurrence in someone’s life. We no longer just get a snapshot of a home-cooked meal, we might see the entire process from start to finish.

This has changed the way people think about what to post — there is much less thought put into a post when it is a story that will be erased after 24 hours.

Boredom in Conversation

Here’s a sad social media effect on communication. We are becoming bored when we have real, in-person conversations. People have such a need for social media consumption and that instant, colorful feedback only social media can give, they will often become bored during real conversations, resorting to their phones. This can lead to a decrease in the quality and number of meaningful conversations.

Reactions to Non-Verbal, Emotional, and Social Cues

In-person reactions to non-verbal, emotional, or social cues are changing in that people don’t need to respond to these types of communication when they are online. This leads to less experience and awareness of others’ needs based on these types of cues that can only be received from in-person communication.

Social Media and its Effect on Self-Expression

Social media has dramatically transformed how people express themselves. These platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for people to share their thoughts, opinions, and creativity with a global audience. Features such as posts, stories, and multimedia content let us craft and curate our online identities, making self-expression more accessible and diverse than ever before.

Sense of Urgency

No one has to wait for longer than a few hours for a response, and people have come to expect that timeline for conversations. There is so much of a sense of urgency that people are often anxious if they haven’t heard back from a family member, friend, or partner in a number of hours.

Photo by Cristian Dina from Pexels

Need to share.

Social media has created a feeling among users that they must share whatever they are doing — from restaurant orders, to concerts, to the books they are reading. This can be a social media positive effect because people are getting more exposure to things they might not otherwise, such as new reads. But it can also be a negative effect as it can urge people to become dependent on posting anything occurring in their own lives and painting those occurrences as rosier than they truly are.

Photo by Vinicius Wiesehofer from Pexels

How we value ourselves.

When people see others having a wonderful life, as represented on social media, they tend to have a negative self-image, and start to devalue their own ways of life. In addition, there is a feeling of needing to paint an inaccurately positive and ‘fun’ version of one’s own life which leads to feelings of negativity about one’s ‘real’ life.

Inside Perspective of Afar

One of the positive effects of social media is the ability to get an intimate view of other cultures and places. With social media, especially on Instagram, users are able to see what others are doing around the world. People are exposed to travel ideas, new cultures, and ways of life unlike before.

Broadcasting Live

Broadcasting live started as a fun, innocent idea to share life’s moments, but it’s transformed to become a large part of political movements, sharing some dark aspects of today’s society. The option to post live videos has created an important platform for serious issues that need to be spoken about.

Personalized Digital Messages

Both Instagram and Snapchat have popularized the highly personalized message. People can now completely change their own faces with selfie filters, or draw pictures to send to friends, and more. Creativity soars, which is a great thing, but people can start to spend too much time personalizing picture messages.

Social Media Communication Style

Social media platforms have their own unique ways of communicating, and people often change how they speak and write to fit in. Platforms like Twitter and Instagram focus on short and visual messages, while LinkedIn is more about professional, text-based content. Knowing these differences can help you engage better with your audience.

1. Summarized Writing

Starting with the limited character text messaging of the 2000s, and nowadays with the 280-character tweet, messages have been getting shorter and more concise. Other areas of communication have adapted for summarized writing as well, such as in shortened work memos, shortened academic communication between students and professors, and shortened messages in advertising.

2. Abbreviations

The abbreviated style of communicating that became popular when text messaging started in the 00’s has continued into online conversations. The rise of text messaging and social media has popularized the use of abbreviations and acronyms.

These shortcuts save time and space but have also infiltrated spoken language, email communication, and even academic writing. While convenient, this trend has sparked debates about its impact on literacy and formal writing skills.

3. Unfiltered Interactions

Have you ever heard the term “Keyboard Warrior”? Social media and internet interactions offer a veil between the person sending and the person receiving the message. These interactions are no longer face to face, and this can lead to some unfiltered conversations as people feel they can say anything with no repercussions.

4. GIFs and Emojis

The introduction of using emojis to illustrate a written message or a GIF to express a reaction may seem fun and innocent, but it is also interfering with our ability to properly craft a written response. It ends up being too tempting to respond with a small picture, or a funny moving photo than to use the mind to create a response with words from scratch.

Photo by Szabo Viktor on Unsplash

5. viral messages.

That quick and easy “share” button on so many social media platforms has led to the phenomenon of “going viral.” Messages, videos, and other content can be easily shared between platforms with millions of people in a matter of days.

The Use of Social Media In Business Communication

Businesses use social media to effectively connect with customers, employees, and stakeholders. These platforms allow companies to build strong communities, engage directly with audiences, and personalize their communication strategies. Social media also helps brands coordinate public relations efforts and adapt to changes in traditional media landscapes. Here are some key ways businesses use social media for communication:

• Building a Community : Companies create communities around their products or services, fostering loyalty and engagement among customers.
• Brands Are Speaking Directly to Audiences : Social media allows brands to communicate directly with their audience, responding to their needs and feedback in real-time.
• Social Media is Changing Traditional Media : Influencers, bloggers, and online personalities can have a significant impact on a brand’s success, often more than traditional media outlets.
• Brands Can Have a More Personal Connection with the Media : Social media enables brands to develop long-term, personal relationships with journalists and media professionals.
• There’s an Opportunity to Coordinate with PR Efforts : Companies can leverage social media for public relations campaigns, finding influencers and collaborators to enhance their reach and impact.

Social media has revolutionized how we communicate, affecting everything from personal expression to business interactions. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have made it easier than ever to share our thoughts, feelings, and experiences with a global audience. They offer unique opportunities for self-expression and identity curation through posts, stories, and multimedia content. However, this shift also brings challenges, such as spreading misinformation and declining in-person conversation quality. As social media shapes our communication norms, navigating these changes thoughtfully is essential.

In business, social media has become an invaluable tool for engagement and marketing. Companies use these platforms to build communities, interact directly with customers, and create more personalized connections with the media. Social media has also transformed traditional media landscapes, allowing brands to coordinate public relations efforts more effectively. Overall, while social media brings opportunities and challenges, its impact on communication is profound, underscoring the need for mindful and strategic use in personal and professional contexts.

What changes has social media brought to communication patterns?

Social media has made communication more immediate and accessible, introducing new forms like emojis and GIFs. It has enabled real-time updates and live interactions, changing the pace and nature of communication.

How has social media influenced interpersonal relationships and interactions?

Social media allows people to stay connected over long distances but can lead to superficial interactions and reduced face-to-face communication quality, sometimes causing feelings of isolation despite being connected online.

What role does social media play in shaping public opinion and discourse?

Social media shapes public opinion by providing a platform for sharing news and opinions, amplifying diverse voices, and allowing rapid dissemination of information. However, it can also spread misinformation quickly and create echo chambers.

How has social media impacted privacy and personal boundaries in communication?

Social media blurs the lines between public and private life, often leading to oversharing and privacy concerns. Users frequently share personal information accessible to a wide audience, subjecting private moments to public scrutiny.

How has social media affected professional communication and networking?

Social media has revolutionized professional networking, with platforms like LinkedIn enabling global connections, job searching, and personal branding. Maintaining a professional online presence and being cautious about public sharing is essential.

How has social media affected the dissemination of information?

Social media enables instant sharing and wide reach of information, making news and updates go viral quickly. However, it also facilitates the spread of misinformation and fake news, making it crucial for users to verify sources.

Can social media be a tool for positive social change and activism?

Yes, social media can drive social change and activism, organizing protests, raising awareness, and mobilizing support for causes. Movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have gained momentum through social media, demonstrating its impact.

In this article

At UoPeople, our blog writers are thinkers, researchers, and experts dedicated to curating articles relevant to our mission: making higher education accessible to everyone. Read More

Question of the Week: Is social media destroying communication skills?

By Karina Putman

Your personal answer completely depends on how you view the phrase “communication skills.” To me, the phrase fully connects itself to the simple ability to relay what you want to say in an effective manner, so that another person understands what you’re trying to get across.

Perhaps, the communication skills that I have were not easily spotted in that sentence, but I hope that made a bit of sense. So, depending on your view of the phrase “communication skills”, this answer may differ. I do not believe that social media has destroyed communication skills in any manner.

This is due to the fact that, even if one has lost a bit of their written grammar, a person is still able to understand what you write and what you are trying to say.

Many people may agree with this, but point out the fact that texting is taking the place of phone calls (which, in turn, is destroying communication skills), but again, it all depends on your opinion of social skills and also social media. To me, texting is not social media and it aides in communication.

I believe social media actually promotes communication and is barely destroying anything. Then again, that is just my opinion.

By Alex Ludy

The art of communication is a complex one. Since the first humans began formulating languages millions of years ago, it has been changing and developing in ways that people may have never expected.

Social media is not destroying how people interact with each other, it is just changing it. Many people, especially those who have not grown up after the advent of smartphones and social media, believe that online communication has caused kids and young adults to be unable to talk to each other and become less social.

The idea that kids are unable to be social and talk to others effectively is contradictory to what social media actually intends to do. Thanks to online sites such as Tumblr and Twitter, kids of the modern era are more social than ever and are learning to communicate in new and exciting ways.

These sites have given not only children, but all people, the ability to connect with anyone around the world. This ease of access to new ideas and exciting cultures only facilitates communication and brings our global community together, an exhilarating opportunity that is unique to the time we live in.

Just because the way people are communicating changes doesn’t mean they are any less proficient in that communication. Critics argue that the quality of this interaction is significantly less, but that’s frankly untrue. What is the difference between having a forced conversation at the dinner table and having a seemingly meaningless conversation via text message; at least the latter is genuine.

It seems that often times people who do not understand new forms of communication blame their inability to connect with the younger generation on that new way of interacting rather than on their lack of communication skills. Social media is not damaging communication.

Online and instant communication is still uncharted territory, and while it may pose many questions on how we experience and interact with our world, it is only making the world a smaller place while simultaneously expanding it.

The real problem communication faces today is the danger that comes with the unwillingness of many to embrace new ideas and ways of interacting with each other.

By Hattie Luster

In our technologically dependent world today, people are constantly buried in their social media, oblivious to the real world. This phenomenon results in the hindrance of most individuals’ communication skills. Social media is inhibiting our young population’s ability to communicate.

A large factor of social media that cannot be ignored is cyberbullying. The many forms of social media that surround us today open the door for vicious attacks on individuals without direct contact. Because young people can now antagonize others without facing them in person, the verbal bullying in our society has increased drastically, all while the attacker sits behind a phone or laptop, never facing consequences.

Social media is also hurting our communication skills as it is inhibiting the ability of today’s youth to communicate face to face. Most young people today don’t know how to talk to someone unless they’re limited to 144 characters or less. Interviews are a nightmare for many young people because they haven’t been exposed to real conversations with other people.

Because of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and many other forms of crippling social media, the young citizens of America are going to be blindsided when they are thrown into the real world upon completion of school. I don’t see any reasonable simple solution to this problem, as our world has unfortunately been consumed by an addiction to social media.

By Veronica Sheriff

Shanksville Stonycreek

Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat are all prevailing in today’s society. These websites are useful in providing information about friends and family, local and international news, having place to store your picture memories and so much more. As entertaining as these may be, there is a downfall of using too much social media.

Ever since smartphones and tablets took off, so has social media. One in every four adolescents admit being “cell-mostly” internet users according to Pewinternet.org. With all of that internet usage, we can only imagine how much of it is going toward social media.

With the amount of social media being used daily, it’s easy to assume it’s affecting communication among peoples’ lives. Social media has become a security blanket to the users of these internet sites.

Social media has become a crutch, and many hide behind it rather than engaging face to face in a conversation. Because of this, speaking skills are going to suffer. Poor speaking skills impair all of those around. It will make someone who may be highly intelligent seem ineligible in a work environment.

Social media can be a wonderful leisure activity if used in a respective manner, it should not however becoming anything more than that.

By Addie Best

Interaction on social media has become a part of many people’s daily lives — much like the real life conversations in which they take part.

In my opinion, social media isn’t destroying communication skills; it is merely altering and diversifying them. This alteration may not be beneficial for developing social skills, manners, and grammar, however, it does expand communication opportunities.

Unlike previous decades where it took days or weeks for a message to be posted, today, social media offers the opportunities to speedily contact or share information with far-away friends and family.

Also, a well-spoken and communicative teenager could easily also have an online presence with no negative impact on his or her face-to-face encounters.

All in all, social media may negatively impact some aspects of 21st century life; however, communication skills may be broadened by social media.

By Lindsay Walker

Just this morning, I woke up to a Facebook message from a former classmate. While this may not seem like an extraordinary occurrence in and of itself, the details surrounding it are what makes it extraordinary.

The message I received came to me at 2:40 a.m. from Ishimbay, Russia. In the early hours of the morning, I was able to communicate with my best friend, who just so happens to live halfway around the world.

Now, take the story I just told you and apply it to a time 100, 50, or even 20 ago. It would be next to impossible for it to have occurred, but today it did, thanks to social media.

Now, let’s be honest with ourselves, social media gets a bad reputation when it comes to communication skills. All too often, the younger demographic is accused with being absorbed in the many social media platforms offered to them: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter.

The list goes on and on. But the truth of the matter is, social media is not destroying communication skills, but is helping to build and enhance them. For example: when has it ever been as easy as a few keystrokes to get in touch with someone halfway around the world?

Or, on a smaller scale, simply being able to send a message to a group of people to organize a get-together? Before social media, it would have taken much longer to send a letter to Russia or get in touch with each individual person, by which time, many other variables can occur.

Platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram also offer communication options. A situation that used to happen to me far too often is seeing something I know someone else would enjoy, but not being able to show it to them, then having to offer a weak description of what it was I saw.

With Snapchat, I can take a photo and send it to the person within seconds, possibly making their day a little brighter.

While social media is often the scapegoat for what are altogether issues varying from person to person, one should keep in mind the doors of communication social media offers before pointing fingers.

By Tristan Wiltrout

Salisbury-Elk Lick

Social media isn’t destroying communication skills, it’s just changing them. Interaction via social media is still interaction between two or more conscious human beings, and nothing about it makes it inherently worse than other forms of communication.

Has social media destroyed direct face-to-face communication skills for some people? Possibly. Still, it seems rare that somebody who feels comfortable with everyday conversation and interaction with other people would become worse at that as a result of using social media.

I feel like when this question is brought up, people imagine four millennials sitting around a table, staring at their phones rather than talking to each other. It’s a pretty common image nowadays, but how often does it actually come up in real life? Do people really stare at their phones out of habit?

Would they talk to each other if they weren’t staring at their phones? And if they would talk to each other, would they be doing it because they really want to, or out of a feeling of obligation? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but they seem important to keep in mind when thinking or discussing this topic.

By Alexandra Davis

Berlin Brothersvalley

In today’s world, technology is at our fingertips as communication with people has never been easier; however, are we losing the real communication skills behind all of the social media? Social media is destroying our communication skills.

I can’t watch TV without seeing an advertisement for some online dating site. Christian Mingle, EHarmony, Farmers Only, Black People Meet, the list goes on and on. The growing popularity of dating sites is one of the many testimonies to the fact that social media is ruining our communication skills.

People are so glued to their phones that they have forgotten how to communicate, or in this case how to go out and meet people. With every new social media that appears, fewer and fewer face to face conversations become the norm.

By Katie Oakes

I do believe that social media is destroying communication skills. For example, when I go to a restaurant with my family or friends, I look around and notice that almost every person in that restaurant is playing a game on their cell phone, texting, or talking on the phone.

People do not communicate by talking face to face anymore. Texting and social media have taken over; it is turning people into zombies. When I was little I would be outside playing or in my room. When supper was ready they would yell to let me know it was done, but now it’s texting, “Come eat, supper is ready.” Why have we let our society come to this?

“Since teenagers spend so much time interacting with their peers through social media and texting, they now lack the face-to-face communications needed to be successful and confident in the work force,” said my instructor Tanis Herwig.

I believe that in the next couple of years, society will be nothing but technology and no one will communicate verbally. We will all be like robots.

By Emma Rugg

I do not feel as though social media is destroying communication skill any more than it is expanding the ways of communication. The world will continue to evolve and advance technologically, whether it can be stopped or not.

Yes, maybe individuals are not developing as many personal interaction skills as they would 25 or even 50 years ago, but social media is allowing us to communicate with people from across the world. There are people that I have met and know from different states and even countries.

In these situations personal interaction is almost impossible, technology and the elements that come along with it. Yes, people could increase their interpersonal communication skills if there was less hype over texting, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites but they are expanding the connections through out the world.

Friends and families can stay in touch even if they are on opposite end of the world. Life will continue to go on and put forth new ideas when it comes to communication but if we keep a happy medium when it comes to both interaction and internet we would not have to worry about losing any skills at all.

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.

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How Harmful Is Social Media?

In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he sought to explain, as the piece’s title had it, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anyone familiar with Haidt’s work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media. Although Haidt concedes that political polarization and factional enmity long predate the rise of the platforms, and that there are plenty of other factors involved, he believes that the tools of virality—Facebook’s Like and Share buttons, Twitter’s Retweet function—have algorithmically and irrevocably corroded public life. He has determined that a great historical discontinuity can be dated with some precision to the period between 2010 and 2014, when these features became widely available on phones.

“What changed in the 2010s?” Haidt asks, reminding his audience that a former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision of a four-year-old with a loaded weapon. “A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.” While the right has thrived on conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, the left has turned punitive: “When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And, unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.” Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: the rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”

These are, needless to say, common concerns. Chief among Haidt’s worries is that use of social media has left us particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias, or the propensity to fix upon evidence that shores up our prior beliefs. Haidt acknowledges that the extant literature on social media’s effects is large and complex, and that there is something in it for everyone. On January 6, 2021, he was on the phone with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke and the author of the recent book “ Breaking the Social Media Prism ,” when Bail urged him to turn on the television. Two weeks later, Haidt wrote to Bail, expressing his frustration at the way Facebook officials consistently cited the same handful of studies in their defense. He suggested that the two of them collaborate on a comprehensive literature review that they could share, as a Google Doc, with other researchers. (Haidt had experimented with such a model before.) Bail was cautious. He told me, “What I said to him was, ‘Well, you know, I’m not sure the research is going to bear out your version of the story,’ and he said, ‘Why don’t we see?’ ”

Bail emphasized that he is not a “platform-basher.” He added, “In my book, my main take is, Yes, the platforms play a role, but we are greatly exaggerating what it’s possible for them to do—how much they could change things no matter who’s at the helm at these companies—and we’re profoundly underestimating the human element, the motivation of users.” He found Haidt’s idea of a Google Doc appealing, in the way that it would produce a kind of living document that existed “somewhere between scholarship and public writing.” Haidt was eager for a forum to test his ideas. “I decided that if I was going to be writing about this—what changed in the universe, around 2014, when things got weird on campus and elsewhere—once again, I’d better be confident I’m right,” he said. “I can’t just go off my feelings and my readings of the biased literature. We all suffer from confirmation bias, and the only cure is other people who don’t share your own.”

Haidt and Bail, along with a research assistant, populated the document over the course of several weeks last year, and in November they invited about two dozen scholars to contribute. Haidt told me, of the difficulties of social-scientific methodology, “When you first approach a question, you don’t even know what it is. ‘Is social media destroying democracy, yes or no?’ That’s not a good question. You can’t answer that question. So what can you ask and answer?” As the document took on a life of its own, tractable rubrics emerged—Does social media make people angrier or more affectively polarized? Does it create political echo chambers? Does it increase the probability of violence? Does it enable foreign governments to increase political dysfunction in the United States and other democracies? Haidt continued, “It’s only after you break it up into lots of answerable questions that you see where the complexity lies.”

Haidt came away with the sense, on balance, that social media was in fact pretty bad. He was disappointed, but not surprised, that Facebook’s response to his article relied on the same three studies they’ve been reciting for years. “This is something you see with breakfast cereals,” he said, noting that a cereal company “might say, ‘Did you know we have twenty-five per cent more riboflavin than the leading brand?’ They’ll point to features where the evidence is in their favor, which distracts you from the over-all fact that your cereal tastes worse and is less healthy.”

After Haidt’s piece was published, the Google Doc—“Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review”—was made available to the public . Comments piled up, and a new section was added, at the end, to include a miscellany of Twitter threads and Substack essays that appeared in response to Haidt’s interpretation of the evidence. Some colleagues and kibbitzers agreed with Haidt. But others, though they might have shared his basic intuition that something in our experience of social media was amiss, drew upon the same data set to reach less definitive conclusions, or even mildly contradictory ones. Even after the initial flurry of responses to Haidt’s article disappeared into social-media memory, the document, insofar as it captured the state of the social-media debate, remained a lively artifact.

Near the end of the collaborative project’s introduction, the authors warn, “We caution readers not to simply add up the number of studies on each side and declare one side the winner.” The document runs to more than a hundred and fifty pages, and for each question there are affirmative and dissenting studies, as well as some that indicate mixed results. According to one paper, “Political expressions on social media and the online forum were found to (a) reinforce the expressers’ partisan thought process and (b) harden their pre-existing political preferences,” but, according to another, which used data collected during the 2016 election, “Over the course of the campaign, we found media use and attitudes remained relatively stable. Our results also showed that Facebook news use was related to modest over-time spiral of depolarization. Furthermore, we found that people who use Facebook for news were more likely to view both pro- and counter-attitudinal news in each wave. Our results indicated that counter-attitudinal exposure increased over time, which resulted in depolarization.” If results like these seem incompatible, a perplexed reader is given recourse to a study that says, “Our findings indicate that political polarization on social media cannot be conceptualized as a unified phenomenon, as there are significant cross-platform differences.”

Interested in echo chambers? “Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter,” which seems convincing—except that, as another team has it, “We do not find evidence supporting a strong characterization of ‘echo chambers’ in which the majority of people’s sources of news are mutually exclusive and from opposite poles.” By the end of the file, the vaguely patronizing top-line recommendation against simple summation begins to make more sense. A document that originated as a bulwark against confirmation bias could, as it turned out, just as easily function as a kind of generative device to support anybody’s pet conviction. The only sane response, it seemed, was simply to throw one’s hands in the air.

When I spoke to some of the researchers whose work had been included, I found a combination of broad, visceral unease with the current situation—with the banefulness of harassment and trolling; with the opacity of the platforms; with, well, the widespread presentiment that of course social media is in many ways bad—and a contrastive sense that it might not be catastrophically bad in some of the specific ways that many of us have come to take for granted as true. This was not mere contrarianism, and there was no trace of gleeful mythbusting; the issue was important enough to get right. When I told Bail that the upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear, he suggested that there was at least some firm ground. He sounded a bit less apocalyptic than Haidt.

“A lot of the stories out there are just wrong,” he told me. “The political echo chamber has been massively overstated. Maybe it’s three to five per cent of people who are properly in an echo chamber.” Echo chambers, as hotboxes of confirmation bias, are counterproductive for democracy. But research indicates that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life, where our social networks—in the original use of the term—are rarely heterogeneous. (Haidt told me that this was an issue on which the Google Doc changed his mind; he became convinced that echo chambers probably aren’t as widespread a problem as he’d once imagined.) And too much of a focus on our intuitions about social media’s echo-chamber effect could obscure the relevant counterfactual: a conservative might abandon Twitter only to watch more Fox News. “Stepping outside your echo chamber is supposed to make you moderate, but maybe it makes you more extreme,” Bail said. The research is inchoate and ongoing, and it’s difficult to say anything on the topic with absolute certainty. But this was, in part, Bail’s point: we ought to be less sure about the particular impacts of social media.

Bail went on, “The second story is foreign misinformation.” It’s not that misinformation doesn’t exist, or that it hasn’t had indirect effects, especially when it creates perverse incentives for the mainstream media to cover stories circulating online. Haidt also draws convincingly upon the work of Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, to sketch out a potential future in which the work of shitposting has been outsourced to artificial intelligence, further polluting the informational environment. But, at least so far, very few Americans seem to suffer from consistent exposure to fake news—“probably less than two per cent of Twitter users, maybe fewer now, and for those who were it didn’t change their opinions,” Bail said. This was probably because the people likeliest to consume such spectacles were the sort of people primed to believe them in the first place. “In fact,” he said, “echo chambers might have done something to quarantine that misinformation.”

The final story that Bail wanted to discuss was the “proverbial rabbit hole, the path to algorithmic radicalization,” by which YouTube might serve a viewer increasingly extreme videos. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this does happen, at least on occasion, and such anecdotes are alarming to hear. But a new working paper led by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, found that almost all extremist content is either consumed by subscribers to the relevant channels—a sign of actual demand rather than manipulation or preference falsification—or encountered via links from external sites. It’s easy to see why we might prefer if this were not the case: algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. “These are the three stories—echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms—but, when you look at the literature, they’ve all been overstated.” He thought that these findings were crucial for us to assimilate, if only to help us understand that our problems may lie beyond technocratic tinkering. He explained, “Part of my interest in getting this research out there is to demonstrate that everybody is waiting for an Elon Musk to ride in and save us with an algorithm”—or, presumably, the reverse—“and it’s just not going to happen.”

When I spoke with Nyhan, he told me much the same thing: “The most credible research is way out of line with the takes.” He noted, of extremist content and misinformation, that reliable research that “measures exposure to these things finds that the people consuming this content are small minorities who have extreme views already.” The problem with the bulk of the earlier research, Nyhan told me, is that it’s almost all correlational. “Many of these studies will find polarization on social media,” he said. “But that might just be the society we live in reflected on social media!” He hastened to add, “Not that this is untroubling, and none of this is to let these companies, which are exercising a lot of power with very little scrutiny, off the hook. But a lot of the criticisms of them are very poorly founded. . . . The expansion of Internet access coincides with fifteen other trends over time, and separating them is very difficult. The lack of good data is a huge problem insofar as it lets people project their own fears into this area.” He told me, “It’s hard to weigh in on the side of ‘We don’t know, the evidence is weak,’ because those points are always going to be drowned out in our discourse. But these arguments are systematically underprovided in the public domain.”

In his Atlantic article, Haidt leans on a working paper by two social scientists, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, who took on a comprehensive meta-analysis of about five hundred papers and concluded that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” Haidt writes, “The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.” Nyhan was less convinced that the meta-analysis supported such categorical verdicts, especially once you bracketed the kinds of correlational findings that might simply mirror social and political dynamics. He told me, “If you look at their summary of studies that allow for causal inferences—it’s very mixed.”

As for the studies Nyhan considered most methodologically sound, he pointed to a 2020 article called “The Welfare Effects of Social Media,” by Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow. For four weeks prior to the 2018 midterm elections, the authors randomly divided a group of volunteers into two cohorts—one that continued to use Facebook as usual, and another that was paid to deactivate their accounts for that period. They found that deactivation “(i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use.” But Gentzkow reminded me that his conclusions, including that Facebook may slightly increase polarization, had to be heavily qualified: “From other kinds of evidence, I think there’s reason to think social media is not the main driver of increasing polarization over the long haul in the United States.”

In the book “ Why We’re Polarized ,” for example, Ezra Klein invokes the work of such scholars as Lilliana Mason to argue that the roots of polarization might be found in, among other factors, the political realignment and nationalization that began in the sixties, and were then sacralized, on the right, by the rise of talk radio and cable news. These dynamics have served to flatten our political identities, weakening our ability or inclination to find compromise. Insofar as some forms of social media encourage the hardening of connections between our identities and a narrow set of opinions, we might increasingly self-select into mutually incomprehensible and hostile groups; Haidt plausibly suggests that these processes are accelerated by the coalescence of social-media tribes around figures of fearful online charisma. “Social media might be more of an amplifier of other things going on rather than a major driver independently,” Gentzkow argued. “I think it takes some gymnastics to tell a story where it’s all primarily driven by social media, especially when you’re looking at different countries, and across different groups.”

Another study, led by Nejla Asimovic and Joshua Tucker, replicated Gentzkow’s approach in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they found almost precisely the opposite results: the people who stayed on Facebook were, by the end of the study, more positively disposed to their historic out-groups. The authors’ interpretation was that ethnic groups have so little contact in Bosnia that, for some people, social media is essentially the only place where they can form positive images of one another. “To have a replication and have the signs flip like that, it’s pretty stunning,” Bail told me. “It’s a different conversation in every part of the world.”

Nyhan argued that, at least in wealthy Western countries, we might be too heavily discounting the degree to which platforms have responded to criticism: “Everyone is still operating under the view that algorithms simply maximize engagement in a short-term way” with minimal attention to potential externalities. “That might’ve been true when Zuckerberg had seven people working for him, but there are a lot of considerations that go into these rankings now.” He added, “There’s some evidence that, with reverse-chronological feeds”—streams of unwashed content, which some critics argue are less manipulative than algorithmic curation—“people get exposed to more low-quality content, so it’s another case where a very simple notion of ‘algorithms are bad’ doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It doesn’t mean they’re good, it’s just that we don’t know.”

Bail told me that, over all, he was less confident than Haidt that the available evidence lines up clearly against the platforms. “Maybe there’s a slight majority of studies that say that social media is a net negative, at least in the West, and maybe it’s doing some good in the rest of the world.” But, he noted, “Jon will say that science has this expectation of rigor that can’t keep up with the need in the real world—that even if we don’t have the definitive study that creates the historical counterfactual that Facebook is largely responsible for polarization in the U.S., there’s still a lot pointing in that direction, and I think that’s a fair point.” He paused. “It can’t all be randomized control trials.”

Haidt comes across in conversation as searching and sincere, and, during our exchange, he paused several times to suggest that I include a quote from John Stuart Mill on the importance of good-faith debate to moral progress. In that spirit, I asked him what he thought of the argument, elaborated by some of Haidt’s critics, that the problems he described are fundamentally political, social, and economic, and that to blame social media is to search for lost keys under the streetlamp, where the light is better. He agreed that this was the steelman opponent: there were predecessors for cancel culture in de Tocqueville, and anxiety about new media that went back to the time of the printing press. “This is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, and it’s absolutely up to the prosecution—people like me—to argue that, no, this time it’s different. But it’s a civil case! The evidential standard is not ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ as in a criminal case. It’s just a preponderance of the evidence.”

The way scholars weigh the testimony is subject to their disciplinary orientations. Economists and political scientists tend to believe that you can’t even begin to talk about causal dynamics without a randomized controlled trial, whereas sociologists and psychologists are more comfortable drawing inferences on a correlational basis. Haidt believes that conditions are too dire to take the hardheaded, no-reasonable-doubt view. “The preponderance of the evidence is what we use in public health. If there’s an epidemic—when COVID started, suppose all the scientists had said, ‘No, we gotta be so certain before you do anything’? We have to think about what’s actually happening, what’s likeliest to pay off.” He continued, “We have the largest epidemic ever of teen mental health, and there is no other explanation,” he said. “It is a raging public-health epidemic, and the kids themselves say Instagram did it, and we have some evidence, so is it appropriate to say, ‘Nah, you haven’t proven it’?”

This was his attitude across the board. He argued that social media seemed to aggrandize inflammatory posts and to be correlated with a rise in violence; even if only small groups were exposed to fake news, such beliefs might still proliferate in ways that were hard to measure. “In the post-Babel era, what matters is not the average but the dynamics, the contagion, the exponential amplification,” he said. “Small things can grow very quickly, so arguments that Russian disinformation didn’t matter are like COVID arguments that people coming in from China didn’t have contact with a lot of people.” Given the transformative effects of social media, Haidt insisted, it was important to act now, even in the absence of dispositive evidence. “Academic debates play out over decades and are often never resolved, whereas the social-media environment changes year by year,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting around five or ten years for literature reviews.”

Haidt could be accused of question-begging—of assuming the existence of a crisis that the research might or might not ultimately underwrite. Still, the gap between the two sides in this case might not be quite as wide as Haidt thinks. Skeptics of his strongest claims are not saying that there’s no there there. Just because the average YouTube user is unlikely to be led to Stormfront videos, Nyhan told me, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry that some people are watching Stormfront videos; just because echo chambers and foreign misinformation seem to have had effects only at the margins, Gentzkow said, doesn’t mean they’re entirely irrelevant. “There are many questions here where the thing we as researchers are interested in is how social media affects the average person,” Gentzkow told me. “There’s a different set of questions where all you need is a small number of people to change—questions about ethnic violence in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, people on YouTube mobilized to do mass shootings. Much of the evidence broadly makes me skeptical that the average effects are as big as the public discussion thinks they are, but I also think there are cases where a small number of people with very extreme views are able to find each other and connect and act.” He added, “That’s where many of the things I’d be most concerned about lie.”

The same might be said about any phenomenon where the base rate is very low but the stakes are very high, such as teen suicide. “It’s another case where those rare edge cases in terms of total social harm may be enormous. You don’t need many teen-age kids to decide to kill themselves or have serious mental-health outcomes in order for the social harm to be really big.” He added, “Almost none of this work is able to get at those edge-case effects, and we have to be careful that if we do establish that the average effect of something is zero, or small, that it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about it—because we might be missing those extremes.” Jaime Settle, a scholar of political behavior at the College of William & Mary and the author of the book “ Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America ,” noted that Haidt is “farther along the spectrum of what most academics who study this stuff are going to say we have strong evidence for.” But she understood his impulse: “We do have serious problems, and I’m glad Jon wrote the piece, and down the road I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a fuller handle on the role of social media in all of this—there are definitely ways in which social media has changed our politics for the worse.”

It’s tempting to sidestep the question of diagnosis entirely, and to evaluate Haidt’s essay not on the basis of predictive accuracy—whether social media will lead to the destruction of American democracy—but as a set of proposals for what we might do better. If he is wrong, how much damage are his prescriptions likely to do? Haidt, to his great credit, does not indulge in any wishful thinking, and if his diagnosis is largely technological his prescriptions are sociopolitical. Two of his three major suggestions seem useful and have nothing to do with social media: he thinks that we should end closed primaries and that children should be given wide latitude for unsupervised play. His recommendations for social-media reform are, for the most part, uncontroversial: he believes that preteens shouldn’t be on Instagram and that platforms should share their data with outside researchers—proposals that are both likely to be beneficial and not very costly.

It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. “But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it—a broader impact on trust,” he said. “Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can’t trust anything, and other people are being misled about it—well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself.” Nyhan had a similar reaction. “There are genuine questions that are really important, but there’s a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There’s so much focus on sweeping claims that aren’t actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better.” He added, “We’re years into this, and we’re still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It’s totally wild.”

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Social Media — Negative Effects Of Social Media: Relationships And Communication

Negative Effects of Social Media: Relationships and Communication

• Categories: Effects of Social Media Negative Impact of Technology Social Media

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Words: 904 |

Published: Mar 14, 2019

Words: 904 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

A Good Hook Examples for “Why Social Media is Bad” Essay

• A Modern Dilemma: In an era dominated by likes, shares, and filters, have you ever paused to consider the darker side of social media? Join me as we unveil the reasons why this digital phenomenon may be more harmful than we realize.
• An Eye-Opening Statistic: Did you know that the average person spends nearly two and a half hours on social media every day? Let’s dive into the implications of this staggering statistic and why it’s cause for concern.
• A Thought-Provoking Quote: Plato once warned, “At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.” But in the age of social media, is the touch of love being replaced by the click of a button? Explore with me how these platforms can dilute genuine human connections.
• A Personal Awakening: As someone who has experienced the negative effects of social media firsthand, I invite you to join me in reflecting on the ways in which these platforms may be undermining our mental health, relationships, and overall well-being.
• A Societal Wake-Up Call: Social media is no longer just a personal choice; it’s a societal force. Discover how it has reshaped our culture, influenced our behaviors, and potentially posed a threat to the fabric of our society.

Works Cited

• Buunk, B. P., & Dijkstra, P. (2017). Gender differences in jealousy: Men are more jealous about physical infidelity than emotional infidelity. Evolutionary Psychology, 15(1), 1474704916680157.
• Eslit, N. (2017, May 5). Effects of social media on communication skills. TechJury. https://techjury.net/blog/effects-of-social-media-on-communication-skills/
• Phoon, A. (2017, March 8). Social media is bad for communication skills and replaces need for human interaction. Medium. https://medium.com/@alphoenix/social-media-is-bad-for-communication-skills-and-replaces-need-for-human-interaction-d78b1c2d1e1b
• Wikerson, M. (2017). The impact of social media on relationships. Marshall Digital Scholar, 1. https://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=student_scholarship
• Wu, A. M. S., Cheung, V. I., & Ku, L. (2013). Continual and problematic internet use as predictors of low self-esteem, depression, and suicidal ideation among Chinese adolescents. Journal of Adolescent Health, 52(2), S122-S127.
• Wu, Y. Q., Li, J., & Li, X. (2020). Cyberbullying victimization and depressive symptoms: The mediating role of resilience and the moderating role of social support in Chinese adolescents. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 2071.
• Zhang, S., Li, X., Chen, H., & Liu, Y. (2017). A longitudinal study of the relationship between problematic internet use and subjective well-being among college students. Social Indicators Research, 133(1), 345-355.

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Why social media has changed the world — and how to fix it

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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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November 1, 2019

13 min read

Social Media Has Not Destroyed a Generation  

New findings suggest angst over the technology is misplaced

By Lydia Denworth

Mark Zingarelli

I t was the headlines that most upset Amy Orben. In 2017, when she was a graduate student in experimental psychology at the University of Oxford researching how social media influences communication, alarming articles began to appear. Giving a child a smartphone was like giving a kid cocaine, claimed one. Smartphones might have destroyed a generation, said another. Orben didn’t think such extreme statements were warranted. At one point, she stayed up all night reanalyzing data from a paper linking increases in depression and suicide to screen time. “I figured out that tweaks to the data analysis caused major changes to the study results,” Orben says. “The effects were actually tiny.”

She published several blog posts, some with her Oxford colleague Andrew K. Przybylski, saying so. “Great claims require great evidence,” she wrote in one. “Yet this kind of evidence does not exist.” Then Orben decided to make her point scientifically and changed the focus of her work. With Przybylski, she set out to rigorously analyze the large-scale data sets that are widely used in studies of social media.

The two researchers were not the only ones who were concerned. A few years ago Jeff Hancock, a psychologist who runs the Social Media Lab at Stanford University, set an alert to let him know when his research was cited by other scientists in their papers. As the notifications piled up in his in-box, he was perplexed. A report on the ways that Facebook made people more anxious would be followed by one about how social media enhances social capital. “What is going on with all these conflicting ideas?” Hancock wondered. How could they all be citing his work? He decided to seek clarity and embarked on the largest meta-analysis to date of the effects of social media on psychological well-being. Ultimately he included 226 papers and data on more than 275,000 people.

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The results of Orben’s, Przybylski’s and Hancock’s efforts are now in. Studies from these researchers and others, published or presented in 2019, have brought some context to the question of what exactly digital technology is doing to our mental health. Their evidence makes several things clear. The results to date have been mixed because the effects measured are themselves mixed. “Using social media is essentially a trade-off,” Hancock says. “You get very small but significant advantages for your well-being that come with very small but statistically significant costs.” The emphasis is on “small”—at least in terms of effect size, which gauges the strength of the relation between two variables. Hancock’s meta-analysis revealed an overall effect size of 0.01 on a scale in which 0.2 is small. Przybylski and Orben measured the percent of variance in well-being that was explained by social media use and found that technology was no more associated with decreased well-being for teenagers than eating potatoes. Wearing glasses was worse. “The monster-of-the-week thing is dead in the water,” Przybylski says.

Furthermore, this new research reveals serious limitations and shortcomings in the science of social media to date. Eighty percent of studies have been cross-sectional (looking at individuals at a given point in time) and correlational (linking two measures such as frequency of Facebook use and level of anxiety but not showing that one causes the other). Most have relied on self-reported use, a notoriously unreliable measure. Nearly all assess only frequency and duration of use rather than content or context. “We’re asking the wrong questions,” Hancock says. And results are regularly overstated—sometimes by the scientists, often by the media. “Social media research is the perfect storm showing us where all the problems are with our scientific methodology,” Orben says. “This challenges us as scientists to think about how we measure things and what sort of effect size we think is important.”

To be clear, it is not that social media is never a problem. Heavy use is associated with potentially harmful effects on well-being. But effects from social media appear to depend on the user—age and mental health status are two important factors that make a difference. Also, cause and effect appear to go in both directions. “It’s a two-way street,” Hancock says.

The hope is that the field will use these new findings to embark on a new science of social media that will set higher standards for statistical analysis, avoid preposterous claims, and include more experimental and longitudinal studies, which track people at multiple time points. “We don’t want to be a field in which we say that potato eating has destroyed a generation,” says clinical neuropsychologist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary of Hunter College. “Despite our concerns, we need to pull ourselves together and act like scientists. We have to have adequate evidence.”

Fear of Technology

Anxiety and panic over the effects of new technology date back to Socrates, who bemoaned the then new tradition of writing things down for fear it would diminish the power of memory. Thomas Hobbes and Thomas Jefferson both warned that communal relationships would suffer as industrial societies moved from rural to urban living. “Before we hated smartphones, we hated cities,” write sociologists Keith Hampton of Michigan State University and Barry Wellman of the NetLab Network, based in Toronto, both of whom study the effects of technological innovation. Radio, video games and even comic books have all caused consternation. Television was going to bring about the dumbing down of America.

Even so, the change that came about from mobile phones, the Internet and social networking sites feels seismic. Cell phones were first widely adopted in the 1990s. By 2018, 95 percent of American adults were using them. Smartphones, which added instant access to the Internet, entered the mainstream with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, and now more than three quarters of U.S. adults have them. Eighty-nine percent of those adults use the Internet. There is near saturation for all things digital among adolescents and adults younger than 50 and among higher-income households. Nonusers tend to be older than 65, poor, or residents of rural areas or other places with limited service. Between 2005, when the Pew Research Center began tracking social media use, and 2019, the proportion of Americans using social media to connect, keep up with the news, share information and be entertained went from 5 to 72 percent—that means it jumped from one in 20 adults to seven in 10.

Because social media is so new, the science investigating its effects is also new. The earliest study Hancock could find that examined social media use and psychological well-being was done in 2006. It came as no surprise that early approaches were limited. Physician Brian Primack, who headed the Center for Research on Media, Technology, and Health at the University of Pittsburgh until moving to the University of Arkansas this year, likens the field to initial research on nutrition: “It took a while to say, ‘Let’s split out fats and proteins and carbohydrates, and not just that, but let’s split out trans-fats and polyunsaturated fats,’” he says. “It’s important for anyone who is doing good research to adapt to what’s going on.” Primack points to his own early work, such as studies that looked only at overall social media use, as examples of what will not cut it anymore. “You might be spending two hours a day clicking ‘like’ on pictures of cute puppies, and I might be spending two hours a day having violent clashes about politics and religion and other hot-button issues. Studies like my early one would count [those activities] the same.”

Many people in the field have been particularly critical of work by psychologist Jean M. Twenge of San Diego State University. In addition to her research papers, Twenge’s popular 2017 article in the Atlantic , based on her book iGen , was the one that asked: “Has the Smartphone Destroyed a Generation?” Twenge is hardly the only researcher to publish negative findings about social media use, but the publicity around her work has made her one of the most high profile. She points to a steep rise in mental health issues among the group born between 1995 and 2012 and writes that “much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.” Her work compares rising rates of depression and anxiety among young people to the proliferation of smartphones in the same time period. Twenge acknowledges that the link is correlational but argues that her conclusions represent “a logical sequence of events” based on the evidence—and care is warranted: “When we’re talking about the health of children and teens, it seems to me we should err on the side of caution.”

No one disagrees about the importance of young people’s health, but they do think that Twenge has gotten ahead of the science. “Why wait for causal evidence?” says Dennis-Tiwary. Because the story might not be so straightforward. She points to a longitudinal study done by researchers in Canada in response to one of Twenge’s articles. They studied nearly 600 adolescents and more than 1,000 young adults over two and six years, respectively, and found that social media use did not predict depressive symptoms but that depressive symptoms predicted more frequent social media use among adolescent girls. “This is a much more nuanced story,” Dennis-Tiwary says. “We know that problematic smartphone use may as likely be a result of mental health problems as a cause, and that calls for a different set of solutions.”

Correlational studies have their uses, just as epidemiological research can suggest a link between pollution and increased cancer rates when a randomized clinical trial is not possible. While he thinks it is important not to overstate findings, economist Matthew Gentzkow of Stanford, who studies social media, says of Twenge’s work that “there are some pretty striking facts there. They don’t tell us whether smartphones are causing mental health problems, but they really shine some light on that possibility. What we need now is to dig in and try to do more careful studies to isolate what’s really going on.”

Credit: Mark Zingarelli

A Two-Way Street?

That is what the newest studies set out to do. Hancock’s meta-analysis highlighted the fact that many studies on social media and psychological well-being did not measure the same outcomes. Effects generally fell into one of six categories. Three concern positive indicators of well-being: eudaemonic happiness (having a sense of meaning), hedonic happiness (joy in the moment) and relationships. And three are negative: depression, anxiety and loneliness. Hancock and his team found that more social media use was associated slightly with higher depression and anxiety (though not loneliness) and more strongly associated with relationship benefits (though not eudaemonic or hedonic well-being). (The largest effect, at 0.20, was the benefit of stronger relationships.) He and his colleagues also found that active rather than passive use was positively associated with well-being. (They found no effect for passive use, although others have found it to be negative.)

And how researchers asked questions mattered. Framing questions around “addiction” rather than more neutrally makes a negative finding more likely. In all the literature, there were only 24 longitudinal studies, the “gold standard” that allows researchers to compare the relation between well-being and social media use at two points in time and statistically assess which variable is driving change in the other. In these, Hancock’s team found a further small but interesting result. “When you have higher well-being, you use social media less, which suggests that well-being is driving [how much use is made of] social media to some degree,” Hancock says.

In a trilogy of papers about adolescent technology use, Orben and Przybylski tackled three major pitfalls they had identified in previous analyses of large-scale data sets. The first paper, published in January in Nature Human Behaviour , provided both context and a method for improving transparency. It included three data sets from the U.S. and Europe made up of more than 350,000 adolescents. Such data sets are valuable but make it easy to turn up statistically significant results that may not be of practical significance. Przybylski and Orben calculated that if they had followed standard statistical operating procedure, they could have produced roughly 10,000 papers showing negative screen effects, 5,000 indicating no effect and another 4,000 demonstrating positive technology effects on young people—all from the same data sets.

For their new analysis, they used a technique called specification curve analysis, a tool that examines the full range of possible correlations at once. It is the statistical equivalent of seeing the forest for the trees. Analyzed in this way, digital technology use was associated with only 0.4 percent of the variation in adolescent well-being. The wealth of information in the data allowed for the telling comparisons with potatoes and glasses. It also revealed that smoking marijuana and bullying had much larger negative associations for well-being (at 2.7 and 4.3 times worse, respectively, than the average in one of the data sets), whereas positive behaviors such as getting enough sleep and regularly eating breakfast were much more strongly linked to well-being than technology use. “We’re trying to move from this mindset of cherry-picking one result to a more holistic picture,” Przybylski says. “A key part of that is being able to put these extremely minuscule effects of screens on young people in a real-world context.” (Twenge and others question the usefulness of explaining percentages of variation and say it will always turn up small numbers that might mask practical effects.)

Their second paper, published in April in Psychological Science , included stronger methods for measuring screen time. They used three data sets from the U.S., the U.K. and Ireland that included time-use diaries in addition to self-reported media usage and measures of well-being. Over a period of five years the more than 17,000 teenagers in the studies were given a diary one day each year. They filled in 10- to 15-minute windows all day long about exactly what they were doing, including use of digital technologies. When Orben and Przybylski applied their statistical technique to the data, there was little evidence for substantial negative associations between digital engagement and well-being. The diaries also allowed them to look at when during the day adolescents were using digital media, including before bed. Even that did not make a difference in well-being, although they did not look at hours of sleep as an outcome, only more general psychological measures.

And finally, in May, with psychologist Tobias Dienlin of the University of Hohenheim in Germany, Orben and Przybylski published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA , incorporating longitudinal data to analyze the effect of social media on adolescents’ life satisfaction over time. This approach allowed them to ask whether adolescents who are on social media more in a given year than average feel better or worse at year’s end and whether feeling better or worse than normal changes social media use in the coming year. Here, too, the result was small and nuanced. “The change in social media use in one year only predicts about 0.25 percent of the variance in the change in life satisfaction over one year,” Orben says. “We’re talking about fractions of 1 percent changes.” The researchers did, however, see slightly stronger effects in girls than in boys, a finding Orben intends to investigate further. The question of individual risk will also be important. “We really want to see if there are reproducible profiles of young people who are more or less vulnerable or resilient to different forms of technology,” Przybylski says.

What about Generation Z?

Teenage media use has been a particular concern because of the ubiquity of smartphones today and because adolescence is such a formative period of development. In choosing what to worry about, parents have followed scientists’ lead, says psychologist Candice Odgers of the University of California, Irvine. They worry mainly about how much time their children spend online without giving equal attention to the critical question of what they are doing there. Odgers’s own work suggests that amount of use is not the problem. In a study published online this summer in Clinical Psychological Science , Odgers, Michaeline Jensen of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and their colleagues followed nearly 400 adolescents for two weeks, sending questions to the teenagers’ cell phones three times a day. The study design allowed them to compare mental health symptoms and technology immersion daily as well as over the weeks of the study.

Was media use associated with individual adolescents’ well-being? The answer was not really. Routines in place at the start did not predict later mental health symptoms, and mental health was not worse on days teenagers reported spending more or less time on technology.

“It’s ironic that in the end the real danger is not smartphones—it’s the level of misinformation that’s being directed at the public and at parents,” Odgers says. “It’s consuming so much of the airtime that it’s causing us to miss potentially some of the real threats and problems around digital spaces.” For her part, Odgers is far more worried about privacy and unequal access to technology for kids from families with lower socioeconomic status. She also suspects that some adolescents find much needed social support online and that adults should pay closer attention to what works in that regard.

Social media 2.0

These studies are just the beginning. They have helped clarify the big picture on social media usage, but far more work is needed. Variety in the types of studies conducted will help tease out nuance. In a recent experimental study, for instance, Stanford’s Gentzkow asked more than 1,600 people to deactivate their Facebook accounts, which was verified electronically. He and his colleagues were surprised that substitution of other digital technologies went down, not up. “People perceive they’re spending less time on all these things,” Gentzkow says. The effect size was small, however, and masked a lot of individual variation. Some people loved the break; others really missed their online social world. “Facebook is delivering a lot of value to people, but nevertheless they may be using it more than is really optimal for them,” Gentzkow says. “There are many people for whom scaling back their usage a little could make them happier and better off.”

Several researchers are trying to better measure screen time. Stanford communications researcher Byron Reeves and his colleagues have developed a technique called Screenomics, which takes a picture of people’s phones every five seconds (with permission). Technology companies also have a role to play. Corporations are better able than scientists to count how much time individuals are spending on different activities, but they consider that information proprietary, and there are privacy concerns for users to be addressed. Przybylski is pushing for that policy to change. “Companies shouldn’t get a free pass,” he says.

New research also seeks to do a better job of predicting individual variation. In Hancock’s lab, Stanford undergraduate Angela Lee developed a creative approach. She applied the idea of mindsets—that beliefs shape people’s realities—to social media. Through interviews, Lee found that views about social media fell into two general buckets: whether someone thought social media was good or bad for them (valence) and whether or not they thought they were in control of it (agency). Over the course of three studies, she and Hancock tested close to 700 people and found that social media mindsets predicted users’ well-being. A sense of agency had the strongest effect. “The more you believe you are in control over your social media, the more social support you have, the less depression you report, the less stress, the less social anxiety, regardless of how much you’re actually saying you use social media,” says Lee, who is now a graduate student in Hancock’s lab. She presented the work in May at the Association for Psychological Science meeting.

The power of mindset serves as a reminder of the power of perspective. In the 1980s people were wringing their hands about the time kids spent staring mindlessly at television screens, says Gentzkow, who has studied that era. He imagines asking those worrywarts about new technologies that would allow kids to instead interact with one another by sharing messages, photographs and videos. “Anybody then would have said, ‘Wow, that would be amazing.’”

Lydia Denworth is an award-winning science journalist and contributing editor for Scientific American . She is author of Friendship (W. W. Norton, 2020).

Chapter 6: 21st-century media and issues

6.10.2 Social media and communication (research essay)

Lindsey Matier

English 102, April 2021

Communication is extremely important in today’s world, whether it be verbal or nonverbal. It can take place through many different forms such as through writing, speaking, listening and physical actions. These forms of communication evolve and continue to improve over time. As humans, we rely on communication for almost everything and it is a way of life. Communication has evolved from talking to writing letters to texting or talking over the phone. Every time a new form of communication is brought up and becomes more popular, we have to adapt and evolve to that new lifestyle. Throughout all the new forms of communication and ways of evolving, social media has been one of the most influential so far. Social media has allowed us to create new ways of communicating, such as texting or posting through different apps. It can connect us with people all over the world and give us a platform to express ourselves in ways that have not been possible before. While social media started off as a small form of technology, it has morphed into aspects of our everyday life. Now there are apps for everything from social media profiles to online shopping. While social media and technology itself has evolved, this has also affected our communication with each other and the world. Social media has created a fast track for information in a matter of seconds. It can give people a platform with millions of followers overnight for doing practically anything. It can help people express themselves in new ways and connect with people who have similar interests. The end goal of social media is to make people happy and ultimately make lives easier.

Introduction

With all this being said, it is evident that social media is in our everyday lives and will continue to change. It has a very strong grip on society as social media usage continues to rise throughout the years. Generalizing social media, we are exposed to forms of media at almost all times of the day. Answering the question of what media is will help give a better understanding of social media as a whole. Media can be defined as a way of mass communication. This could include siting in the car listening to ads on the radio all the way to scrolling on twitter. We are exposed to social media less often than generalized media, but it tends to come in greater quantities when exposed. For example, for people that wake up and check twitter it is an instant flood of information with every scroll. Everything from politics to sports to celebrity news is available at the fingertips. The concern is not all focused on the overwhelming information, but also the overwhelming number of comments and opinions. If we wanted to debate or talk about something before social media it had to be done in person, face to face. Now with social media, we are able to fight with people in comment sections on a backup account with a different name and no connection to who we really are. This new form of communication takes away the vulnerability of speaking to people and having genuine conversation, and makes up for it in internet trolls. Overall, social media is impacting the way we communicate with each other and the real questions are: Is social media impacting us in a positive or negative way? Do the positive aspects outweigh the negative aspects? Is social media hindering the way we communicate in person with each other? Is their more room for improvement when it comes to dealing with communication in the social media spectrum? How is social media impacting younger generation’s communication versus older generation’s communication? How can we help improve our communication skills on social media and in real life?

Personal Research 

Along with the other studies that I found from the sources I chose, I also conducted my own study to determine more accurate and recent data. I asked students mostly within high school and college range questions relating to social media and communication. I tried to get a wide range of data dealing with social media apps, screen time, and overall communication as a result of social media. I expected to see almost all negative responses about social media and communication. I figured that most people would respond saying that it has affected them negatively rather than positively, but the results were different compared to what I expected.

The first questions I asked had to do with social media itself. I asked questions about their most used social media apps, screen time, what age they were allowed to start using social media, and whether or not they think social media has had a negative or positive impact on them. As expected, most of the social media apps were some of the most popular ones like Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. Overall, the average screen time for all apps was evenly split between 4-6 and 6-8 hours, which I also expected. Something that did surprise me was the amount of time spent on certain social media apps. The data was split pretty evenly three ways and all between 1-4 hours. The next two questions dealt with when they group surveyed started using social media. I asked these questions because a lot of the points I want to discuss later in my paper have to deal with age and whether younger generations are suffering when it comes to communication. More than half the people surveyed said that they wished that they had waited to get social media until they were older. Some said that it is not appropriate for younger kids and that it is just toxic in general. Something that I really like that a couple people mentioned was that in reality, social media at a young age is stupid and useless. A lot of people said they wish they would have enjoyed their childhood more and they would be more extroverted now if they had not been exposed that early. The last question of this section that I asked was if they thought social media has had a more positive or negative impact on them. Overall, the data was split but leaning slightly towards the more positive side. The positive answers mostly dealt with being able to talk to stay in contact with people and meeting new friends. The negative answers all related to mental health and feeling bad about themselves. A lot of people said it is toxic and very controlling and takes up too much of our time.

The next set of questions I asked had to do more with communication and interaction with and without social media. I asked questions like how they feel about social media and how it has impacted their communication, their mental health, and if it has made our lives easier. I decided to ask questions like these because I figured I would get a wide range of responses and a lot of people’s different opinions. I started off by asking if people are an introvert or an extrovert to get an idea of what the responses would be like, and 66% said somewhere in between the two. The response for the next question really shocked me because I received such a one-side response. I asked if they think social media has impacted their communication and the way they interact with others and 75% (18/24 people) said yes. This is the information that I was looking for along with the next two questions. The next question asked if they think social media has negatively impacted their mental health and 50% said yes. I also plan on using this as a research question to show that social media can affect our mental health and therefore affect the way we interact with and around other people. The last two questions are similar but the responses were both very good. Almost everyone answered yes to the question asking if social media has made our lives easier. Everyone that answered yes said they think so because it helps them talk to friends, stay in touch with people they do not see as much, and meet new people that they are comfortable talking to. The people that said no also made good points such as it takes over our lives and it is filled with too much hate and cancel culture. I agree with both sides and am very happy that people can feel a positive response especially when it comes to communicating with other people online. The last question I asked was used to wrap up the whole survey and topic. I asked if they think social media has made our generation’s communication improve or worsen. The data was pretty evenly split, and most people gave a positive and a negative. The people that said improve gave that answer because they said it broadens our communication and allows us to talk to people at a wider range. The people who said it has made it worse all said that it is ruining our face-to-face interaction and causing us to lose emotion. They said that some people do not even know how to have a proper in person conversation and that they are too dependent on their phones. Overall, I agree with both arguments that people made but I do think that the positives outweigh the negatives in most of these situations and questions.

Research Questions

The first question I want to ask has to deal with the overall social media and communication connection and has multiple other questions I would like to cover within it. The main question is: Is social media hindering the way we communicate with each other? I also want to touch on questions like: Is social media impacting us in a positive or negative way? Do the positives outweigh the negatives? The second set of research questions I have is: Is their more room for improvement when it comes to dealing with communication in the social media spectrum? How can we help improve our communication skills on social media and in real life? How is social media impacting younger generation’s communication versus older generation’s communication?

Research Question One

Social media and communication have a direct connection to each other and both have a strong impact on the outcome of the other. My first research question has to do with that. My questions center around how social media has impacted our communication, and whether or not it is positive or negative. First, I think it is important to note the changes and different characteristics that come into play when talking about this. Things like age and problems going on in our world can affect our social media usage and communication. While we connect to people on a deeper level when talking to the in person, social media has also given us a newer and more broad way of communicating. The article “How Social Media Affects Our Ability to Communicate” by Stacey Hanke, talks about different ways social media has impacted our communication. Social media has become so relevant in our day to day lives and Hanke describes it in a couple different ways. She describes it as information binging and the fear of missing out, social graces and conversational boredom. Within these, she explains how social media has become an excuse and escape to talk to people face to face. Hanke also talks about how even though it is limiting our in person communication, it can sometimes make communicating in general easier, by being able to talk to each other in just a few words (Hanke 1). In another article by Ryan J. Fuller titled “The Impact of Social Media Use on Our Social Skills”, he discusses similar topics to Hanke’s article but also brings up more positive attributes of social media. Fuller starts of his article by giving some statistics, stating that 75% of teens own cellphones and 25% of them using it for social media, and also says that they use 7.5 hours a day using it (Fuller 1). I am glad that this was brought up because it is important to know how much time is spent on social media, scrolling through feed. Next, Fuller starts to discuss some of the benefits of social media. He briefly explains how social media is beneficial because we are able to stay in touch with our friends and family, and share important parts of our lives with them. He also explains how it helps people reach out to new friends and provide themselves with more opportunities (Fuller 1). Overall, I really like that he mentioned these because it is important to keep in mind the vast majority of social media and communication. While some use it for more simpler purposes likes just keeping up to date with what is going on in the world, others use it to make new friends, find new job opportunities, and stay in touch with people. Another topic I find important when it comes to answering this research question is how Covid affected everything. With the pandemic, we were left inside with nothing to do but what was at our fingertips. This pandemic increased social media usage drastically. The article “Social Media Insights Into US Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Analysis of Twitter Data” by Danny Valdez et al, shows extensive research into determining just how much social media usage in the United States increased during the pandemic. They did experiments and surveys to determine multiple responses to research questions and show how much we rely on social media to communicate with each other. During the pandemic, everyone spent more time on their social media and their phone in general, probably more than they would like to admit. The article helps give more insight into this claim. There is the idea that social media was meant as an addition to our lives. For some people, it has become an addiction and a new piece of their life. The article focuses on how social media could be a toxic place and have a negative effect on our mental health. The time period for this information focuses around the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from Twitter, Valdez created a study to determine the mood of people during the pandemic and the usage throughout (Valdez et al 2). Collecting tweets with certain hashtags and during time periods, the goal was to determine how much the pandemic affected people’s moods, and how much they put out and shared on social media. They used hashtags, timeline data, and tweets from different periods such as the first lockdown, different stay at home orders, etc. Given the responses to the data, they were able to determine the increase in social media usage. We cannot determine if this had a positive or negative effect on the people who were using Twitter, but we can infer that social media is becoming a key part of our lives. Not being able to talk to people as much in person during the first few months of the pandemic greatly affected communication, in positive and negative ways. Communication over the phone increased due to the amount of free time that people had and were able to spend talking to others. Contrary to that, in person communication also decreased given that people were not really allowed to leave the house. The next article by Tayebi et al, “The Role of Information Systems in Communication Through Social Media” focuses a lot about how we have evolved over time with social media and communication. They start off by talking about how social networks are like social media societies. They explain it by resembling it to a human society, as it is filled with people communicating, regardless of time or place. They also exemplify other aspects such as emotional support, information, emotions (Tayebi 2). Social media is constantly looked at through such a negative light due to some of the major bad events that have taken place. While it can be difficult at times to look past the negatives, it is important to recognize and acknowledge the positives. The growth of scientific research would not be possible without the amount of information received from the media (Tayebi 3). Without social media and media in general, we would not be where we are today as a society. As mentioned earlier, it is so easy to get lost in the negative aspects of social media and discard the positive ones. Positive parts of social media such as widespread communication and unlimited access to information makes it all worth it. Staying on topic with positive aspects of social media and communication, social media in the workplace has also broken down barriers for communication. The article “A Guide to the Successful Use of Social Media in the Workplace” by Clark Boyd gives insight into how social media has improved the workplace, and ultimately communication and interaction as a whole. Companies can use social media as a form of branding and way to communicate their products (Boyd 4). Boyd states, “Harvard Business Review finds that 82% of employees believe social media improves work relationships. Left to their own devices, your teams will connect and communicate on social networks, both inside and outside the office.” This directly relates to the research question asking whether social media hinders our communication with each other. Social media also helps when it comes to dealing with complaints placed online. By seeing these through social media, it can help the company communicate either with the person or their company the concerns that are being stated (Boyd 9). Overall, it is safe to say that social media has directly affected communication throughout different aspects of our lives.

Research Question Two

My second set of research questions has a lot to do with the future and how we can improve. Questions such as: Is their more room for improvement when it comes to dealing with communication in the social media spectrum? How can we help improve our communication skills on social media and in real life? How is social media impacting younger generation’s communication versus older generation’s communication? The article “What is Literacy” by James Paul Gee talks a lot about the basics of communication. I find this an important article to talk about before I go into more detail with this second research question. Gee explains discourse as a socially accepted way of speaking, thinking, and acting (Gee 1). It is important to note this because social media has changed that discourse for us. We no longer communicate and interact the same way in which we use to therefore almost giving us a new discourse. Another thing Gee discusses is identity kits. Gee explains identity kits as “appropriate costumes and instructions on how to act and talk” (Gee 2). This relates to social media because there is a certain way we communicate online that we wouldn’t do in person. For example, we use emojis and abbreviations to communicate on social media or over text, but this is something we would not do when communicating face-to-face. There are also some basic well-known rules of social media that follow along the lines of an identity kit. Such as, for Instagram it is a common idea not to like people’s pictures from too long ago. When you say this aloud it sounds like it is not a big deal and silly almost, but for people that use social media it is something that makes sense. The next article is going to focus more on the question that has to do with room for improvement of communication. The article “The Positive Effect of Not Following Others on Social Media” by Francesca Valsesia, Davide Proserpio, and Joseph C. Nunes involves how we deal with social media and how we react to it. The article has a lot to do with pyramid schemes and marketing schemes on social media, simply due to follower count. Social media has a lot of power over us and the content we see. Influencers have too much impact on what we see every day and this overall effects our communication (Valsesia 1). Social media feeds us information at our fingertips, whether it be true or false. Valsesia is trying to get the point across that social media has no impact on our lives without the phone and therefore, having a smaller follower count is better for our communication and overall wellbeing in the first place. Leading into my next article, social media can have a huge impact on the younger generation. This leads into part of my second research question dealing with the younger generation and their communication. The article “The Impact of Social Media on Youth Mental Health: Challenges and Opportunities” by Jacqueline Nesi shows how social media is a very complex brand of information and makes it complicated for everyone. Younger kids having access to it and multiple devices like computers and phones makes it that much more difficult. There are a lot of positives and negatives for younger kids having access to social media and the internet in general. It has an impact on their mental health and studies show it leads to signs of depression, body dysmorphia, eating disorders (Nesi 2). It can also affect their communication and outward identity due to things such as bullying, internet drama, and behavioral problems. While it does have serious negative risks, social media also can bring a lot of new positive ones. Things like creative ideas, humor and entertainment, and being able to explore their identity are all really great positives that social media gives us (Nesi 4). Most of them using it as a way to connect with friends and family and help them feel a sense of acceptance and belonging (Nesi 4). Similarly to this, social media has given a great outlet for kids and young adults to speak out on issues going on in the world. The article “Building Bridges: Exploring the Communication Trends and Perceived Sociopolitical Benefits of Adolescents Engaging in Online Social Justice Efforts” by Mariah Elsa Kornbluh goes into detail about the racial injustices in the world and how they are communicated through social media. Social media networks can help connect kids to different backgrounds and aspects of their lives (Kornbluh 1). Kornbluh expresses how a society only can flourish under civic engagement and being able to express ourselves, and social media is helping us do that. It is helping the younger generation prepare for the civic role that they will undergo (Kornbluh 2). Social media helps play a major role in participating in political movements and bringing awareness to topics (Kornbluh 3). This all is done by the younger generation and would not be possible without them. So, while it is easy to look at the negative parts of social media and how it effects the younger generation, it also brings great awareness to real life problems in our world. This last article I wanted to go over dealing with this research question has to do with the pandemic. The article “Responses to COVID-19 in Higher Education: Social Media Usage for Sustaining Formal Academic Communication in Developing Countries” by Abu Elnasr E. Sobaih, Ahmed M. Hasanein and Ahmed E. Abu Elnasr briefly talks about communication with social media in higher education systems. Education systems had to switch from in person learning and communication to online learning, which was a struggle for everyone. Throughout the time that this took place, results showed that social media had a positive effect on students dealing with this (Sobaih 1). Students used social media to build a community and help support each other through this rough time. Through these results, proper usage of social media can be shown as a positive result for a new era of learning (Sobaih 1). This is just one more reason why social media can help us improve our future.

After answering my research questions, it has become clear to me that while social media does have negative aspects, the positive aspects outweigh them. Between the articles and my own research, I have enough evidence to prove that social media does effect communication, but in a more positive way. The way we act and present ourselves is heavily influenced by social media and communication between generations are different and can be seen that way. It is important to note the accomplishments we have made as a society with social media and the media in general. It has helped connect families, provide support groups, and provide entertainment in desperate times. Our communication has changed because of social media but has changed and helped us for the better in the long run. Keeping social media a positive place and staying away from the toxic people on it will only help us grow and learn new things about ourselves.

Works Cited

Boyd, Clark. “A Guide to Using Social Media in the Workplace in 2021.”  The Blueprint , The Blueprint, 13 May 2020, www.fool.com/the-blueprint/social-media-in-the-workplace/.

https://www.fool.com/the-blueprint/social-media-in-the-workplace/

D, Valdez, et al. “Social Media Insights Into US Mental Health During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Analysis of Twitter Data.”  Journal of Medical Internet Research  , vol. 22, no. 12, 14 Dec. 2020, pp. 1438–8871.

http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu:2050/eds/detail/detail? vid=8&sid=ff59b04c-b868-44cd-b864-4538e112a2ea%40sessionmgr103&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#AN=33284783&db=mnh

J, Nesi. “The Impact of Social Media on Youth Health: Challenges and Opportunities.”  North Carolina Medical Journal , vol. 81, no. 2, 2020, pp. 116–121.

http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu:2050/eds/detail/detail?vid=10&sid=ff59b04c-b868-44cd-b864-4538e112a2ea%40sessionmgr103&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#AN=32132255&db=mnh

Gee, James Paul. “What is literacy.”  Negotiating academic literacies: Teaching and learning  across languages and cultures  (1998): 51-59.

https://academic.jamespaulgee.com/pdfs/Gee%20What%20is%20Literacy.pdf

Hanke, Stacey. “How Social Media Affects Our Ability to Communicate.”  Thrive Global , 13  Sept. 2018, thriveglobal.com/stories/how-social-media-affects-our-ability-to-communicate/.

https://thriveglobal.com/stories/how-social-media-affects-our-ability-to-communicate/

http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu:2050/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&sid=467b825c-34f8-4e47-95df-e5b2b61bbaf4%40sessionmgr4006

Kornbluh, Mariah Elsa. “Building Bridges.”  Youth & Society , vol. 51, no. 8, 2017, pp. 1104–1126., doi:10.1177/0044118×17723656.

https://journals-sagepub-com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/0044118X17723656

Retchin, Sarah, et al. “The Impact of Social Media Use on Social Skills.”  New York Behavioral Health , 1 Dec. 2020, newyorkbehavioralhealth.com/the-impact-of-social-media-use-on-social-skills/.

https://newyorkbehavioralhealth.com/the-impact-of-social-media-use-on-social-skills/

Sobaih, Abu Elnasr E., et al. “Responses to COVID-19 in Higher Education: Social Media Usage for Sustaining Formal Academic Communication in Developing Countries.”  MDPI , Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 12 Aug. 2020, www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6520/htm.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6520/htm

Tayeb, Seyed Mohammad, et al. “The Role of Information Systems in Communication through Social Media.”  International Journal of Data and Network Science , vol. 3, no. 3, 2019, pp. 245–268., doi:10.5267/j.ijdns.2019.2.002.

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Valsesia, Francesca, et al. “The Positive Effect of Not Following Others on Social Media .”  Journal of Marketing Research  , vol. 57, no. 6, Dec. 2020, pp. 1152–1168.

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Understanding Literacy in Our Lives by Lindsey Matier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Social Media Is Destroying Quality Human Interaction

• https://thoughtcatalog.com/?p=388201

Social and digital media have become a huge part of today’s society. The Cyber World exists parallel to our physical reality in that the Internet, television, video games, and cell phones all play a role in shaping who we are as individuals existing together outside of technology. Experts say digital media helps us because it may enhance time management skills; increase productivity or social interactions; and may even improve optimism and self-esteem, as well as general knowledge. However, Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT, claims that social media is a metaphor for real life. We think it might change our lives for the better, make it easier, make us happier… but we all know what they say: you can’t buy happiness. Well, social media comes with a cost. I want to argue that too much of it can become a problem where we are no longer helping ourselves, but where we are beginning to become handicapped by changing our relationships with society and perhaps even our evolutionary path.

Social media may appear to make our lives easier, but at the same time it complicates them. Studies show that the pressure of having to present oneself in a way that is acceptable to online friends increases stress levels. The fact that we have to worry about how we appear to “everyone” in cyber-society adds unnecessary stress to our lives. Simultaneously, we have far more information accessible to us than we’re programmed to have. Knowing too much about everything going on in the world through constant access to cyber reports requires us to be involved in it. We become seemingly too busy caring about the people we hardly know inside these machines; then we can no longer balance worrying about things with which we should be concerned, such as real-life relationships, skills, and (probably the most unfortunate) ourselves.

Constantly having access to anything we think we need or want at that moment, especially social interaction, becomes too much to handle and is technically not even real – it is cyber interaction. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs proves that you don’t need that constant connection with society to survive. We do not need to keep in contact with every single person we meet – only those with whom we’ve formed meaningful relationships, with whom we socialize outside of the cyber world. As Maslow theorizes, social interaction is in the middle of our necessities to survive. We need it in balance to reach self-actualization. However too much of it can drive a person insane; a plethora of information being thrown at us is bound to reveal unwanted material, such as accidently stumbling upon a spoiler for a movie you really wanted to see or worrying about that one (most likely harmless) person commenting your significant other’s photos. Digital media involves us in innumerous lives and events that are not always meant to be of our concern.

It is not just one form of digital media that affects our life relationships either. Facebook and other social networking sites allow us to find out about our friends “lives” without even having to talk to them – the media they choose to upload shows you. Television and movies show us models of perfect relationships so our real-life expectations of how others should act are altered. Films also show us hostile behaviors and sometimes make it seem okay to be a belligerent, violent individual. Similarly video games actually allow us to be the violent character, which in essence can teach us to behave more aggressively with others or be confused about how to act in general.

Social media appears to help us communicate and in turn make our lives easier, but it is in reality allowing us to access too much information and is handicapping us as a functioning society. My dad is always telling me that having a phone in my reach every minute of every day is a physical handicap because I have to either physically hold it or worry about misplacing or breaking it and losing my “entire life.” The fact that many other digital natives and I refer to our phones, a device that can play many different types of media, as “our entire life” is a bit ludicrous. I can do so much on my device that I feel it is comparable to my life, my reality… even though it is not. Digital natives are losing real life communication skills by forming online relationships with robots and learning these skills from them rather than living older generations. According to a study done by Majid Zorofi, professor of psychology at an Islamic university, many teenagers claim that it is much easier to talk via text message because it allows time to think before responding. I would say it is also much easier to be taught online where anything I need to know is a few Google-searches away. My generation is being taught via machines a multitude of topics… anything imaginable. I think it’s just too much information being shared through robots.

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Jessica Serra

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64% of Americans say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the U.S. today

About two-thirds of Americans (64%) say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the country today, according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted July 13-19, 2020. Just one-in-ten Americans say social media sites have a mostly positive effect on the way things are going, and one-quarter say these platforms have a neither positive nor negative effect.

Those who have a negative view of the impact of social media mention, in particular, misinformation and the hate and harassment they see on social media. They also have concerns about users believing everything they see or read – or not being sure about what to believe. Additionally, they bemoan social media’s role in fomenting partisanship and polarization, the creation of echo chambers, and the perception that these platforms oppose President Donald Trump and conservatives.

This is part of a series of posts on Americans’ experiences with and attitudes about the role of social media in politics today. Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand how Americans think about the impact of social media on the way things are currently going in the country. To explore this, we surveyed 10,211 U.S. adults from July 13 to 19, 2020. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

The public’s views on the positive and negative effect of social media vary widely by political affiliation and ideology. Across parties, larger shares describe social media’s impact as mostly negative rather than mostly positive, but this belief is particularly widespread among Republicans.

Roughly half of Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party (53%) say social media have a largely negative effect on the way things are going in the country today, compared with 78% of Republicans and leaners who say the same. Democrats are about three times as likely as Republicans to say these sites have a mostly positive impact (14% vs. 5%) and twice as likely to say social media have neither a positive nor negative effect (32% vs. 16%).

Among Democrats, there are no differences in these views along ideological lines. Republicans, however, are slightly more divided by ideology. Conservative Republicans are more likely than moderate to liberal Republicans to say social media have a mostly negative effect (83% vs. 70%). Conversely, moderate to liberal Republicans are more likely than their conservative counterparts to say social media have a mostly positive (8% vs. 4%) or neutral impact (21% vs. 13%).

Younger adults are more likely to say social media have a positive impact on the way things are going in the country and are less likely to believe social media sites have a negative impact compared with older Americans. For instance, 15% of those ages 18 to 29 say social media have a mostly positive effect on the way things are going in the country today, while just 8% of those over age 30 say the same. Americans 18 to 29 are also less likely than those 30 and older to say social media have a mostly negative impact (54% vs. 67%).

However, views among younger adults vary widely by partisanship. For example, 43% of Democrats ages 18 to 29 say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going, compared with about three-quarters (76%) of Republicans in the same age group. In addition, these youngest Democrats are more likely than their Republican counterparts to say social media platforms have a mostly positive (20% vs. 6%) or neither a positive nor negative effect (35% vs. 18%) on the way things are going in the country today. This partisan division persists among those 30 and older, but most of the gaps are smaller than those seen within the younger cohort.

Views on the negative impact of social media vary only slightly between social media users (63%) and non-users (69%), with non-users being slightly more likely to say these sites have a negative impact. However, among social media users, those who say some or a lot of what they see on social media is related to politics are more likely than those who say a little or none of what they see on these sites is related to politics to think social media platforms have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the country today (65% vs. 50%).

Past Pew Research Center studies have drawn attention to the complicated relationships Americans have with social media. In 2019, a Center survey found that 72% of U.S. adults reported using at least one social media site. And while these platforms have been used for political and social activism and engagement , they also raise concerns among portions of the population. Some think political ads on these sites are unacceptable, and many object to the way social media platforms have been weaponized to spread made-up news and engender online harassment . At the same time, a share of users credit something they saw on social media with changing their views about a political or social issue. And growing shares of Americans who use these sites also report feeling worn out by political posts and discussions on social media.

Those who say social media have negative impact cite concerns about misinformation, hate, censorship; those who see positive impact cite being informed

When asked to elaborate on the main reason why they think social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in this country today, roughly three-in-ten (28%) respondents who hold that view mention the spreading of misinformation and made-up news. Smaller shares reference examples of hate, harassment, conflict and extremism (16%) as a main reason, and 11% mention a perceived lack of critical thinking skills among many users – voicing concern about people who use these sites believing everything they see or read or being unsure about what to believe.

In written responses that mention misinformation or made-up news, a portion of adults often include references to the spread, speed and amount of false information available on these platforms. (Responses are lightly edited for spelling, style and readability.) For example:

“They allow for the rampant spread of misinformation.” –Man, 36

“False information is spread at lightning speed – and false information never seems to go away.” –Woman, 71

“Social media is rampant with misinformation both about the coronavirus and political and social issues, and the social media organizations do not do enough to combat this.” –Woman, 26

“Too much misinformation and lies are promoted from unsubstantiated sources that lead people to disregard vetted and expert information.” –Woman, 64

People’s responses that centered around hate, harassment, conflict or extremism in some way often mention concerns that social media contributes to incivility online tied to anonymity, the spreading of hate-filled ideas or conspiracies, or the incitement of violence.

“People say incendiary, stupid and thoughtless things online with the perception of anonymity that they would never say to someone else in person.” –Man, 53

“Promotes hate and extreme views and in some cases violence.” –Man, 69

“People don’t respect others’ opinions. They take it personally and try to fight with the other group. You can’t share your own thoughts on controversial topics without fearing someone will try to hurt you or your family.” –Woman, 65

“Social media is where people go to say some of the most hateful things they can imagine.” –Man, 46

About one-in-ten responses talk about how people on social media can be easily confused and believe everything they see or read or are not sure about what to believe.

“People believe everything they see and don’t verify its accuracy.” –Man, 75

“Many people can’t distinguish between real and fake news and information and share it without doing proper research …” –Man, 32

“You don’t know what’s fake or real.” –Man, 49

“It is hard to discern truth.” –Woman, 80

“People cannot distinguish fact from opinion, nor can they critically evaluate sources. They tend to believe everything they read, and when they see contradictory information (particularly propaganda), they shut down and don’t appear to trust any information.” –Man, 42

Smaller shares complain that the platforms censor content or allow material that is biased (9%), too negative (7%) or too steeped in partisanship and division (6%).

“Social media is censoring views that are different than theirs. There is no longer freedom of speech.” –Woman, 42

“It creates more divide between people with different viewpoints.” –Man, 37

“Focus is on negativity and encouraging angry behavior rather than doing something to help people and make the world better.” –Woman, 66

Far fewer Americans – 10% – say they believe social media has a mostly positive effect on the way things are going in the country today. When those who hold these positive views were asked about the main reason why they thought this, one-quarter say these sites help people stay informed and aware (25%) and about one-in-ten say they allow for communication, connection and community-building (12%).

“We are now aware of what’s happening around the world due to the social media outlet.” –Woman, 28

“It brings awareness to important issues that affect all Americans.” –Man, 60

“It brings people together; folks can see that there are others who share the same/similar experience, which is really important, especially when so many of us are isolated.” –Woman, 36

“Helps people stay connected and share experiences. I also get advice and recommendations via social media.” –Man, 32

“It keeps people connected who might feel lonely and alone if there did not have social media …” – Man, 65

Smaller shares tout social media as a place where marginalized people and groups have a voice (8%) and as a venue for activism and social movements (7%).

“Spreading activism and info and inspiring participation in Black Lives Matter.” –Woman, 31

“It gives average people an opportunity to voice and share their opinions.” –Man, 67

“Visibility – it has democratized access and provided platforms for voices who have been and continue to be oppressed.” –Woman, 27

Note: This is part of a series of blog posts leading up to the 2020 presidential election that explores the role of social media in politics today. Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

Other posts in this series:

• 23% of users in U.S. say social media led them to change views on an issue; some cite Black Lives Matter
• 54% of Americans say social media companies shouldn’t allow any political ads
• 55% of U.S. social media users say they are ‘worn out’ by political posts and discussions
• Americans think social media can help build movements, but can also be a distraction
• Misinformation
• Misinformation Online
• National Conditions
• Political Discourse
• Politics Online
• Social Media

Brooke Auxier is a former research associate focusing on internet and technology at Pew Research Center .

Majorities in most countries surveyed say social media is good for democracy

­most americans favor restrictions on false information, violent content online, as ai spreads, experts predict the best and worst changes in digital life by 2035, social media seen as mostly good for democracy across many nations, but u.s. is a major outlier, the role of alternative social media in the news and information environment, most popular.

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Yes, Social Media Really Is Undermining Democracy

Despite what Meta has to say.

W ithin the past 15 years, social media has insinuated itself into American life more deeply than food-delivery apps into our diets and microplastics into our bloodstreams. Look at stories about conflict, and it’s often lurking in the background. Recent articles on the rising dysfunction within progressive organizations point to the role of Twitter, Slack, and other platforms in prompting “endless and sprawling internal microbattles,” as The Intercept ’s Ryan Grim put it, referring to the ACLU. At a far higher level of conflict, the congressional hearings about the January 6 insurrection show us how Donald Trump’s tweets summoned the mob to Washington and aimed it at the vice president. Far-right groups then used a variety of platforms to coordinate and carry out the attack.

Social media has changed life in America in a thousand ways, and nearly two out of three Americans now believe that these changes are for the worse. But academic researchers have not yet reached a consensus that social media is harmful. That’s been a boon to social-media companies such as Meta, which argues, as did tobacco companies, that the science is not “ settled .”

The lack of consensus leaves open the possibility that social media may not be very harmful. Perhaps we’ve fallen prey to yet another moral panic about a new technology and, as with television, we’ll worry about it less after a few decades of conflicting studies. A different possibility is that social media is quite harmful but is changing too quickly for social scientists to capture its effects. The research community is built on a quasi-moral norm of skepticism: We begin by assuming the null hypothesis (in this case, that social media is not harmful), and we require researchers to show strong, statistically significant evidence in order to publish their findings. This takes time—a couple of years, typically, to conduct and publish a study; five or more years before review papers and meta-analyses come out; sometimes decades before scholars reach agreement. Social-media platforms, meanwhile, can change dramatically in just a few years .

So even if social media really did begin to undermine democracy (and institutional trust and teen mental health ) in the early 2010s, we should not expect social science to “settle” the matter until the 2030s. By then, the effects of social media will be radically different, and the harms done in earlier decades may be irreversible.

Let me back up. This spring, The Atlantic published my essay “ Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid ,” in which I argued that the best way to understand the chaos and fragmentation of American society is to see ourselves as citizens of Babel in the days after God rendered them unable to understand one another.

I showed how a few small changes to the architecture of social-media platforms, implemented from 2009 to 2012, increased the virality of posts on those platforms, which then changed the nature of social relationships. People could spread rumors and half-truths more quickly, and they could more readily sort themselves into homogenous tribes. Even more important, in my view, was that social-media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook could now be used more easily by anyone to attack anyone. It was as if the platforms had passed out a billion little dart guns, and although most users didn’t want to shoot anyone, three kinds of people began darting others with abandon: the far right, the far left, and trolls.

Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell: The dark psychology of social networks

All of these groups were suddenly given the power to dominate conversations and intimidate dissenters into silence. A fourth group—Russian agents––also got a boost, though they didn’t need to attack people directly. Their long-running project, which ramped up online in 2013, was to fabricate, exaggerate, or simply promote stories that would increase Americans’ hatred of one another and distrust of their institutions.

The essay proved to be surprisingly uncontroversial—or, at least, hardly anyone attacked me on social media. But a few responses were published, including one from Meta (formerly Facebook), which pointed to studies it said contradicted my argument. There was also an essay in The New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who interviewed me and other scholars who study politics and social media. He argued that social media might well be harmful to democracies, but the research literature is too muddy and contradictory to support firm conclusions.

So was my diagnosis correct, or are concerns about social media overblown? It’s a crucial question for the future of our society. As I argued in my essay, critics make us smarter. I’m grateful, therefore, to Meta and the researchers interviewed by Lewis-Kraus for helping me sharpen and extend my argument in three ways.

Are Democracies Becoming More Polarized and Less Healthy?

My essay laid out a wide array of harms that social media has inflicted on society. Political polarization is just one of them, but it is central to the story of rising democratic dysfunction.

Meta questioned whether social media should be blamed for increased polarization. In response to my essay, Meta’s head of research, Pratiti Raychoudhury, pointed to a study by Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse Shapiro that looked at trends in 12 countries and found, she said, “that in some countries polarization was on the rise before Facebook even existed, and in others it has been decreasing while internet and Facebook use increased.” In a recent interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman , Mark Zuckerberg cited this same study in support of a more audacious claim: “Most of the academic studies that I’ve seen actually show that social-media use is correlated with lower polarization.”

Does that study really let social media off the hook? It plotted political polarization based on survey responses in 12 countries, most with data stretching back to the 1970s, and then drew straight lines that best fit the data points over several decades. It’s true that, while some lines sloped upward (meaning that polarization increased across the period as a whole), others sloped downward. But my argument wasn’t about the past 50 years. It was about a phase change that happened in the early 2010s , after Facebook and Twitter changed their architecture to enable hyper-virality.

I emailed Gentzkow to ask whether he could put a “hinge” in the graphs in the early 2010s, to see if the trends in polarization changed direction or accelerated in the past decade. He replied that there was not enough data after 2010 to make such an analysis reliable. He also noted that Meta’s response essay had failed to cite a 2020 article in which he and three colleagues found that randomly assigning participants to deactivate Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections reduced polarization.

Adrienne LaFrance: ‘History will not judge us kindly’

Meta’s response motivated me to look for additional publications to evaluate what had happened to democracies in the 2010s. I discovered four. One of them found no overall trend in polarization, but like the study by Boxell, Gentzkow, and Shapiro, it had few data points after 2015. The other three had data through 2020, and all three reported substantial increases in polarization and/or declines in the number or quality of democracies around the world.

One of them, a 2022 report from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, found that “liberal democracies peaked in 2012 with 42 countries and are now down to the lowest levels in over 25 years.” It summarized the transformations of global democracy over the past 10 years in stark terms:

Just ten years ago the world looked very different from today. In 2011, there were more countries improving than declining on every aspect of democracy. By 2021 the world has been turned on its head: there are more countries declining than advancing on nearly all democratic aspects captured by V-Dem measures.

The report also notes that “toxic polarization”—signaled by declining “respect for counter-arguments and associated aspects of the deliberative component of democracy”—grew more severe in at least 32 countries.

A paper published one week after my Atlantic essay, by Yunus E. Orhan, found a global spike in democratic “backsliding” since 2008, and linked it to affective polarization, or animosity toward the other side. When affective polarization is high, partisans tolerate antidemocratic behavior by politicians on their own side––such as the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

And finally, the Economist Intelligence Unit reported a global decline in various democratic measures starting after 2015, according to its Democracy Index.

These three studies cannot prove that social media caused the global decline, but—contra Meta and Zuckerberg—they show a global trend toward polarization in the previous decade, the one in which the world embraced social media.

Has Social Media Created Harmful Echo Chambers?

So why did democracies weaken in the 2010s? How might social media have made them more fragmented and less stable? One popular argument contends that social media sorts users into echo chambers––closed communities of like-minded people. Lack of contact with people who hold different viewpoints allows a sort of tribal groupthink to take hold, reducing the quality of everyone’s thinking and the prospects for compromise that are essential in a democratic system.

According to Meta, however, “More and more research discredits the idea that social media algorithms create an echo chamber.” It points to two sources to back up that claim, but many studies show evidence that social media does in fact create echo chambers. Because conflicting studies are common in social-science research, I created a “ collaborative review ” document last year with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke University who studies social media. It’s a public Google doc in which we organize the abstracts of all the studies we can find about social media’s impact on democracy, and then we invite other experts to add studies, comments, and criticisms. We cover research on seven different questions, including whether social media promotes echo chambers. After spending time in the document, Lewis-Kraus wrote in The New Yorker : “The upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear.”

He is certainly right that nothing is unambiguous. But as I have learned from curating three such documents , researchers often reach opposing conclusions because they have “operationalized” the question differently. That is, they have chosen different ways to turn an abstract question (about the prevalence of echo chambers, say) into something concrete and measurable. For example, researchers who choose to measure echo chambers by looking at the diversity of people’s news consumption typically find little evidence that they exist at all. Even partisans end up being exposed to news stories and videos from the other side. Both of the sources that Raychoudhury cited in her defense of Meta mention this idea.

Derek Thompson: Social media is attention alcohol

But researchers who measure echo chambers by looking at social relationships and networks usually find evidence of “homophily”—that is, people tend to engage with others who are similar to themselves. One study of politically engaged Twitter users, for example, found that they “are disproportionately exposed to like-minded information and that information reaches like-minded users more quickly.” So should we throw up our hands and say that the findings are irreconcilable? No, we should integrate them, as the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci did in a 2018 essay . Coming across contrary viewpoints on social media, she wrote, is “not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone.” Rather, she said, “it’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium … We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one.” Mere exposure to different sources of news doesn’t automatically break open echo chambers; in fact, it can reinforce them.

These closely bonded groupings can have profound political ramifications, as a couple of my critics in the New Yorker article acknowledged. A major feature of the post-Babel world is that the extremes are now far louder and more influential than before. They may also become more violent. Recent research by Morteza Dehghani and his colleagues at the University of Southern California shows that people are more willing to commit violence when they are immersed in a community they perceive to be morally homogeneous.

This finding seems to be borne out by a statement from the 18-year-old man who recently killed 10 Black Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo. In the Q&A portion of the manifesto attributed to him, he wrote:

Where did you get your current beliefs? Mostly from the internet. There was little to no influence on my personal beliefs by people I met in person.

The killer goes on to claim that he had read information “from all ideologies,” but I find it unlikely that he consumed a balanced informational diet, or, more important, that he hung out online with ideologically diverse users. The fact that he livestreamed his shooting tells us he assumed that his community shared his warped worldview. He could not have found such an extreme yet homogeneous group in his small town 200 miles from Buffalo. But thanks to social media, he found an international fellowship of extreme racists who jointly worshipped past mass murderers and from whom he copied sections of his manifesto.

Is Social Media the Primary Villain in This Story?

In her response to my essay, Raychoudhury did not deny that Meta bore any blame. Rather, her defense was two-pronged, arguing that the research is not yet definitive, and that, in any case, we should be focusing on mainstream media as the primary cause of harm.

Raychoudhury pointed to a study on the role of cable TV and mainstream media as major drivers of partisanship. She is correct to do so: The American culture war has roots going back to the turmoil of the 1960s, which activated evangelicals and other conservatives in the ’70s. Social media (which arrived around 2004 and became truly pernicious, I argue, only after 2009) is indeed a more recent player in this phenomenon.

In my essay, I included a paragraph on this backstory, noting the role of Fox News and the radicalizing Republican Party of the ’90s, but I should have said more. The story of polarization is complex, and political scientists cite a variety of contributing factors , including the growing politicization of the urban-rural divide; rising immigration; the increasing power of big and very partisan donors; the loss of a common enemy when the Soviet Union collapsed; and the loss of the “Greatest Generation,” which had an ethos of service forged in the crisis of the Second World War. And although polarization rose rapidly in the 2010s, the rise began in the ’90s, so I cannot pin the majority of the rise on social media.

But my essay wasn’t primarily about ordinary polarization. I was trying to explain a new dynamic that emerged in the 2010s: the fear of one another , even—and perhaps especially––within groups that share political or cultural affinities. This fear has created a whole new set of social and political problems.

The loss of a common enemy and those other trends with roots in the 20th century can help explain America’s ever nastier cross-party relationships, but they can’t explain why so many college students and professors suddenly began to express more fear, and engage in more self-censorship, around 2015. These mostly left-leaning people weren’t worried about the “other side”; they were afraid of a small number of students who were further to the left, and who enthusiastically hunted for verbal transgressions and used social media to publicly shame offenders.

A few years later, that same fearful dynamic spread to newsrooms , companies , nonprofit organizations , and many other parts of society . The culture war had been running for two or three decades by then, but it changed in the mid-2010s when ordinary people with little to no public profile suddenly became the targets of social-media mobs. Consider the famous 2013 case of Justine Sacco , who tweeted an insensitive joke about her trip to South Africa just before boarding her flight in London and became an international villain by the time she landed in Cape Town. She was fired the next day. Or consider the the far right’s penchant for using social media to publicize the names and photographs of largely unknown local election officials, health officials, and school-board members who refuse to bow to political pressure, and who are then subjected to waves of vitriol, including threats of violence to themselves and their children, simply for doing their jobs. These phenomena, now common to the culture, could not have happened before the advent of hyper-viral social media in 2009.

Matthew Hindman, Nathaniel Lubin, and Trevor Davis: Facebook has a superuser-supremacy problem

This fear of getting shamed, reported, doxxed, fired, or physically attacked is responsible for the self-censorship and silencing of dissent that were the main focus of my essay. When dissent within any group or institution is stifled, the group will become less perceptive, nimble, and effective over time.

Social media may not be the primary cause of polarization, but it is an important cause, and one we can do something about. I believe it is also the primary cause of the epidemic of structural stupidity, as I called it, that has recently afflicted many of America’s key institutions.

What Can We Do to Make Things Better?

My essay presented a series of structural solutions that would allow us to repair some of the damage that social media has caused to our key democratic and epistemic institutions. I proposed three imperatives: (1) harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, (2) reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and (3) better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.

I believe that we should begin implementing these reforms now, even if the science is not yet “settled.” Beyond a reasonable doubt is the appropriate standard of evidence for reviewers guarding admission to a scientific journal, or for jurors establishing guilt in a criminal trial. It is too high a bar for questions about public health or threats to the body politic. A more appropriate standard is the one used in civil trials: the preponderance of evidence. Is social media probably damaging American democracy via at least one of the seven pathways analyzed in our collaborative-review document , or probably not ? I urge readers to examine the document themselves. I also urge the social-science community to find quicker ways to study potential threats such as social media, where platforms and their effects change rapidly. Our motto should be “Move fast and test things.” Collaborative-review documents are one way to speed up the process by which scholars find and respond to one another’s work.

Beyond these structural solutions, I considered adding a short section to the article on what each of us can do as individuals, but it sounded a bit too preachy, so I cut it. I now regret that decision. I should have noted that all of us, as individuals, can be part of the solution by choosing to act with courage, moderation, and compassion. It takes a great deal of resolve to speak publicly or stand your ground when a barrage of snide, disparaging, and otherwise hostile comments is coming at you and nobody rises to your defense (out of fear of getting attacked themselves).

Read: How to fix Twitter—and all of social media

Fortunately, social media does not usually reflect real life, something that more people are beginning to understand. A few years ago, I heard an insight from an older business executive. He noted that before social media, if he received a dozen angry letters or emails from customers, they spurred him to action because he assumed that there must be a thousand other disgruntled customers who didn’t bother to write. But now, if a thousand people like an angry tweet or Facebook post about his company, he assumes that there must be a dozen people who are really upset.

Seeing that social-media outrage is transient and performative should make it easier to withstand, whether you are the president of a university or a parent speaking at a school-board meeting. We can all do more to offer honest dissent and support the dissenters within institutions that have become structurally stupid. We can all get better at listening with an open mind and speaking in order to engage another human being rather than impress an audience. Teaching these skills to our children and our students is crucial, because they are the generation who will have to reinvent deliberative democracy and Tocqueville’s “art of association” for the digital age.

We must act with compassion too. The fear and cruelty of the post-Babel era are a result of its tendency to reward public displays of aggression. Social media has put us all in the middle of a Roman coliseum, and many in the audience want to see conflict and blood. But once we realize that we are the gladiators—tricked into combat so that we might generate “content,” “engagement,” and revenue—we can refuse to fight. We can be more understanding toward our fellow citizens, seeing that we are all being driven mad by companies that use largely the same set of psychological tricks. We can forswear public conflict and use social media to serve our own purposes, which for most people will mean more private communication and fewer public performances.

The post-Babel world will not be rebuilt by today’s technology companies. That work will be left to citizens who understand the forces that brought us to the verge of self-destruction, and who develop the new habits, virtues, technologies, and shared narratives that will allow us to reap the benefits of living and working together in peace.

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Social Media Has Destroyed Real Life Communication

• Sumiya Amjad
• October 27, 2023
• CSS Solved Essays

CSS Special 2023 Solved Essays | Social Media Has Destroyed Real Life Communication

Sumiya Amjad , a Sir Syed Kazim Ali student, has attempted the CSS Special 2023 essay “ Social Media has Destroyed Real Life Communication ” on the given pattern, which Sir  Syed Kazim Ali  teaches his students. Sir Syed Kazim Ali has been Pakistan’s top English writing and CSS, PMS essay and precis coach with the highest success rate of his students. The essay is uploaded to help other competitive aspirants learn and practice essay writing techniques and patterns to qualify for the essay paper.

1- Introduction:

• Social media’s pervasive influence has led to the deterioration of authentic, face-to-face communication by fostering shallow, superficial interactions that prioritize virtual connections, resulting in reduced empathy, heightened instances of misinterpretation, and an overall deterioration in the quality of our interpersonal relationships.

2- The current state of evolution and performance of social media

• ✓ Emergence of social media platforms
• According to Data Report, there are 4.62 billion active social media users worldwide in October 2023. This means that over 58% of the world’s population is using social media.

3- Which aspects of real-life communication are destroyed by social media?

• Case in Point: According to the American Press Institute 2014 report, 6 in 10 people reported not reading beyond the headline.
• Case in Point: In a study conducted by Full Wood (2017), young people heavily engaged with social media tend to misinterpret non-verbal cues, resulting in negative social interactions.
• Case in Point: Forbes report: By 2025, AI-generated profiles will pose a significant threat, contributing to the rise of sophisticated catfishing
• Case in Point: A 2022 study by the National Center for Bullying Prevention found that 20% of US students ages 12-18 have experienced cyberbullying.
• Case in Point: In 2019, a white supremacist gunman killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The gunman had been active on social media platforms, where he spread his hateful views and recruited followers.

4- What are the impacts of social media’s destruction of real-life communication?

• COVID-19 Misinformation
• Joe Biden’s false statement of beheading of Israeli children by Hamas
• Political polarization in the US
• Preference of social media communication over in-person meetings leading to meagre inter-personal skills development
• Deals regarding real estate, working with supply-chain companies

5- Aspects of social media which have enabled destruction of real-life communication:

• Easy spread of propaganda and misinformation
• The global social media usage rate stood at 59 per cent
• Amazon, Shopify, Nike, Coca-Cola

6- How to reduce the negative impacts of social media on real-life communication?

• Set time for social media usage
• ✓ Developing digital literacy to distinguish reliable sources from fake ones
• ✓ Enhancing real life interactions through active and meaningful discussions
• ✓ Connecting with people with similar interests rather than the ones with pessimistic approach (social media groups and communities)
• ✓ Utilizing social platforms to improve, grow and develop (recipe videos, fitness inspiration and self-help tips)
•   ✓ Prioritizing real-world social interactions and experiences (field trips, get together)

7- Critical Analysis

8- Conclusion

Communication in real life is the cornerstone upon which human relationships are built, connecting individuals on both emotional and spiritual levels and fostering a sense of belonging within society. Nevertheless, the absence of genuine communication can lead to estrangement among family members and friends, ultimately giving rise to social anxiety and feelings of isolation. This unfortunate trend is undoubtedly exacerbated by the rampant use of social media, which has gradually eroded traditional face-to-face interactions and shifted people’s focus away from genuine conversations, causing a rift in friendships and family bonds. Moreover, the negative consequences of social media, such as reduced attention spans, the prevalence of catfishing, and diminished empathetic behaviour, have significantly contributed to the deterioration of the quality of relationships, social discord, and a decline in interpersonal skill development. However, the solution to revitalizing authentic communication and nurturing healthier relationships lies in mitigating excessive social media usage and curbing addiction. As accurately observed by Naskar,  “There is no such thing as social media; there is only unsocial media.”  This essay will embark on a journey to explore the profound impact of social media on real-life communication, unravelling the complex tapestry of its consequences and discovering pathways to balance the scales of connection and disconnection in contemporary society .

The emergence of social media platforms has redefined how people communicate and interact in the digital age. Not only these platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, have become integral to people’s daily lives, but they have also transformed the way people share information, connect with friends and family, and engage with the world around them.  According to a Data Report in October 2023, there are a staggering 4.62 billion active social media users worldwide, accounting for over 58% of the global population.  This statistic underscores the sheer ubiquity of social media in our lives. Therefore, this evolution has not only revolutionized how people interact but also profoundly impacted their cultural, business, and political values.

One of the significant impacts of social media on real-life communication is its influence on people’s attention spans. In the digital age, individuals are frequently bombarded with a constant stream of information, often presented in bite-sized formats designed for quick consumption. This has resulted in a concerning decrease in people’s ability to focus and maintain attention, especially when compared to face-to-face interactions.  According to the American Press Institute 2014 report, a significant portion of individuals, specifically 6 in 10 people, admitted to not reading beyond the headlines of articles or posts.  This alarming statistic underscores the tendency to skim content and seek quick, surface-level information, which is a stark departure from the deep and sustained engagement that typically characterizes face-to-face interactions.

Moreover, the prevalence of social media has ushered in a new challenge when it comes to real-life communication; it often serves as a significant distraction, making it hard for individuals to focus on face-to-face conversations. The constant allure of notifications, updates, and digital interactions diverts people’s attention and disrupts the quality of in-person exchanges.  A notable study conducted by Fullwood in 2017 revealed a disconcerting trend among young people who are heavily engaged with social media.  These individuals tend to misinterpret non-verbal cues in real-life interactions, leading to negative social exchanges. When someone is engrossed in their digital world, they may fail to pick up on important non-verbal signals such as body language, tone of voice, or facial expressions. This can result in misunderstandings, miscommunications, and even strained relationships in the offline world.

Furthermore, in social media platforms, there has emerged a phenomenon known as “catfishing,” where individuals create false personas or AI-generated profiles to appear completely different from their actual selves. These fabricated personas include fictitious names, images, personal histories, and even strongly held beliefs or political views that do not align with the individual’s true convictions. As a result, the camouflaging of identities erodes trust and intimacy in real-life relationships and contributes to the proliferation of misinformation, confusion, and polarization. When individuals engage with seemingly authentic profiles that are, in fact, fabricated, they may inadvertently amplify misinformation, thereby sowing discord and undermining informed discussions.  A Forbes report predicts that by 2025, AI-generated profiles will pose a significant threat, contributing to the rise of sophisticated catfishing .

Likewise, the anonymity provided by social media platforms has facilitated cyberbullying and online harassment.  A study by the National Center for Bullying Prevention in 2022 found that 20% of U.S. students aged 12-18 have experienced cyberbullying.  These negative online experiences can spill over into real-life interactions, affecting individuals’ mental and emotional well-being. Besides, one of the most alarming and pressing issues concerning social media’s impact on real-life communication is its role as a breeding ground for hate speech and extremism. The unrestricted and often anonymous nature of online platforms has provided a fertile ground for the propagation of extremist ideologies and the spread of hatred. This, in turn, poses a grave threat to online safety and societal harmony.  A horrifying example is the 2019 Christchurch Mosque shootings in New Zealand, where a white supremacist gunman killed 51 people.  The gunman had actively used social media platforms to propagate his hateful views and recruit followers. The speed and reach of these platforms allowed him to disseminate his extremist ideology, ultimately leading to a violent act that shattered lives and communities. Thus, the prevalence of hate speech and extremism on social media platforms has far-reaching consequences. It not only endangers online safety by creating an environment where individuals are exposed to threatening content, but it also contributes to the polarization and division of societies.

The influence of social media on real-life communication has led to a series of significant impacts across various societal levels, including the social, political, and economic dimensions. These effects underscore the complexities and challenges that come with the pervasive use of social media. At the social level, the prevalence of online communication and decreased face-to-face interactions profoundly impact the quality of personal relationships by hindering the development of trust, empathy, and deeper connections. Additionally, negative and polarizing content on social media platforms contributes to social chaos and confusion, sowing discord and misinformation among communities. Furthermore, social media has played a significant role in the rapid dissemination of misinformation, including conspiracy theories related to the COVID-19 pandemic, which poses public health risks. Similarly, at the political level, social media’s influence leads to an increase in the spread of false statements and comments, leading to miscommunication and misunderstandings among the public. High-profile figures sharing unverified or false claims on these platforms can have diplomatic implications and stoke tensions. Additionally, the algorithms employed by social media platforms often create filter bubbles, reinforcing users’ existing beliefs and limiting exposure to diverse viewpoints, hindering constructive political discourse and the democratic exchange of ideas. This, in turn, exacerbates political polarization, making it more challenging to find common ground and work towards bipartisan solutions. Besides, at the economic level, the preference for digital communication over face-to-face meetings hampers the development of essential interpersonal skills necessary for effective in-person interactions. Moreover, the reliance on social media platforms for business transactions and negotiations, such as real estate deals and supply-chain management, can lead to misunderstandings, inefficiencies, and economic challenges. These impacts underscore the need for individuals, organizations, and policymakers to address the challenges posed by social media’s influence on real-life communication, including the potential risks to relationships, information accuracy, political discourse, and economic productivity.

The destruction of real-life communication by social media is propelled by several pivotal factors. Firstly, the ease of free access and low cost of social media platforms have led to the rampant spread of propaganda and misinformation, as these platforms serve as fertile ground for the dissemination of unreliable content. Secondly, the wide-reaching penetration of social media among the global population, with a usage rate of 59 per cent, underscores its omnipresence, making it a primary channel for information dissemination and interaction. Finally, the growing dependence of businesses on social media advertising campaigns, exemplified by industry giants like Amazon, Shopify, Nike, and Coca-Cola, has further entrenched social media as a dominant mode of communication. This reliance on digital platforms for marketing and customer engagement has inadvertently weakened the significance of face-to-face interactions and traditional communication methods, accentuating the profound impact of social media on real-life communication dynamics. These aspects collectively highlight the intricate relationship between social media and the deterioration of in-person communication.

To mitigate the negative impacts of social media on real-life communication, individuals can take the following proactive steps. First, individuals can create a balance between online and offline interactions by setting specific times for social media usage, allowing for undistracted real-life communication. Furthermore, enhancing face-to-face interactions through active and meaningful discussions fosters genuine human connection. Engaging with individuals who share similar interests, rather than succumbing to pessimistic online environments, can promote constructive dialogue and positive interactions. Leveraging social platforms for self-improvement, whether through recipe videos, fitness inspiration, or self-help tips, transforms online spaces into avenues for personal growth. Ultimately, prioritizing real-world social interactions and experiences, such as field trips and get-togethers, rejuvenates the depth and authenticity of human communication, allowing individuals to regain control over the positive aspects of their interactions while minimizing the detrimental effects of excessive social media use.

Critically, social media’s influence on real-life communication remains a subject of ongoing debate and evolution. Undoubtedly, social media platforms offer unparalleled opportunities for communication and the swift acquisition of current information from virtually any corner of the world. However, this convenience, when taken to excess, can inadvertently foster a dependency that erodes cognitive abilities, decision-making skills, and intellectual prowess, thereby detrimentally affecting face-to-face communication. While these platforms were originally introduced to enhance human connectivity, their overreliance can result in a pervasive distraction, diverting individuals from their life goals and aspirations. Consequently, the judicious and balanced use of social media emerges as a key strategy for mitigating its negative impacts.

In conclusion, social media has played an integral role in ushering humanity into the modern age, enhancing our communication, productivity, access to information, and entertainment methods. Yet, the unbridled dependence on this technology has wrought significant erosion in the realm of real-life communication. This overreliance diminishes physical interactions, decision-making power, and cognitive development. Additionally, social media fosters superficial interactions and impolite conduct due to deficiencies in verbal skills and emotional intelligence. It disrupts quality time and fuels cyberbullying and unhealthy comparisons. However, balancing real-life communication necessitates prioritizing face-to-face interaction, setting screen time limits, and avoiding comparison-based content on social media can counteract the detrimental effects of excessive social media use.  As renowned author John Naisbitt once wisely said, “We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge,” and this adage underscores the significance of preserving real-life communication in our increasingly digital world .

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Does social media destroy real-life communication - jessie abbygil.

As the days go by, technology is becoming more and more advanced. This also affects the way people interact with each other. From post to wired phones and, now, almost everybody in the world has access to the internet. Social media is used to not only communicate internationally; it is also used for short distances.

While it is great that having social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other social media apps help us to connect with the other side of the world, it is also a one-way ticket to a broken trust and bond. This is because many arguments have started on social media that could cause real-life communication risks. These arguments on social media can be very dangerous for those who have social media at a young age. On the other hand, online interaction has provided a big improvement to people’s lives as it helps them to express their feelings better than they would face-to-face.

Dr. Kate Roberts, a Boston-based school psychologist, said that technologies are at fault for the increasing amount of people having a difficult time interacting with each other face-to-face. She said “It is like we have lost the skill of courtship and the ability to make that connection.” She is also concerned that children would have difficulty communicating with each other in real life as they have already taken the easy method to communicate, through social media. Fortunately, some parents are smart enough to limit their children’s screen time and let them get out of their comfort zones and discover what is around them.

Others say that social media is ruining some of their relationships with people. Maybe because of the false news or misunderstandings posted online that they all lose trust in each other. People have shared opinions that using their phones make them ignore what is happening around them and have less face-to-face interaction. We also need to pay attention to the fact that lots of people have become addicted to social media. Even though it may seem harmless compared to alcohol addiction and smoking addiction, it still has a big impact on those who are addicted to social media.

There are many more reasons why social media is affecting real-life communication negatively. Even though it may not seem serious enough, it has a big effect on everybody who uses social media frequently to communicate. Maybe not right now but, if people do not try hard enough to solve this issue, social media will become our only way of communication and face-to-face interaction will no longer be used.

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Social media has destroyed real-life communication

Topic: Social media has destroyed real-life communication

Type of paper: Essay (any type)

Discipline: English and Literature : English

Format or citation style: APA (edition “APA 6”)

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