negative effects of social media on society essay

Essay on Negative Effects of Social Media

Students are often asked to write an essay on Negative Effects of Social Media in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Negative Effects of Social Media

The dark side of social media.

Social media is a powerful tool, but it has negative impacts too. It can lead to addiction, affecting our daily life. Many people spend hours scrolling, ignoring real-life interactions.

Mental Health Issues

Studies show excessive social media use can cause anxiety and depression. The constant comparison with others’ lives can lead to low self-esteem.

Privacy Concerns

Personal information shared on social media can be misused, leading to privacy issues. Cyberbullying is another serious concern, causing emotional distress.

Unrealistic Expectations

Social media often presents a perfect life, creating unrealistic expectations and dissatisfaction. It’s important to remember that what we see online isn’t always real.

250 Words Essay on Negative Effects of Social Media

Introduction, psychological impact.

Firstly, social media can lead to mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. The constant comparison with others’ lives, the desire for validation through likes and comments, and the fear of missing out (FOMO) can lead to feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem.

Secondly, privacy is a significant concern. Users often unknowingly share sensitive information, making them susceptible to data breaches and identity theft. The lack of stringent privacy policies on many platforms exacerbates this issue.

Spread of Misinformation

Lastly, social media contributes to the spread of fake news and misinformation. The speed and reach of these platforms make it easy for false information to spread, leading to confusion, panic, and in some cases, violence.

In conclusion, while social media has revolutionized communication, its negative effects cannot be ignored. It is incumbent upon users to use these platforms responsibly and be aware of the potential risks. As the saying goes, “With great power comes great responsibility”.

500 Words Essay on Negative Effects of Social Media

Social media has revolutionized the way we communicate, connect, and share information. However, it is not without its drawbacks. While it offers numerous benefits, it has also given rise to a myriad of negative effects, impacting individuals and society.

The Erosion of Privacy

Impact on mental health.

The impact of social media on mental health is another significant concern. The pressure to maintain a perfect online persona and the constant comparison with others can lead to feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and depression. The addictive nature of social media platforms, designed to keep users engaged for as long as possible, exacerbates these issues. The dopamine hit from likes, comments, and shares can create a dependency, leading to an unhealthy relationship with these platforms.

Social media also plays a significant role in the spread of misinformation. The speed and reach of social media platforms make them a potent tool for disseminating false information, leading to real-world consequences. This phenomenon has been particularly evident in recent years, with misinformation about health, politics, and social issues spreading rapidly.

Decreased Productivity

In conclusion, while social media has transformed the way we communicate and share information, it has also given rise to several negative effects. The erosion of privacy, impact on mental health, spread of misinformation, and decreased productivity are all significant concerns that need to be addressed. It is crucial for users to be aware of these issues and use social media responsibly, considering the potential implications of their online behavior. As a society, we must also strive to mitigate these effects, through education, regulation, and the development of healthier online habits.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

Happy studying!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Every print subscription comes with full digital access

Science News

Social media harms teens’ mental health, mounting evidence shows. what now.

Understanding what is going on in teens’ minds is necessary for targeted policy suggestions

Most teens use social media, often for hours on end. Some social scientists are confident that such use is harming their mental health. Now they want to pinpoint what explains the link.

Carol Yepes/Getty Images

Share this:

By Sujata Gupta

February 20, 2024 at 7:30 am

In January, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, appeared at a congressional hearing to answer questions about how social media potentially harms children. Zuckerberg opened by saying: “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health.”

But many social scientists would disagree with that statement. In recent years, studies have started to show a causal link between teen social media use and reduced well-being or mood disorders, chiefly depression and anxiety.

Ironically, one of the most cited studies into this link focused on Facebook.

Researchers delved into whether the platform’s introduction across college campuses in the mid 2000s increased symptoms associated with depression and anxiety. The answer was a clear yes , says MIT economist Alexey Makarin, a coauthor of the study, which appeared in the November 2022 American Economic Review . “There is still a lot to be explored,” Makarin says, but “[to say] there is no causal evidence that social media causes mental health issues, to that I definitely object.”

The concern, and the studies, come from statistics showing that social media use in teens ages 13 to 17 is now almost ubiquitous. Two-thirds of teens report using TikTok, and some 60 percent of teens report using Instagram or Snapchat, a 2022 survey found. (Only 30 percent said they used Facebook.) Another survey showed that girls, on average, allot roughly 3.4 hours per day to TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, compared with roughly 2.1 hours among boys. At the same time, more teens are showing signs of depression than ever, especially girls ( SN: 6/30/23 ).

As more studies show a strong link between these phenomena, some researchers are starting to shift their attention to possible mechanisms. Why does social media use seem to trigger mental health problems? Why are those effects unevenly distributed among different groups, such as girls or young adults? And can the positives of social media be teased out from the negatives to provide more targeted guidance to teens, their caregivers and policymakers?

“You can’t design good public policy if you don’t know why things are happening,” says Scott Cunningham, an economist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

Increasing rigor

Concerns over the effects of social media use in children have been circulating for years, resulting in a massive body of scientific literature. But those mostly correlational studies could not show if teen social media use was harming mental health or if teens with mental health problems were using more social media.

Moreover, the findings from such studies were often inconclusive, or the effects on mental health so small as to be inconsequential. In one study that received considerable media attention, psychologists Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski combined data from three surveys to see if they could find a link between technology use, including social media, and reduced well-being. The duo gauged the well-being of over 355,000 teenagers by focusing on questions around depression, suicidal thinking and self-esteem.

Digital technology use was associated with a slight decrease in adolescent well-being , Orben, now of the University of Cambridge, and Przybylski, of the University of Oxford, reported in 2019 in Nature Human Behaviour . But the duo downplayed that finding, noting that researchers have observed similar drops in adolescent well-being associated with drinking milk, going to the movies or eating potatoes.

Holes have begun to appear in that narrative thanks to newer, more rigorous studies.

In one longitudinal study, researchers — including Orben and Przybylski — used survey data on social media use and well-being from over 17,400 teens and young adults to look at how individuals’ responses to a question gauging life satisfaction changed between 2011 and 2018. And they dug into how the responses varied by gender, age and time spent on social media.

Social media use was associated with a drop in well-being among teens during certain developmental periods, chiefly puberty and young adulthood, the team reported in 2022 in Nature Communications . That translated to lower well-being scores around ages 11 to 13 for girls and ages 14 to 15 for boys. Both groups also reported a drop in well-being around age 19. Moreover, among the older teens, the team found evidence for the Goldilocks Hypothesis: the idea that both too much and too little time spent on social media can harm mental health.

“There’s hardly any effect if you look over everybody. But if you look at specific age groups, at particularly what [Orben] calls ‘windows of sensitivity’ … you see these clear effects,” says L.J. Shrum, a consumer psychologist at HEC Paris who was not involved with this research. His review of studies related to teen social media use and mental health is forthcoming in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

Cause and effect

That longitudinal study hints at causation, researchers say. But one of the clearest ways to pin down cause and effect is through natural or quasi-experiments. For these in-the-wild experiments, researchers must identify situations where the rollout of a societal “treatment” is staggered across space and time. They can then compare outcomes among members of the group who received the treatment to those still in the queue — the control group.

That was the approach Makarin and his team used in their study of Facebook. The researchers homed in on the staggered rollout of Facebook across 775 college campuses from 2004 to 2006. They combined that rollout data with student responses to the National College Health Assessment, a widely used survey of college students’ mental and physical health.

The team then sought to understand if those survey questions captured diagnosable mental health problems. Specifically, they had roughly 500 undergraduate students respond to questions both in the National College Health Assessment and in validated screening tools for depression and anxiety. They found that mental health scores on the assessment predicted scores on the screenings. That suggested that a drop in well-being on the college survey was a good proxy for a corresponding increase in diagnosable mental health disorders. 

Compared with campuses that had not yet gained access to Facebook, college campuses with Facebook experienced a 2 percentage point increase in the number of students who met the diagnostic criteria for anxiety or depression, the team found.

When it comes to showing a causal link between social media use in teens and worse mental health, “that study really is the crown jewel right now,” says Cunningham, who was not involved in that research.

A need for nuance

The social media landscape today is vastly different than the landscape of 20 years ago. Facebook is now optimized for maximum addiction, Shrum says, and other newer platforms, such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, have since copied and built on those features. Paired with the ubiquity of social media in general, the negative effects on mental health may well be larger now.

Moreover, social media research tends to focus on young adults — an easier cohort to study than minors. That needs to change, Cunningham says. “Most of us are worried about our high school kids and younger.” 

And so, researchers must pivot accordingly. Crucially, simple comparisons of social media users and nonusers no longer make sense. As Orben and Przybylski’s 2022 work suggested, a teen not on social media might well feel worse than one who briefly logs on. 

Researchers must also dig into why, and under what circumstances, social media use can harm mental health, Cunningham says. Explanations for this link abound. For instance, social media is thought to crowd out other activities or increase people’s likelihood of comparing themselves unfavorably with others. But big data studies, with their reliance on existing surveys and statistical analyses, cannot address those deeper questions. “These kinds of papers, there’s nothing you can really ask … to find these plausible mechanisms,” Cunningham says.

One ongoing effort to understand social media use from this more nuanced vantage point is the SMART Schools project out of the University of Birmingham in England. Pedagogical expert Victoria Goodyear and her team are comparing mental and physical health outcomes among children who attend schools that have restricted cell phone use to those attending schools without such a policy. The researchers described the protocol of that study of 30 schools and over 1,000 students in the July BMJ Open.

Goodyear and colleagues are also combining that natural experiment with qualitative research. They met with 36 five-person focus groups each consisting of all students, all parents or all educators at six of those schools. The team hopes to learn how students use their phones during the day, how usage practices make students feel, and what the various parties think of restrictions on cell phone use during the school day.

Talking to teens and those in their orbit is the best way to get at the mechanisms by which social media influences well-being — for better or worse, Goodyear says. Moving beyond big data to this more personal approach, however, takes considerable time and effort. “Social media has increased in pace and momentum very, very quickly,” she says. “And research takes a long time to catch up with that process.”

Until that catch-up occurs, though, researchers cannot dole out much advice. “What guidance could we provide to young people, parents and schools to help maintain the positives of social media use?” Goodyear asks. “There’s not concrete evidence yet.”

More Stories from Science News on Science & Society

‘Night Magic’ invites you to celebrate the living wonders of the dark

This researcher studies how misinformation seeps into science and politics

10 early-career scientists tackling some of the biggest problems of today

Talking to a chatbot may weaken someone’s belief in conspiracy theories

AI generates harsher punishments for people who use Black dialect

A new book tackles AI hype – and how to spot it

A fluffy, orange fungus could transform food waste into tasty dishes

‘Turning to Stone’ paints rocks as storytellers and mentors

Subscribers, enter your e-mail address for full access to the Science News archives and digital editions.

Not a subscriber? Become one now .

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Social Media — The Impact of Social Media: Causes and Effects

The Impact of Social Media: Causes and Effects

• Categories: Effects of Social Media Social Media

About this sample

Words: 1226 |

Published: Feb 7, 2024

Words: 1226 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, cause 1: increased connectivity and communication, cause 2: promotion of self-expression and individuality, cause 3: access to information and awareness, effect 1: impacts on mental health, effect 2: influence on societal norms and values, effect 3: privacy and security concerns.

Cite this Essay

To export a reference to this article please select a referencing style below:

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Prof Ernest (PhD)

Verified writer

• Expert in: Sociology

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 696 words

3 pages / 1526 words

3 pages / 1226 words

6 pages / 2793 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Social Media

In the 21st century, the rise of social media platforms has ushered in a digital revolution that has profoundly transformed the way we communicate, connect, and live our lives. From Facebook to Twitter, Instagram to TikTok, [...]

Primack, B. A. (n.d.). Social Media Use and Perceived Social Isolation Among Young Adults in the U.S. Emotion, 17(6), 1026–1032. DOI: 10.1037/emo0000525Hobson, K. (n.d.). The Social Media Paradox: Are We Really More Connected? [...]

Bulmer, J. G., McLeod, J. M., & Rice, R. E. (2009). Television and Political Life: Studies in Six European Countries. Springer Science & Business Media.Fulcher, J., & Scott, J. (2011). Sociology. Oxford University Press.Kitts, [...]

Anderson, C. A., & Jiang, S. (2018). The value of social media data. Marketing Science, 37(3), 387-402.Boczkowski, P. J., & Mitchelstein, E. (2013). The news gap: When the information preferences of the media and the public [...]

Social media is a superb factor or a awful issue? That is the maximum often asked query these days. Nicely, there are constantly aspects of the entirety. It depends to your perspective on how you perceive it. The same goes for [...]

The company Always is a brand of feminine hygiene products and has been in business since 1984. The advertisement analyzed within this essay seeks to catch the viewer’s eye and cause the female viewer to associate that product [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• Negative Effects of Social Media on Health Words: 1166
• Social Media in Moderation Words: 1444
• Effects of Social Media and Internet Words: 601
• Impact of Social Media in Education Words: 1988
• The Power of Social Media Words: 2322
• The Impact of Social Media on Teenagers Words: 562
• Social Media and Modern Society Words: 1281
• Social Media Impact on Activism Words: 1152
• Social Media: Annotated Bibliography Words: 1064
• The Effects of Social Media on People Words: 869
• Social Media in Business Across the Globe Words: 1399
• The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health Words: 1367
• Becoming Distant on Social Media Words: 572
• Social Media and Traditional News Media Words: 600
• Impact of Social Media on Adolescence Words: 372
• Effect of Social Media on Adolescent Mental Health Words: 3538
• Social Media Impact on Teenagers in the UAE Words: 2242
• Social Media’s Multifaceted Impact on Mental Health Words: 1270
• Social Media Nature and Influence Words: 638

Social Media: Negative Impacts

Introduction, intrusive advertising, bullying/harassment, privacy threats, works cited.

Social media is a natural phenomenon of modern hi-tech life. The impact of virtual communication is significant as people are often willing to pay more attention to online interaction. Besides, due to the development of technology, social media plays the role of platforms not only for communication but also fir effective advertising and entertainment. Digital content that is published in various groups has a large target audience, which allows influencing people and providing demand for specific goods or services. However, the controversy of the benefits of social media lies in the potentially negative impacts they have. In addition to using specialized web resources for communication, many Internet users utilize them as tools for bullying, intimidation, humiliation, and even violence. An opportunity to remain anonymous opens up significant prospects for cybercriminals, which complicates the task for law enforcement agencies. As a counterargument, today, there are various means of account verification and support services that are ready to ensure the safety of communication on social media and provide users with protection from scammers or blackmailers. Nevertheless, people who are well versed in the digital field can bypass such locks easily. Among the real negative effects that social media have, one can note intrusive advertising, bullying and harassment, privacy threats, fake news, and violence. Social media are gradually losing the function of communication tools and gaining the status of platforms that allow posting any content, including illegal and immoral materials.

Advertising on social media has become so intrusive and widespread that it has ceased to have its promotional function and often causes users more negative emotions than interest. At the same time, it is hard to get rid of advertising completely since many creators of digital content sign contracts with advertisers, and profit depends directly on the activity of the public. However, in case of excess advertising, people feel annoyed and ignore certain offers deliberately. According to Shareef et al., “irritation due to any advertisement can distract consumers from receiving the intended meaning of the statement, and thus can have a negative effect on the value of the advertising” (p. 61). Such a statement is logical because, in their quest for profit, advertisers provoke a natural reaction from the target audience to condemn the excess of promoting content. Customer perception largely depends not only on the essence of specific offers but also on the way marketers deliver them. Therefore, in case of intrusiveness, advertising content on social media causes rejection and is often blocked by users. Shareef et al. confirm this and argue that the context of marketing materials may be more important as a driver to convince the public of the value of specific goods or services (p. 66). The objectivity of such an idea is due to the fact that initially, social media were not intended for advertising, and only the creativity of marketers can be an effective way to attract public attention. Finally, Shareef et al. mention viral marketing as one of the methods of intrusive advertising on social media and note that this form of promotion are relevant only among a narrow target audience. In other words, the more annoying the advertisement is, the lower is the chance to attract a wide range of new consumers. Nevertheless, intrusive advertising is significantly less dangerous than bullying or harassment, which are found in modern social media.

The anonymity factor that may persist when interacting on social media is one of the reasons for bullying that some Internet users are forced to experience. A sense of impunity for aggressive behavior and insults towards another person exacerbate the situation. Moreover, bullying is a trend that is common in children’s communication on social media, which poses a serious threat to the fragile psyche of young users. According to Canty et al., online bullying is a unique phenomenon that has expanded in the virtual space due to the emergence of means to preserve anonymity and, in particular, the ability to go unpunished (p. 52). These factors are most obvious reasons why children, who are often humiliated by their peers on social media, become self-absorbed and cannot figure out the wrongdoers. Harassment is a similar problem, which, however, is characteristic of the adult population and often has a sexual background. Chadha et al. state that modern digital technologies “amplify attacks on gender-based and sexual minorities,” thereby acting as negative consequences of progress (p. 241). This statement assumes that the context of harassment is not limited to one topic. In addition, as findings show, virtual space is a favorable environment for this phenomenon:

Online communities and social media platforms offer many benefits, but they also have become breeding grounds for an assortment of sexist and misogynist behaviors. Importantly, the harassment behaviors evident today differ from off-line and pre-social media-era harassment, given the affordances of these networked spaces, including – but not limited to – the visibility and persistence of content, the anonymity/pseudonymity of users, the spreadability of content, and the multimediality of smartphones (Chadha et al, p. 250).

As a result, the openness of online communication creates a favorable environment for harassment and affects user behavior. Chadha et al. mention requests for personal data and addresses as easy consequences of harassment and note that people who have faced with real threats see this phenomenon as an extremely dangerous and aggressive trend (p. 243). This conclusion is logical because, despite different environments, online and real-life harassment have a common background. In this regard, the issues of privacy and accompanying risks are negative consequences of social media.

Privacy threats are fraught not only with identity theft but also with other problems that may entail anonymous bullying or blackmail. Today, for users of social media, communication options are not limited solely to correspondence. Interlocutors can comment on each other, share links, and perform other actions that go beyond a particular platform. As a result, as Aghasian et al. note, “the distribution of information in real world is almost local, the publically shared information in online social media can be retrieved on the internet anytime, anywhere and by anyone” (p. 13118). The significance of this statement is that virtually no one can be fully protected, and precautions should be taken. Aghasian et al. argue that users should be able to protect their personal data not only from intruders but also from familiar people who can become intermediaries in the leak of information (p. 13118). Those people who face privacy threats may lose their money or valuable digital content through negligence by providing their data to third parties. Due to the widespread use of virtual interaction, various leakage channels are discussed:

For example, a user normally share his/her personal information in Facebook which may pose a privacy risk. This user may share his/her occupation history and background in another site such as LinkedIn. His/her job information has again its own privacy risk, but a combination of the information from two social media accounts can pose the user to higher risk as more information is revealed. Consequently, by considering the overall information from multiple source, a more accurate quantification of the privacy disclosure score can be obtained. (Aghasian et al, p. 13118)

In addition to individual data leakage channels, the forms of privacy risks themselves are numerous. Aghasian et al. mention the threat of government data theft, the disclosure of confidential information about trade transactions, and even religious secrets (13119). Such a variety of risks explains the need for comprehensive protection. Social media, in turn, are a favorable environment for such fraud since the predominant number of Internet users have accounts at least at one specialized site. Wherein, according to Aghasian et al., “one of the challenges in addressing privacy concerns is how to measure the privacy of a user participating in multiple social networks” (p. 13129). The increasing role of social media in people’s lives inevitably leads to threats to personal data, especially if they are stored on different platforms. However, not all negative aspects of virtual communication are aimed at interacting with a particular person, and the example of fake news distributed online is a confirmation.

Social media are becoming the most common sources of news, including both entertaining content and serious political and economic reports, which, however, are not always reliable. One of the main reasons is the desire to attract a large target audience. The greater the news resonance is, the greater is the potential success of a particular media platform. For example, Shu et al. give the following statistics: “62 percent of U.S. adults get news on social media in 2016, while in 2012, only 49 percent reported seeing news on social media” (p. 22). This ratio proves that even the adult population of the country began to use virtual platforms more often. In addition, this growth may be due to the wider use of social media by numerous agencies that have individual accounts. The authors emphasize that fake news as a negative consequence of digital communication is disseminated most actively through social media due to an opportunity to create a public outcry quickly (Shu et al, p. 23). News groups fight for the target audience in any way possible, which entails publications based on unverified or false facts. Spohr explains the reasons and argues that “the producers and curators of fake news content are able to monetize their content through advertising platforms from Facebook and Google” (p. 156). This conclusion is logical since material gain is the most objective explanation for such publications. In addition, the researcher notes that fake news creates a resonance that, regardless of whether it is positive or negative, serves as a means of popularization (Spohr, p. 150). Therefore, the ability to influence the masses opens up prospects for fraudulent actions, although fake news cannot do such harm as violence, which is another negative effect of social media.

Despite the fact that violence in its natural sense cannot be realized online, the manifestations of violent acts through social media are possible. This phenomenon is similar to cyberbullying, but it involves strict measures of intimidation or harassment, while bullying can be superficial. Today, particular attention is paid to youth virtual violence, as children and adolescents are vulnerable groups. As Tripathi notes, “most children and adolescents (65-91%) report little or no involvement in violence over social media platforms” (2). At the same time, the author argues that time spent online is one of the factors on which the risk of violence depends (Tripathi, p. 3). In other words, the longer and more actively a child interacts with other users, the higher is the threat of psychological violence. This statement is reasonable and carries an open message about the need to reduce the access of young users to free online communication. Also, gender-based online violence is another form of bullying, and its consequences can be extremely dangerous from a social perspective:

Gender-based violence online is rampant, ranging from harassment of women who are public figures on social media to stalking intimate partners using purpose-built apps. This is not an issue that can be addressed by individual states alone, nor can it be addressed satisfactorily through legal means. The normalization of misogyny and abuse online both reflects and reinforces systemic inequalities. (Suzor et al, p. 84)

This position on gender-based violence proves the effect that indifference to this problem may cause. According to Suzor et al., most modern social media promote themselves as platforms for expressing individuality and personal opinions, which can be dangerous in conditions of the freedom of speech and anonymity (p. 89). Not only women but also other vulnerable groups can experience the effects of virtual violence, and impunity is one of the most dangerous consequences. The authors are convinced that “deeply entrenched structural features of existing social media platforms often exacerbate the effects of online harassment and abuse” (Suzor et al, p. 94). Thus, social media carry many negative implications, and an opportunity to go unpunished for aggressive or annoying behavior is a severe social omission.

• Aghasian, Erfan, et al. “Scoring Users’ Privacy Disclosure Across Multiple Online Social Networks.” IEEE Access , vol. 5, 2017, pp. 13118-13130.
• Canty, Justin, et al. “The Trouble with Bullying – Deconstructing the Conventional Definition of Bullying for a Child‐Centred Investigation into Children’s Use of Social Media.” Children & Society , vol. 30, no. 1, 2016, pp. 48-58.
• Chadha, Kalyani, et al. “Women’s Responses to Online Harassment.” International Journal of Communication , vol. 14, 2020, pp. 239-257.
• Shareef, Mahmud Akhter, et al. “Social Media Marketing: Comparative Effect of Advertisement Sources.” Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services , vol. 46, 2019, pp. 58-69.
• Shu, Kai, et al. “Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective.” ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter , vol. 19, no. 1, 2017, pp. 22-36.
• Spohr, Dominic. “Fake News and Ideological Polarization: Filter Bubbles and Selective Exposure on Social Media.” Business Information Review , vol. 34, no. 3, 2017, pp. 150-160.
• Suzor, Nicolas, et al. “Human Rights by Design: The Responsibilities of Social Media Platforms to Address Gender‐Based Violence Online.” Policy & Internet , vol. 11, no. 1, 2019, pp. 84-103.
• Tripathi, Vivek. “Youth Violence and Social Media.” Journal of Social Sciences , vol. 52, no. 1-3, 2017, pp. 1-7.

Cite this paper

• Chicago (N-B)
• Chicago (A-D)

StudyCorgi. (2022, March 10). Social Media: Negative Impacts. https://studycorgi.com/social-media-negative-impacts/

"Social Media: Negative Impacts." StudyCorgi , 10 Mar. 2022, studycorgi.com/social-media-negative-impacts/.

StudyCorgi . (2022) 'Social Media: Negative Impacts'. 10 March.

1. StudyCorgi . "Social Media: Negative Impacts." March 10, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/social-media-negative-impacts/.

Bibliography

StudyCorgi . "Social Media: Negative Impacts." March 10, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/social-media-negative-impacts/.

StudyCorgi . 2022. "Social Media: Negative Impacts." March 10, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/social-media-negative-impacts/.

This paper, “Social Media: Negative Impacts”, was written and voluntary submitted to our free essay database by a straight-A student. Please ensure you properly reference the paper if you're using it to write your assignment.

Before publication, the StudyCorgi editorial team proofread and checked the paper to make sure it meets the highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, fact accuracy, copyright issues, and inclusive language. Last updated: May 25, 2022 .

If you are the author of this paper and no longer wish to have it published on StudyCorgi, request the removal . Please use the “ Donate your paper ” form to submit an essay.

10 Positive and Negative Effects of Social Media on Society

Nowadays, social media is so popular among the young, children, and adults. Each of us uses social media to be updated, to entertain ourselves, to communicate with others, to explore new things, and to connect with the world. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc. are examples of social media. Social media is a part of our lives today, and consciously or unconsciously, it is becoming our habit to continuously go through it and check the notifications.

What is social media?

Social media is a platform where we can communicate with a large number of people, make connections, and interact with them. It operates on the internet.A user usually creates an account on such a platform and allows interaction with the millions of other users available on it according to their preferences and choices. Apart from the interaction, it also allows users to share information, chat with other people, share their opinions, create content, and embrace their differences.

In today’s world, social media is an important part of young people’s lives, determining and shaping their perspectives.The youth typically adopt and pursue social media trends; for example, in dressing styles, the youth adopt dresses and styles that are promoted as trends by social media.

Social media not only allows people to share their opinions, but it also shapes the opinions of its users.Social media have an impact on their users as well as society as a whole, both positive and negative.

Here we will now discuss the negative and positive impacts of social media on society.

Positive impact of social media on   society, negative impacts of social media on society.

Conclusion-

Yachika Yadav is a sociology post graduate student at Banasthali Vidyapith. She loves to capture moments in nature, apart from drawing and writing poetries. Field of research attracts her the most and in future she want to be a part of that. She is a good listener, learner. And tries to always help others.

Skip to content

Read the latest news stories about Mailman faculty, research, and events. 

Departments

We integrate an innovative skills-based curriculum, research collaborations, and hands-on field experience to prepare students.

Learn more about our research centers, which focus on critical issues in public health.

Our Faculty

Meet the faculty of the Mailman School of Public Health. 

Become a Student

Life and community, how to apply.

Learn how to apply to the Mailman School of Public Health. 

Just How Harmful Is Social Media? Our Experts Weigh-In.

A recent investigation by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook was aware of mental health risks linked to the use of its Instagram app but kept those findings secret. Internal research by the social media giant found that Instagram worsened body image issues for one in three teenage girls, and all teenage users of the app linked it to experiences of anxiety and depression. It isn’t the first evidence of social media’s harms. Watchdog groups have identified Facebook and Instagram as avenues for cyberbullying , and reports have linked TikTok to dangerous and antisocial behavior, including a recent spate of school vandalism .

As social media has proliferated worldwide—Facebook has 2.85 billion users—so too have concerns over how the platforms are affecting individual and collective wellbeing. Social media is criticized for being addictive by design and for its role in the spread of misinformation on critical issues from vaccine safety to election integrity, as well as the rise of right-wing extremism. Social media companies, and many users, defend the platforms as avenues for promoting creativity and community-building. And some research has pushed back against the idea that social media raises the risk for depression in teens . So just how healthy or unhealthy is social media?

Two experts from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia Psychiatry share their insights into one crucial aspect of social media’s influence—its effect on the mental health of young people and adults. Deborah Glasofer , associate professor of psychology in psychiatry, conducts psychotherapy development research for adults with eating disorders and teaches about cognitive behavioral therapy. She is the co-author of the book Eating Disorders: What Everyone Needs to Know. Claude Mellins , Professor of medical psychology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Sociomedical Sciences, studies wellbeing among college and graduate students, among other topics, and serves as program director of CopeColumbia, a peer support program for Columbia faculty and staff whose mental health has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. She co-led the SHIFT research study to reduce sexual violence among undergraduates. Both use social media.

What do we know about the mental health risks of social media use?

Mellins : Facebook and Instagram and other social media platforms are important sources of socialization and relationship-building for many young people. Although there are important benefits, social media can also provide platforms for bullying and exclusion, unrealistic expectations about body image and sources of popularity, normalization of risk-taking behaviors, and can be detrimental to mental health. Girls and young people who identify as sexual and gender minorities can be especially vulnerable as targets. Young people’s brains are still developing, and as individuals, young people are developing their own identities. What they see on social media can define what is expected in ways that is not accurate and that can be destructive to identity development and self-image. Adolescence is a time of risk-taking, which is both a strength and a vulnerability. Social media can exacerbate risks, as we have seen played out in the news. 

Although there are important benefits, social media can also provide platforms for bullying and exclusion, unrealistic expectations about body image and sources of popularity, normalization of risk-taking behaviors, and can be detrimental to mental health. – Claude Mellins

Glasofer : For those vulnerable to developing an eating disorder, social media may be especially unhelpful because it allows people to easily compare their appearance to their friends, to celebrities, even older images of themselves. Research tells us that how much someone engages with photo-related activities like posting and sharing photos on Facebook or Instagram is associated with less body acceptance and more obsessing about appearance. For adolescent girls in particular, the more time they spend on social media directly relates to how much they absorb the idea that being thin is ideal, are driven to try to become thin, and/or overly scrutinize their own bodies. Also, if someone is vulnerable to an eating disorder, they may be especially attracted to seeking out unhelpful information—which is all too easy to find on social media.

Are there any upsides to social media?

Mellins : For young people, social media provides a platform to help them figure out who they are. For very shy or introverted young people, it can be a way to meet others with similar interests. During the pandemic, social media made it possible for people to connect in ways when in-person socialization was not possible.  Social support and socializing are critical influences on coping and resilience. Friends we couldn’t see in person were available online and allowed us important points of connection. On the other hand, fewer opportunities for in-person interactions with friends and family meant less of a real-world check on some of the negative influences of social media.

Whether it’s social media or in person, a good peer group makes the difference. A group of friends that connects over shared interests like art or music, and is balanced in their outlook on eating and appearance, is a positive. – Deborah Glasofer

Glasofer : Whether it’s social media or in person, a good peer group makes the difference. A group of friends that connects over shared interests like art or music, and is balanced in their outlook on eating and appearance, is a positive. In fact, a good peer group online may be protective against negative in-person influences. For those with a history of eating disorders, there are body-positive and recovery groups on social media. Some people find these groups to be supportive; for others, it’s more beneficial to move on and pursue other interests.

Is there a healthy way to be on social media?

Mellins : If you feel social media is a negative experience, you might need a break. Disengaging with social media permanently is more difficult­—especially for young people. These platforms are powerful tools for connecting and staying up-to-date with friends and family. Social events, too. If you’re not on social media then you’re reliant on your friends to reach out to you personally, which doesn’t always happen. It’s complicated.

Glasofer : When you find yourself feeling badly about yourself in relation to what other people are posting about themselves, then social media is not doing you any favors. If there is anything on social media that is negatively affecting your actions or your choices­—for example, if you’re starting to eat restrictively or exercise excessively—then it’s time to reassess. Parents should check-in with their kids about their lives on social media. In general, I recommend limiting social media— creating boundaries that are reasonable and work for you—so you can be present with people in your life. I also recommend social media vacations. It’s good to take the time to notice the difference between the virtual world and the real world.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

The PMC website is updating on October 15, 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• HHS Author Manuscripts

Social Media and Mental Health: Benefits, Risks, and Opportunities for Research and Practice

John a. naslund.

a Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA

Ameya Bondre

b CareNX Innovations, Mumbai, India

John Torous

c Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA

Kelly A. Aschbrenner

d Department of Psychiatry, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Lebanon, NH

Social media platforms are popular venues for sharing personal experiences, seeking information, and offering peer-to-peer support among individuals living with mental illness. With significant shortfalls in the availability, quality, and reach of evidence-based mental health services across the United States and globally, social media platforms may afford new opportunities to bridge this gap. However, caution is warranted, as numerous studies highlight risks of social media use for mental health. In this commentary, we consider the role of social media as a potentially viable intervention platform for offering support to persons with mental disorders, promoting engagement and retention in care, and enhancing existing mental health services. Specifically, we summarize current research on the use of social media among mental health service users, and early efforts using social media for the delivery of evidence-based programs. We also review the risks, potential harms, and necessary safety precautions with using social media for mental health. To conclude, we explore opportunities using data science and machine learning, for example by leveraging social media for detecting mental disorders and developing predictive models aimed at characterizing the aetiology and progression of mental disorders. These various efforts using social media, as summarized in this commentary, hold promise for improving the lives of individuals living with mental disorders.

Introduction

Social media has become a prominent fixture in the lives of many individuals facing the challenges of mental illness. Social media refers broadly to web and mobile platforms that allow individuals to connect with others within a virtual network (such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, or LinkedIn), where they can share, co-create, or exchange various forms of digital content, including information, messages, photos, or videos ( Ahmed, Ahmad, Ahmad, & Zakaria, 2019 ). Studies have reported that individuals living with a range of mental disorders, including depression, psychotic disorders, or other severe mental illnesses, use social media platforms at comparable rates as the general population, with use ranging from about 70% among middle-age and older individuals, to upwards of 97% among younger individuals ( Aschbrenner, Naslund, Grinley, et al., 2018 ; M. L. Birnbaum, Rizvi, Correll, Kane, & Confino, 2017 ; Brunette et al., 2019 ; Naslund, Aschbrenner, & Bartels, 2016 ). Other exploratory studies have found that many of these individuals with mental illness appear to turn to social media to share their personal experiences, seek information about their mental health and treatment options, and give and receive support from others facing similar mental health challenges ( Bucci, Schwannauer, & Berry, 2019 ; Naslund, Aschbrenner, Marsch, & Bartels, 2016b ).

Across the United States and globally, very few people living with mental illness have access to adequate mental health services ( Patel et al., 2018 ). The wide reach and near ubiquitous use of social media platforms may afford novel opportunities to address these shortfalls in existing mental health care, by enhancing the quality, availability, and reach of services. Recent studies have explored patterns of social media use, impact of social media use on mental health and wellbeing, and the potential to leverage the popularity and interactive features of social media to enhance the delivery of interventions. However, there remains uncertainty regarding the risks and potential harms of social media for mental health ( Orben & Przybylski, 2019 ), and how best to weigh these concerns against potential benefits.

In this commentary, we summarized current research on the use of social media among individuals with mental illness, with consideration of the impact of social media on mental wellbeing, as well as early efforts using social media for delivery of evidence-based programs for addressing mental health problems. We searched for recent peer reviewed publications in Medline and Google Scholar using the search terms “mental health” or “mental illness” and “social media”, and searched the reference lists of recent reviews and other relevant studies. We reviewed the risks, potential harms, and necessary safety precautions with using social media for mental health. Overall, our goal was to consider the role of social media as a potentially viable intervention platform for offering support to persons with mental disorders, promoting engagement and retention in care, and enhancing existing mental health services, while balancing the need for safety. Given this broad objective, we did not perform a systematic search of the literature and we did not apply specific inclusion criteria based on study design or type of mental disorder.

Social Media Use and Mental Health

In 2020, there are an estimated 3.8 billion social media users worldwide, representing half the global population ( We Are Social, 2020 ). Recent studies have shown that individuals with mental disorders are increasingly gaining access to and using mobile devices, such as smartphones ( Firth et al., 2015 ; Glick, Druss, Pina, Lally, & Conde, 2016 ; Torous, Chan, et al., 2014 ; Torous, Friedman, & Keshavan, 2014 ). Similarly, there is mounting evidence showing high rates of social media use among individuals with mental disorders, including studies looking at engagement with these popular platforms across diverse settings and disorder types. Initial studies from 2015 found that nearly half of a sample of psychiatric patients were social media users, with greater use among younger individuals ( Trefflich, Kalckreuth, Mergl, & Rummel-Kluge, 2015 ), while 47% of inpatients and outpatients with schizophrenia reported using social media, of which 79% reported at least once-a-week usage of social media websites ( Miller, Stewart, Schrimsher, Peeples, & Buckley, 2015 ). Rates of social media use among psychiatric populations have increased in recent years, as reflected in a study with data from 2017 showing comparable rates of social media use (approximately 70%) among individuals with serious mental illness in treatment as compared to low-income groups from the general population ( Brunette et al., 2019 ).

Similarly, among individuals with serious mental illness receiving community-based mental health services, a recent study found equivalent rates of social media use as the general population, even exceeding 70% of participants ( Naslund, Aschbrenner, & Bartels, 2016 ). Comparable findings were demonstrated among middle-age and older individuals with mental illness accessing services at peer support agencies, where 72% of respondents reported using social media ( Aschbrenner, Naslund, Grinley, et al., 2018 ). Similar results, with 68% of those with first episode psychosis using social media daily were reported in another study ( Abdel-Baki, Lal, D.-Charron, Stip, & Kara, 2017 ).

Individuals who self-identified as having a schizophrenia spectrum disorder responded to a survey shared through the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI), and reported that visiting social media sites was one of their most common activities when using digital devices, taking up roughly 2 hours each day ( Gay, Torous, Joseph, Pandya, & Duckworth, 2016 ). For adolescents and young adults ages 12 to 21 with psychotic disorders and mood disorders, over 97% reported using social media, with average use exceeding 2.5 hours per day ( M. L. Birnbaum et al., 2017 ). Similarly, in a sample of adolescents ages 13-18 recruited from community mental health centers, 98% reported using social media, with YouTube as the most popular platform, followed by Instagram and Snapchat ( Aschbrenner et al., 2019 ).

Research has also explored the motivations for using social media as well as the perceived benefits of interacting on these platforms among individuals with mental illness. In the sections that follow (see Table 1 for a summary), we consider three potentially unique features of interacting and connecting with others on social media that may offer benefits for individuals living with mental illness. These include: 1) Facilitate social interaction; 2) Access to a peer support network; and 3) Promote engagement and retention in services.

Summary of potential benefits and challenges with social media for mental health

Facilitate Social Interaction

Social media platforms offer near continuous opportunities to connect and interact with others, regardless of time of day or geographic location. This on demand ease of communication may be especially important for facilitating social interaction among individuals with mental disorders experiencing difficulties interacting in face-to-face settings. For example, impaired social functioning is a common deficit in schizophrenia spectrum disorders, and social media may facilitate communication and interacting with others for these individuals ( Torous & Keshavan, 2016 ). This was suggested in one study where participants with schizophrenia indicated that social media helped them to interact and socialize more easily ( Miller et al., 2015 ). Like other online communication, the ability to connect with others anonymously may be an important feature of social media, especially for individuals living with highly stigmatizing health conditions ( Berger, Wagner, & Baker, 2005 ), such as serious mental disorders ( Highton-Williamson, Priebe, & Giacco, 2015 ).

Studies have found that individuals with serious mental disorders ( Spinzy, Nitzan, Becker, Bloch, & Fennig, 2012 ) as well as young adults with mental illness ( Gowen, Deschaine, Gruttadara, & Markey, 2012 ) appear to form online relationships and connect with others on social media as often as social media users from the general population. This is an important observation because individuals living with serious mental disorders typically have few social contacts in the offline world, and also experience high rates of loneliness ( Badcock et al., 2015 ; Giacco, Palumbo, Strappelli, Catapano, & Priebe, 2016 ). Among individuals receiving publicly funded mental health services who use social media, nearly half (47%) reported using these platforms at least weekly to feel less alone ( Brusilovskiy, Townley, Snethen, & Salzer, 2016 ). In another study of young adults with serious mental illness, most indicated that they used social media to help feel less isolated ( Gowen et al., 2012 ). Interestingly, more frequent use of social media among a sample of individuals with serious mental illness was associated with greater community participation, measured as participation in shopping, work, religious activities or visiting friends and family, as well as greater civic engagement, reflected as voting in local elections ( Brusilovskiy et al., 2016 ).

Emerging research also shows that young people with moderate to severe depressive symptoms appear to prefer communicating on social media rather than in-person ( Rideout & Fox, 2018 ), while other studies have found that some individuals may prefer to seek help for mental health concerns online rather than through in-person encounters ( Batterham & Calear, 2017 ). In a qualitative study, participants with schizophrenia described greater anonymity, the ability to discover that other people have experienced similar health challenges, and reducing fears through greater access to information as important motivations for using the Internet to seek mental health information ( Schrank, Sibitz, Unger, & Amering, 2010 ). Because social media does not require the immediate responses necessary in face-to-face communication, it may overcome deficits with social interaction due to psychotic symptoms that typically adversely affect face-to-face conversations ( Docherty et al., 1996 ). Online social interactions may not require the use of non-verbal cues, particularly in the initial stages of interaction ( Kiesler, Siegel, & McGuire, 1984 ), with interactions being more fluid, and within the control of users, thereby overcoming possible social anxieties linked to in-person interaction ( Indian & Grieve, 2014 ). Furthermore, many individuals with serious mental disorders can experience symptoms including passive social withdrawal, blunted affect and attentional impairment, as well as active social avoidance due to hallucinations or other concerns ( Hansen, Torgalsbøen, Melle, & Bell, 2009 ); thus, potentially reinforcing the relative advantage, as perceived by users, of using social media over in person conversations.

Access to a Peer Support Network

There is growing recognition about the role that social media channels could play in enabling peer support ( Bucci et al., 2019 ; Naslund, Aschbrenner, et al., 2016b ), referred to as a system of mutual giving and receiving where individuals who have endured the difficulties of mental illness can offer hope, friendship, and support to others facing similar challenges ( Davidson, Chinman, Sells, & Rowe, 2006 ; Mead, Hilton, & Curtis, 2001 ). Initial studies exploring use of online self-help forums among individuals with serious mental illnesses have found that individuals with schizophrenia appeared to use these forums for self-disclosure, and sharing personal experiences, in addition to providing or requesting information, describing symptoms, or discussing medication ( Haker, Lauber, & Rössler, 2005 ), while users with bipolar disorder reported using these forums to ask for help from others about their illness ( Vayreda & Antaki, 2009 ). More recently, in a review of online social networking in people with psychosis, Highton-Williamson et al (2015) highlight that an important purpose of such online connections was to establish new friendships, pursue romantic relationships, maintain existing relationships or reconnect with people, and seek online peer support from others with lived experience ( Highton-Williamson et al., 2015 ).

Online peer support among individuals with mental illness has been further elaborated in various studies. In a content analysis of comments posted to YouTube by individuals who self-identified as having a serious mental illness, there appeared to be opportunities to feel less alone, provide hope, find support and learn through mutual reciprocity, and share coping strategies for day-to-day challenges of living with a mental illness ( Naslund, Grande, Aschbrenner, & Elwyn, 2014 ). In another study, Chang (2009) delineated various communication patterns in an online psychosis peer-support group ( Chang, 2009 ). Specifically, different forms of support emerged, including ‘informational support’ about medication use or contacting mental health providers, ‘esteem support’ involving positive comments for encouragement, ‘network support’ for sharing similar experiences, and ‘emotional support’ to express understanding of a peer’s situation and offer hope or confidence ( Chang, 2009 ). Bauer et al. (2013) reported that the main interest in online self-help forums for patients with bipolar disorder was to share emotions with others, allow exchange of information, and benefit by being part of an online social group ( Bauer, Bauer, Spiessl, & Kagerbauer, 2013 ).

For individuals who openly discuss mental health problems on Twitter, a study by Berry et al. (2017) found that this served as an important opportunity to seek support and to hear about the experiences of others ( Berry et al., 2017 ). In a survey of social media users with mental illness, respondents reported that sharing personal experiences about living with mental illness and opportunities to learn about strategies for coping with mental illness from others were important reasons for using social media ( Naslund et al., 2017 ). A computational study of mental health awareness campaigns on Twitter provides further support with inspirational posts and tips being the most shared ( Saha et al., 2019 ). Taken together, these studies offer insights about the potential for social media to facilitate access to an informal peer support network, though more research is necessary to examine how these online interactions may impact intentions to seek care, illness self-management, and clinically meaningful outcomes in offline contexts.

Promote Engagement and Retention in Services

Many individuals living with mental disorders have expressed interest in using social media platforms for seeking mental health information ( Lal, Nguyen, & Theriault, 2018 ), connecting with mental health providers ( M. L. Birnbaum et al., 2017 ), and accessing evidence-based mental health services delivered over social media specifically for coping with mental health symptoms or for promoting overall health and wellbeing ( Naslund et al., 2017 ). With the widespread use of social media among individuals living with mental illness combined with the potential to facilitate social interaction and connect with supportive peers, as summarized above, it may be possible to leverage the popular features of social media to enhance existing mental health programs and services. A recent review by Biagianti et al (2018) found that peer-to-peer support appeared to offer feasible and acceptable ways to augment digital mental health interventions for individuals with psychotic disorders by specifically improving engagement, compliance, and adherence to the interventions, and may also improve perceived social support ( Biagianti, Quraishi, & Schlosser, 2018 ).

Among digital programs that have incorporated peer-to-peer social networking consistent with popular features on social media platforms, a pilot study of the HORYZONS online psychosocial intervention demonstrated significant reductions in depression among patients with first episode psychosis ( Alvarez-Jimenez et al., 2013 ). Importantly, the majority of participants (95%) in this study engaged with the peer-to-peer networking feature of the program, with many reporting increases in perceived social connectedness and empowerment in their recovery process ( Alvarez-Jimenez et al., 2013 ). This moderated online social therapy program is now being evaluated as part of a large randomized controlled trial for maintaining treatment effects from first episode psychosis services ( Alvarez-Jimenez et al., 2019 ).

Other early efforts have demonstrated that use of digital environments with the interactive peer-to-peer features of social media can enhance social functioning and wellbeing in young people at high risk of psychosis ( Alvarez-Jimenez et al., 2018 ). There has also been a recent emergence of several mobile apps to support symptom monitoring and relapse prevention in psychotic disorders. Among these apps, the development of PRIME (Personalized Real-time Intervention for Motivational Enhancement) has involved working closely with young people with schizophrenia to ensure that the design of the app has the look and feel of mainstream social media platforms, as opposed to existing clinical tools ( Schlosser et al., 2016 ). This unique approach to the design of the app is aimed at promoting engagement, and ensuring that the app can effectively improve motivation and functioning through goal setting and promoting better quality of life of users with schizophrenia ( Schlosser et al., 2018 ).

Social media platforms could also be used to promote engagement and participation in in-person services delivered through community mental health settings. For example, the peer-based lifestyle intervention called PeerFIT targets weight loss and improved fitness among individuals living with serious mental illness through a combination of in-person lifestyle classes, exercise groups, and use of digital technologies ( Aschbrenner, Naslund, Shevenell, Kinney, & Bartels, 2016 ; Aschbrenner, Naslund, Shevenell, Mueser, & Bartels, 2016 ). The intervention holds tremendous promise as lack of support is one of the largest barriers toward exercise in patients with serious mental illness ( Firth et al., 2016 ) and it is now possible to use social media to counter such. Specifically, in PeerFIT, a private Facebook group is closely integrated into the program to offer a closed platform where participants can connect with the lifestyle coaches, access intervention content, and support or encourage each other as they work towards their lifestyle goals ( Aschbrenner, Naslund, & Bartels, 2016 ; Naslund, Aschbrenner, Marsch, & Bartels, 2016a ). To date, this program has demonstrate preliminary effectiveness for meaningfully reducing cardiovascular risk factors that contribute to early mortality in this patient group ( Aschbrenner, Naslund, Shevenell, Kinney, et al., 2016 ), while the Facebook component appears to have increased engagement in the program, while allowing participants who were unable to attend in-person sessions due to other health concerns or competing demands to remain connected with the program ( Naslund, Aschbrenner, Marsch, McHugo, & Bartels, 2018 ). This lifestyle intervention is currently being evaluated in a randomized controlled trial enrolling young adults with serious mental illness from a variety of real world community mental health services settings ( Aschbrenner, Naslund, Gorin, et al., 2018 ).

These examples highlight the promise of incorporating the features of popular social media into existing programs, which may offer opportunities to safely promote engagement and program retention, while achieving improved clinical outcomes. This is an emerging area of research, as evidenced by several important effectiveness trials underway ( Alvarez-Jimenez et al., 2019 ; Aschbrenner, Naslund, Gorin, et al., 2018 ), including efforts to leverage online social networking to support family caregivers of individuals receiving first episode psychosis services ( Gleeson et al., 2017 ).

Challenges with Social Media for Mental Health

The science on the role of social media for engaging persons with mental disorders needs a cautionary note on the effects of social media usage on mental health and well being, particularly in adolescents and young adults. While the risks and harms of social media are frequently covered in the popular press and mainstream news reports, careful consideration of the research in this area is necessary. In a review of 43 studies in young people, many benefits of social media were cited, including increased self-esteem, and opportunities for self-disclosure ( Best, Manktelow, & Taylor, 2014 ). Yet, reported negative effects were an increased exposure to harm, social isolation, depressive symptoms and bullying ( Best et al., 2014 ). In the sections that follow (see Table 1 for a summary), we consider three major categories of risk related to use of social media and mental health. These include: 1) Impact on symptoms; 2) Facing hostile interactions; and 3) Consequences for daily life.

Impact on Symptoms

Studies consistently highlight that use of social media, especially heavy use and prolonged time spent on social media platforms, appears to contribute to increased risk for a variety of mental health symptoms and poor wellbeing, especially among young people ( Andreassen et al., 2016 ; Kross et al., 2013 ; Woods & Scott, 2016 ). This may partly be driven by the detrimental effects of screen time on mental health, including increased severity of anxiety and depressive symptoms, which have been well documented ( Stiglic & Viner, 2019 ). Recent studies have reported negative effects of social media use on mental health of young people, including social comparison pressure with others and greater feeling of social isolation after being rejected by others on social media ( Rideout & Fox, 2018 ). In a study of young adults, it was found that negative comparisons with others on Facebook contributed to risk of rumination and subsequent increases in depression symptoms ( Feinstein et al., 2013 ). Still, the cross sectional nature of many screen time and mental health studies makes it challenging to reach causal inferences ( Orben & Przybylski, 2019 ).

Quantity of social media use is also an important factor, as highlighted in a survey of young adults ages 19 to 32, where more frequent visits to social media platforms each week were correlated with greater depressive symptoms ( Lin et al., 2016 ). More time spent using social media is also associated with greater symptoms of anxiety ( Vannucci, Flannery, & Ohannessian, 2017 ). The actual number of platforms accessed also appears to contribute to risk as reflected in another national survey of young adults where use of a large number of social media platforms was associated with negative impact on mental health ( Primack et al., 2017 ). Among survey respondents using between 7 and 11 different social media platforms compared to respondents using only 2 or fewer platforms, there was a 3 times greater odds of having high levels of depressive symptoms and a 3.2 times greater odds of having high levels of anxiety symptoms ( Primack et al., 2017 ).

Many researchers have postulated that worsening mental health attributed to social media use may be because social media replaces face-to-face interactions for young people ( Twenge & Campbell, 2018 ), and may contribute to greater loneliness ( Bucci et al., 2019 ), and negative effects on other aspects of health and wellbeing ( Woods & Scott, 2016 ). One nationally representative survey of US adolescents found that among respondents who reported more time accessing media such as social media platforms or smartphone devices, there was significantly greater depressive symptoms and increased risk of suicide when compared to adolescents who reported spending more time on non-screen activities, such as in-person social interaction or sports and recreation activities ( Twenge, Joiner, Rogers, & Martin, 2018 ). For individuals living with more severe mental illnesses, the effects of social media on psychiatric symptoms have received less attention. One study found that participation in chat rooms may contribute to worsening symptoms in young people with psychotic disorders ( Mittal, Tessner, & Walker, 2007 ), while another study of patients with psychosis found that social media use appeared to predict low mood ( Berry, Emsley, Lobban, & Bucci, 2018 ). These studies highlight a clear relationship between social media use and mental health that may not be present in general population studies ( Orben & Przybylski, 2019 ), and emphasize the need to explore how social media may contribute to symptom severity and whether protective factors may be identified to mitigate these risks.

Facing Hostile Interactions

Popular social media platforms can create potential situations where individuals may be victimized by negative comments or posts. Cyberbullying represents a form of online aggression directed towards specific individuals, such as peers or acquaintances, which is perceived to be most harmful when compared to random hostile comments posted online ( Hamm et al., 2015 ). Importantly, cyberbullying on social media consistently shows harmful impact on mental health in the form of increased depressive symptoms as well as worsening of anxiety symptoms, as evidenced in a review of 36 studies among children and young people ( Hamm et al., 2015 ). Furthermore, cyberbullying disproportionately impacts females as reflected in a national survey of adolescents in the United States, where females were twice as likely to be victims of cyberbullying compared to males ( Alhajji, Bass, & Dai, 2019 ). Most studies report cross-sectional associations between cyberbullying and symptoms of depression or anxiety ( Hamm et al., 2015 ), though one longitudinal study in Switzerland found that cyberbullying contributed to significantly greater depression over time ( Machmutow, Perren, Sticca, & Alsaker, 2012 ).

For youth ages 10 to 17 who reported major depressive symptomatology, there was over 3 times greater odds of facing online harassment in the last year compared to youth who reported mild or no depressive symptoms ( Ybarra, 2004 ). Similarly, in a 2018 national survey of young people, respondents ages 14 to 22 with moderate to severe depressive symptoms were more likely to have had negative experiences when using social media, and in particular, were more likely to report having faced hostile comments, or being “trolled”, from others when compared to respondents without depressive symptoms (31% vs. 14%) ( Rideout & Fox, 2018 ). As these studies depict risks for victimization on social media and the correlation with poor mental health, it is possible that individuals living with mental illness may also experience greater hostility online compared to individuals without mental illness. This would be consistent with research showing greater risk of hostility, including increased violence and discrimination, directed towards individuals living with mental illness in in-person contexts, especially targeted at those with severe mental illnesses ( Goodman et al., 1999 ).

A computational study of mental health awareness campaigns on Twitter reported that while stigmatizing content was rare, it was actually the most spread (re-tweeted) demonstrating that harmful content can travel quickly on social media ( Saha et al., 2019 ). Another study was able to map the spread of social media posts about the Blue Whale Challenge, an alleged game promoting suicide, over Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr and other forums across 127 countries ( Sumner et al., 2019 ). These findings show that it is critical to monitor the actual content of social media posts, such as determining whether content is hostile or promotes harm to self or others. This is pertinent because existing research looking at duration of exposure cannot account for the impact of specific types of content on mental health and is insufficient to fully understand the effects of using these platforms on mental health.

Consequences for Daily Life

The ways in which individuals use social media can also impact their offline relationships and everyday activities. To date, reports have described risks of social media use pertaining to privacy, confidentiality, and unintended consequences of disclosing personal health information online ( Torous & Keshavan, 2016 ). Additionally, concerns have been raised about poor quality or misleading health information shared on social media, and that social media users may not be aware of misleading information or conflicts of interest especially when the platforms promote popular content regardless of whether it is from a trustworthy source ( Moorhead et al., 2013 ; Ventola, 2014 ). For persons living with mental illness there may be additional risks from using social media. A recent study that specifically explored the perspectives of social media users with serious mental illnesses, including participants with schizophrenia spectrum disorders, bipolar disorder, or major depression, found that over one third of participants expressed concerns about privacy when using social media ( Naslund & Aschbrenner, 2019 ). The reported risks of social media use were directly related to many aspects of everyday life, including concerns about threats to employment, fear of stigma and being judged, impact on personal relationships, and facing hostility or being hurt ( Naslund & Aschbrenner, 2019 ). While few studies have specifically explored the dangers of social media use from the perspectives of individuals living with mental illness, it is important to recognize that use of these platforms may contribute to risks that extend beyond worsening symptoms and that can affect different aspects of daily life.

In this commentary we considered ways in which social media may yield benefits for individuals living with mental illness, while contrasting these with the possible harms. Studies reporting on the threats of social media for individuals with mental illness are mostly cross-sectional, making it difficult to draw conclusions about direction of causation. However, the risks are potentially serious. These risks should be carefully considered in discussions pertaining to use of social media and the broader use of digital mental health technologies, as avenues for mental health promotion, or for supporting access to evidence-based programs or mental health services. At this point, it would be premature to view the benefits of social media as outweighing the possible harms, when it is clear from the studies summarized here that social media use can have negative effects on mental health symptoms, can potentially expose individuals to hurtful content and hostile interactions, and can result in serious consequences for daily life, including threats to employment and personal relationships. Despite these risks, it is also necessary to recognize that individuals with mental illness will continue to use social media given the ease of accessing these platforms and the immense popularity of online social networking. With this in mind, it may be ideal to raise awareness about these possible risks so that individuals can implement necessary safeguards, while also highlighting that there could also be benefits. For individuals with mental illness who use social media, being aware of the risks is an essential first step, and then highlighting ways that use of these popular platforms could also contribute to some benefits, ranging from finding meaningful interactions with others, engaging with peer support networks, and accessing information and services.

To capitalize on the widespread use of social media, and to achieve the promise that these platforms may hold for supporting the delivery of targeted mental health interventions, there is need for continued research to better understand how individuals living with mental illness use social media. Such efforts could inform safety measures and also encourage use of social media in ways that maximize potential benefits while minimizing risk of harm. It will be important to recognize how gender and race contribute to differences in use of social media for seeking mental health information or accessing interventions, as well as differences in how social media might impact mental wellbeing. For example, a national survey of 14- to 22-year olds in the United States found that female respondents were more likely to search online for information about depression or anxiety, and to try to connect with other people online who share similar mental health concerns, when compared to male respondents ( Rideout & Fox, 2018 ). In the same survey, there did not appear to be any differences between racial or ethnic groups in social media use for seeking mental health information ( Rideout & Fox, 2018 ). Social media use also appears to have a differential impact on mental health and emotional wellbeing between females and males ( Booker, Kelly, & Sacker, 2018 ), highlighting the need to explore unique experiences between gender groups to inform tailored programs and services. Research shows that lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender individuals frequently use social media for searching for health information and may be more likely compared to heterosexual individuals to share their own personal health experiences with others online ( Rideout & Fox, 2018 ). Less is known about use of social media for seeking support for mental health concerns among gender minorities, though this is an important area for further investigation as these individuals are more likely to experience mental health problems and more likely to experience online victimization when compared to heterosexual individuals ( Mereish, Sheskier, Hawthorne, & Goldbach, 2019 ).

Similarly, efforts are needed to explore the relationship between social media use and mental health among ethnic and racial minorities. A recent study found that exposure to traumatic online content on social media showing violence or hateful posts directed at racial minorities contributed to increases in psychological distress, PTSD symptoms, and depression among African American and Latinx adolescents in the United States ( Tynes, Willis, Stewart, & Hamilton, 2019 ). These concerns are contrasted by growing interest in the potential for new technologies including social media to expand the reach of services to underrepresented minority groups ( Schueller, Hunter, Figueroa, & Aguilera, 2019 ). Therefore, greater attention is needed to understanding the perspectives of ethnic and racial minorities to inform effective and safe use of social media for mental health promotion efforts.

Research has found that individuals living with mental illness have expressed interest in accessing mental health services through social media platforms. A survey of social media users with mental illness found that most respondents were interested in accessing programs for mental health on social media targeting symptom management, health promotion, and support for communicating with health care providers and interacting with the health system ( Naslund et al., 2017 ). Importantly, individuals with serious mental illness have also emphasized that any mental health intervention on social media would need to be moderated by someone with adequate training and credentials, would need to have ground rules and ways to promote safety and minimize risks, and importantly, would need to be free and easy to access.

An important strength with this commentary is that it combines a range of studies broadly covering the topic of social media and mental health. We have provided a summary of recent evidence in a rapidly advancing field with the goal of presenting unique ways that social media could offer benefits for individuals with mental illness, while also acknowledging the potentially serious risks and the need for further investigation. There are also several limitations with this commentary that warrant consideration. Importantly, as we aimed to address this broad objective, we did not conduct a systematic review of the literature. Therefore, the studies reported here are not exhaustive, and there may be additional relevant studies that were not included. Additionally, we only summarized published studies, and as a result, any reports from the private sector or websites from different organizations using social media or other apps containing social media-like features would have been omitted. Though it is difficult to rigorously summarize work from the private sector, sometimes referred to as “gray literature”, because many of these projects are unpublished and are likely selective in their reporting of findings given the target audience may be shareholders or consumers.

Another notable limitation is that we did not assess risk of bias in the studies summarized in this commentary. We found many studies that highlighted risks associated with social media use for individuals living with mental illness; however, few studies of programs or interventions reported negative findings, suggesting the possibility that negative findings may go unpublished. This concern highlights the need for a future more rigorous review of the literature with careful consideration of bias and an accompanying quality assessment. Most of the studies that we described were from the United States, as well as from other higher income settings such as Australia or the United Kingdom. Despite the global reach of social media platforms, there is a dearth of research on the impact of these platforms on the mental health of individuals in diverse settings, as well as the ways in which social media could support mental health services in lower income countries where there is virtually no access to mental health providers. Future research is necessary to explore the opportunities and risks for social media to support mental health promotion in low-income and middle-income countries, especially as these countries face a disproportionate share of the global burden of mental disorders, yet account for the majority of social media users worldwide ( Naslund et al., 2019 ).

Future Directions for Social Media and Mental Health

As we consider future research directions, the near ubiquitous social media use also yields new opportunities to study the onset and manifestation of mental health symptoms and illness severity earlier than traditional clinical assessments. There is an emerging field of research referred to as ‘digital phenotyping’ aimed at capturing how individuals interact with their digital devices, including social media platforms, in order to study patterns of illness and identify optimal time points for intervention ( Jain, Powers, Hawkins, & Brownstein, 2015 ; Onnela & Rauch, 2016 ). Given that most people access social media via mobile devices, digital phenotyping and social media are closely related ( Torous et al., 2019 ). To date, the emergence of machine learning, a powerful computational method involving statistical and mathematical algorithms ( Shatte, Hutchinson, & Teague, 2019 ), has made it possible to study large quantities of data captured from popular social media platforms such as Twitter or Instagram to illuminate various features of mental health ( Manikonda & De Choudhury, 2017 ; Reece et al., 2017 ). Specifically, conversations on Twitter have been analyzed to characterize the onset of depression ( De Choudhury, Gamon, Counts, & Horvitz, 2013 ) as well as detecting users’ mood and affective states ( De Choudhury, Gamon, & Counts, 2012 ), while photos posted to Instagram can yield insights for predicting depression ( Reece & Danforth, 2017 ). The intersection of social media and digital phenotyping will likely add new levels of context to social media use in the near future.

Several studies have also demonstrated that when compared to a control group, Twitter users with a self-disclosed diagnosis of schizophrenia show unique online communication patterns ( Michael L Birnbaum, Ernala, Rizvi, De Choudhury, & Kane, 2017 ), including more frequent discussion of tobacco use ( Hswen et al., 2017 ), symptoms of depression and anxiety ( Hswen, Naslund, Brownstein, & Hawkins, 2018b ), and suicide ( Hswen, Naslund, Brownstein, & Hawkins, 2018a ). Another study found that online disclosures about mental illness appeared beneficial as reflected by fewer posts about symptoms following self-disclosure (Ernala, Rizvi, Birnbaum, Kane, & De Choudhury, 2017). Each of these examples offers early insights into the potential to leverage widely available online data for better understanding the onset and course of mental illness. It is possible that social media data could be used to supplement additional digital data, such as continuous monitoring using smartphone apps or smart watches, to generate a more comprehensive ‘digital phenotype’ to predict relapse and identify high-risk health behaviors among individuals living with mental illness ( Torous et al., 2019 ).

With research increasingly showing the valuable insights that social media data can yield about mental health states, greater attention to the ethical concerns with using individual data in this way is necessary ( Chancellor, Birnbaum, Caine, Silenzio, & De Choudhury, 2019 ). For instance, data is typically captured from social media platforms without the consent or awareness of users ( Bidargaddi et al., 2017 ), which is especially crucial when the data relates to a socially stigmatizing health condition such as mental illness ( Guntuku, Yaden, Kern, Ungar, & Eichstaedt, 2017 ). Precautions are needed to ensure that data is not made identifiable in ways that were not originally intended by the user who posted the content, as this could place an individual at risk of harm or divulge sensitive health information ( Webb et al., 2017 ; Williams, Burnap, & Sloan, 2017 ). Promising approaches for minimizing these risks include supporting the participation of individuals with expertise in privacy, clinicians, as well as the target individuals with mental illness throughout the collection of data, development of predictive algorithms, and interpretation of findings ( Chancellor et al., 2019 ).

In recognizing that many individuals living with mental illness use social media to search for information about their mental health, it is possible that they may also want to ask their clinicians about what they find online to check if the information is reliable and trustworthy. Alternatively, many individuals may feel embarrassed or reluctant to talk to their clinicians about using social media to find mental health information out of concerns of being judged or dismissed. Therefore, mental health clinicians may be ideally positioned to talk with their patients about using social media, and offer recommendations to promote safe use of these sites, while also respecting their patients’ autonomy and personal motivations for using these popular platforms. Given the gap in clinical knowledge about the impact of social media on mental health, clinicians should be aware of the many potential risks so that they can inform their patients, while remaining open to the possibility that their patients may also experience benefits through use of these platforms. As awareness of these risks grows, it may be possible that new protections will be put in place by industry or through new policies that will make the social media environment safer. It is hard to estimate a number needed to treat or harm today given the nascent state of research, which means the patient and clinician need to weigh the choice on a personal level. Thus offering education and information is an important first step in that process. As patients increasingly show interest in accessing mental health information or services through social media, it will be necessary for health systems to recognize social media as a potential avenue for reaching or offering support to patients. This aligns with growing emphasis on the need for greater integration of digital psychiatry, including apps, smartphones, or wearable devices, into patient care and clinical services through institution-wide initiatives and training clinical providers ( Hilty, Chan, Torous, Luo, & Boland, 2019 ). Within a learning healthcare environment where research and care are tightly intertwined and feedback between both is rapid, the integration of digital technologies into services may create new opportunities for advancing use of social media for mental health.

As highlighted in this commentary, social media has become an important part of the lives of many individuals living with mental disorders. Many of these individuals use social media to share their lived experiences with mental illness, to seek support from others, and to search for information about treatment recommendations, accessing mental health services, and coping with symptoms ( Bucci et al., 2019 ; Highton-Williamson et al., 2015 ; Naslund, Aschbrenner, et al., 2016b ). As the field of digital mental health advances, the wide reach, ease of access, and popularity of social media platforms could be used to allow individuals in need of mental health services or facing challenges of mental illness to access evidence-based treatment and support. To achieve this end and to explore whether social media platforms can advance efforts to close the gap in available mental health services in the United States and globally, it will be essential for researchers to work closely with clinicians and with those affected by mental illness to ensure that possible benefits of using social media are carefully weighed against anticipated risks.

Acknowledgements

Dr. Naslund is supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (U19MH113211). Dr. Aschbrenner is supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (1R01MH110965-01).

Publisher's Disclaimer: This Author Accepted Manuscript is a PDF file of a an unedited peer-reviewed manuscript that has been accepted for publication but has not been copyedited or corrected. The official version of record that is published in the journal is kept up to date and so may therefore differ from this version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors have nothing to disclose.

• Abdel-Baki A, Lai S, D.-Charron O, Stip E, & Kara N, (2017). Understanding access and use of technology among youth with first - episode psychosis to inform the development of technology - enabled therapeutic interventions . Early intervention in psychiatry , 77 ( 1 ), 72–76. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ahmed YA, Ahmad MN, Ahmad N, & Zakaria NH (2019). Social media for knowledge-sharing: A systematic literature review . Telematics and informatics , 37 , 72–112 . [ Google Scholar ]
• Alhajji M, Bass S, & Dai T (2019). Cyberbullying, mental health, and violence in adolescents and associations with sex and race: data from the 2015 Youth Risk Behavior Survey . Global pediatric health , 6 , 2333794X19868887. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Alvarez-Jimenez M, Bendall S, Koval P, Rice S, Cagliarini D, Valentine L, … Penn DL (2019). HORYZONS trial: protocol for a randomised controlled trial of a moderated online social therapy to maintain treatment effects from first-episode psychosis services . BMJ open , 9 ( 2 ), e024104. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Alvarez-Jimenez M, Bendall S, Lederman R, Wadley G, Chinnery G, Vargas S, … Gleeson JF (2013). On the HORYZON: moderated online social therapy for long-term recovery in first episode psychosis . Schizophrenia research , 143 ( 1 ), 143–149. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Alvarez-Jimenez M, Gleeson J, Bendall S, Penn D, Yung A, Ryan R, … Miles C (2018). Enhancing social functioning in young people at Ultra High Risk (UHR) for psychosis: A pilot study of a novel strengths and mindfulness-based online social therapy . Schizophrenia research , 202 , 369–377. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Andreassen CS, Billieux J, Griffiths MD, Kuss DJ, Demetrovics Z, Mazzoni E, & Pallesen S (2016). The relationship between addictive use of social media and video games and symptoms of psychiatric disorders: A large-scale cross-sectional study . Psychology of Addictive Behaviors , 30 ( 2 ), 252. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Aschbrenner KA, Naslund JA, & Bartels SJ (2016). A mixed methods study of peer-to-peer support in a group-based lifestyle intervention for adults with serious mental illness . Psychiatric rehabilitation journal , 39 ( 4 ), 328. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Aschbrenner KA, Naslund JA, Gorin AA, Mueser KT, Scherer EA, Viron M, … Bartels SJ, (2018). Peer support and mobile health technology targeting obesity-related cardiovascular risk in young adults with serious mental illness: Protocol for a randomized controlled trial . Contemporary clinical trials , 74 , 97–106. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Aschbrenner KA, Naslund JA, Grinley T, Bienvenida JCM, Bartels SJ, & Brunette M (2018). A Survey of Online and Mobile Technology Use at Peer Support Agencies . Psychiatric Quarterly , 1–10. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Aschbrenner KA, Naslund JA, Shevenell M, Kinney E, & Bartels SJ (2016). A pilot study of a peer-group lifestyle intervention enhanced with mHealth technology and social media for adults with serious mental illness . The Journal of nervous and mental disease , 204 ( 6 ), 483–486. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Aschbrenner KA, Naslund JA, Shevenell M, Mueser KT, & Bartels SJ (2016). Feasibility of behavioral weight loss treatment enhanced with peer support and mobile health technology for individuals with serious mental illness . Psychiatric Quarterly , 57 ( 3 ), 401–415. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Aschbrenner KA, Naslund JA, Tomlinson EF, Kinney A, Pratt SI, & Brunette MF (2019). Adolescents’ Use of Digital Technologies and Preferences for Mobile Health Coaching in Mental Health Settings . Frontiers in Public Health . [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Badcock JC, Shah S, Mackinnon A, Stain HJ, Galletly C, Jablensky A, & Morgan VA (2015). Loneliness in psychotic disorders and its association with cognitive function and symptom profile . Schizophrenia research , 169 ( 1-3 ), 268–273. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Batterham PJ, & Calear AJ (2017). Preferences for internet-based mental health interventions in an adult online sample: Findings from ann online community survey . JMIR mental health , 4 ( 2 ), e26. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bauer R, Bauer M, Spiessl H, & Kagerbauer T (2013). Cyber-support: an analysis of online self-help forums (online self-help forums in bipolar disorder) . Nordic journal of psychiatry , 67 ( 3 ), 185–190. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Berger M, Wagner TH, & Baker LC (2005). Internet use and stigmatized illness . Social science & medicine , 67 ( 8 ), 1821–1827. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Berry N, Emsley R, Lobban F, & Bucci S (2018). Social media and its relationship with mood, self - esteem and paranoia in psychosis . Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica , 138 , 558–570. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Berry N, Lobban F, Belousov M, Emsley R, Nenadic G, & Bucci S (2017). # Why We Tweet MH: understanding why people use Twitter to discuss mental health problems . Journal of medical Internet research , 19 ( 4 ), e107. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Best P, Manktelow R, & Taylor B (2014). Online communication, social media and adolescent wellbeing: A systematic narrative review . Children and Youth Services Review , 41 , 27–36. [ Google Scholar ]
• Biagianti B, Quraishi SH, & Schlosser DA (2018). Potential benefits of incorporating peer-to-peer interactions into digital interventions for psychotic disorders: a systematic review . Psychiatric Services , 69 ( 4 ), 377–388. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bidargaddi N, Musiat P, Makinen V-P, Ermes M, Schrader G, & Licinio J (2017). Digital footprints: facilitating large-scale environmental psychiatric research in naturalistic settings through data from everyday technologies . Molecular psychiatry , 22 ( 2 ), 164. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Birnbaum ML, Emala SK, Rizvi AF, De Choudhury M, & Kane JM (2017). A Collaborative Approach to Identifying Social Media Markers of Schizophrenia by Employing Machine Learning and Clinical Appraisals . Journal of medical Internet research , 79 ( 8 ), e289. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Birnbaum ML, Rizvi AF, Correll CU, Kane JM, & Confino J (2017). Role of social media and the Internet in pathways to care for adolescents and young adults with psychotic disorders and non - psychotic mood disorders . Early intervention in psychiatry , 77 ( 4 ), 290–295. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Booker CL, Kelly YJ, & Sacker A (2018). Gender differences in the associations between age trends of social media interaction and well-being among 10-15 year olds in the UK . BMC public health , 18 ( 1 ), 321. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Brunette M, Achtyes E, Pratt S, Stilwell K, Opperman M, Guarino S, & Kay-Lambkin F (2019). Use of smartphones, computers and social media among people with SMI: opportunity for intervention . Community mental health journal , 1–6. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Brusilovskiy E, Townley G, Snethen G, & Salzer MS (2016). Social media use, community participation and psychological well-being among individuals with serious mental illnesses . Computers in Human Behavior , 65 , 232–240. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bucci S, Schwannauer M, & Berry N (2019). The digital revolution and its impact on mental health care . Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice , 1–21. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Chancellor S, Birnbaum ML, Caine ED, Silenzio V, & De Choudhury M (2019). A taxonomy of ethical tensions in inferring mental health states from social media . Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. [ Google Scholar ]
• Chang HJ (2009). Online supportive interactions: Using a network approach to examine communication patterns within a psychosis social support group in Taiwan . Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology , 60 ( 7 ), 1504–1517. [ Google Scholar ]
• Davidson L, Chinman M, Sells D, & Rowe M (2006). Peer support among adults with serious mental illness: a report from the field . Schizophrenia bulletin , 32 ( 3 ), 443–450. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• De Choudhury M, Gamon M, & Counts S (2012). Happy, nervous or surprised? classification of human affective states in social media . Paper presented at the Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. [ Google Scholar ]
• De Choudhury M, Gamon M, Counts S, & Horvitz E (2013). Predicting Depression via Social Media . Paper presented at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. [ Google Scholar ]
• Docherty NM, Hawkins KA, Hoffman RE, Quinlan DM, Rakfeldt J, & Sledge WH (1996). Working memory, attention, and communication disturbances in schizophrenia . Journal of Abnormal Psychology , 105 ( 2 ), 212. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Emala SK, Rizvi AF, Birnbaum ML, Kane JM, & De Choudhury M (2017). Linguistic Markers Indicating Therapeutic Outcomes of Social Media Disclosures of Schizophrenia . Proc. ACMHum.-Comput. Interact , 1 ( 1 ), 43. [ Google Scholar ]
• Feinstein BA, Hershenberg R, Bhatia V, Latack JA, Meuwly N, & Davila J (2013). Negative social comparison on Facebook and depressive symptoms: Rumination as a mechanism . Psychology of Popular Media Culture , 2 ( 3 ), 161. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Firth J, Cotter J, Torous J, Bucci S, Firth JA, & Yung AR (2015). Mobile phone ownership and endorsement of “mHealth” among people with psychosis: a meta-analysis of cross-sectional studies . Schizophrenia bulletin , 42 ( 2 ), 448–455. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Firth J, Rosenbaum S, Stubbs B, Gorczynski P, Yung AR, & Vancampfort D (2016). Motivating factors and barriers towards exercise in severe mental illness: a systematic review and meta-analysis . Psychological medicine , 46 ( 14 ), 2869–2881. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gay K, Torous J, Joseph A, Pandya A, & Duckworth K (2016). Digital technology use among individuals with schizophrenia: results of an online survey . JMIR mental health , 3 ( 2 ), el5. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Giacco D, Palumbo C, Strappelli N, Catapano F, & Priebe S (2016). Social contacts and loneliness in people with psychotic and mood disorders . Comprehensive Psychiatry , 66 , 59–66. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gleeson J, Lederman R, Herrman H, Koval P, Eleftheriadis D, Bendall S, … Alvarez-Jimenez M (2017). Moderated online social therapy for carers of young people recovering from first-episode psychosis: study protocol for a randomised controlled trial . Trials , 75 ( 1 ), 27. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Glick G, Druss B, Pina J, Lally C, & Conde M (2016). Use of mobile technology in a community mental health setting . Journal of telemedicine and telecare , 22 ( 7 ), 430–435. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Goodman LA, Thompson KM, Weinfurt K, Corl S, Acker P, Mueser KT, & Rosenberg SD (1999). Reliability of reports of violent victimization and posttraumatic stress disorder among men and women with serious mental illness . Journal of Traumatic Stress: Official Publication of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies , 12 ( 4 ), 587–599. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gowen K, Deschaine M, Gruttadara D, & Markey D (2012). Young adults with mental health conditions and social networking websites: seeking tools to build community . Psychiatric rehabilitation journal , 35 ( 3 ), 245–250. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Guntuku SC, Yaden DB, Kern ML, Ungar LH, & Eichstaedt JC (2017). Detecting depression and mental illness on social media: an integrative review . Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences , 18 , 43–49. [ Google Scholar ]
• Haker EL, Lauber C, & Rossler W (2005). Internet forums: a self - help approach for individuals with schizophrenia? Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica , 112 ( 6 ), 474–477. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hamm MP, Newton AS, Chisholm A, Shulhan J, Milne A, Sundar P, … Hartling L (2015). Prevalence and effect of cyberbullying on children and young people: A scoping review of social media studies . JAMA pediatrics , 769 ( 8 ), 770–777. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hansen CF, Torgalsboen A-K, Melle I, & Bell MD (2009). Passive/apathetic social withdrawal and active social avoidance in schizophrenia: difference in underlying psychological processes . The Journal of nervous and mental disease , 197 ( 4 ), 274–277. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Highton-Williamson E, Priebe S, & Giacco D (2015). Online social networking in people with psychosis: a systematic review . International Journal of Social Psychiatry , 61 ( 1 ), 92–101. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hilty DM, Chan S, Torous J, Luo J, & Boland RJ (2019). Mobile health, smartphone/device, and apps for psychiatry and medicine: competencies, training, and faculty development issues . Psychiatric Clinics , 42 ( 2 ), 513–534. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hswen Y, Naslund JA, Brownstein JS, & Hawkins JB (2018a). Monitoring online discussions about suicide among Twitter users with schizophrenia: exploratory study . JMIR mental health , 5 ( 4 ), e11483. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hswen Y, Naslund JA, Brownstein JS, & Hawkins JB (2018b). Online communication about depression and anxiety among twitter users with schizophrenia: preliminary findings to inform a digital phenotype using social media . Psychiatric Quarterly , 89 ( 3 ), 569–580. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hswen Y, Naslund JA, Chandrashekar P, Siegel R, Brownstein JS, & Hawkins JB (2017). Exploring online communication about cigarette smoking among Twitter users who self-identify as having schizophrenia . Psychiatry research , 257 , 479–484. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Indian M, & Grieve R (2014). When Facebook is easier than face-to-face: social support dervied from Facebook in socially anxious individuals . Personality and Individual Differences , 59 , 102–106. [ Google Scholar ]
• Jain SH, Powers BW, Hawkins JB, & Brownstein JS (2015). The digital phenotype . Nature Biotechnology , 33 ( 5 ), 462. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kiesler S, Siegel J, & McGuire TW (1984). Social psychological aspects of computer-mediated communication . American Psychologist , 39 , 1123–1134. [ Google Scholar ]
• Kross E, Verduyn P, Demiralp E, Park J, Lee DS, Lin N, … Ybarra O (2013). Facebook use predicts declines in subjective well-being in young adults . PloS one , 5 ( 8 ), e69841. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lai S, Nguyen V, & Theriault J (2018). Seeking mental health information and support online: experiences and perspectives of young people receiving treatment for first - episode psychosis . Early intervention in psychiatry , 72 ( 3 ), 324–330. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lin LY, Sidani JE, Shensa A, Radovic A, Miller E, Colditz JB, … Primack BA (2016). Association between social media use and depression among US young adults . Depression and anxiety , 22 ( 4 ), 323–331. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Machmutow K, Perren S, Sticca F, & Alsaker FD (2012). Peer victimisation and depressive symptoms: can specific coping strategies buffer the negative impact of cybervictimisation? Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties , 17 ( 3-4 ), 403–420. [ Google Scholar ]
• Manikonda L, & De Choudhury M (2017). Modeling and understanding visual attributes of mental health disclosures in social media . Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. [ Google Scholar ]
• Mead S, Hilton D, & Curtis L (2001). Peer support: A theoretical perspective . Psychiatric rehabilitation journal , 25 ( 2 ), 134. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mereish EH, Sheskier M, Hawthorne DJ, & Goldbach JT (2019). Sexual orientation disparities in mental health and substance use among Black American young people in the USA: effects of cyber and bias-based victimisation . Culture, health & sexuality , 21 ( 9 ), 985–998. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Miller BJ, Stewart A, Schrimsher J, Peeples D, & Buckley PF (2015). How connected are people with schizophrenia? Cell phone, computer, email, and social media use . Psychiatry research , 225 ( 3 ), 458–463. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mittal VA, Tessner KD, & Walker EF (2007). Elevated social Internet use and schizotypal personality disorder in adolescents . Schizophrenia research , 94 ( 1-3 ), 50–57. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Moorhead SA, Hazlett DE, Harrison L, Carroll JK, Irwin A, & Hoving C (2013). A new dimension of health care: systematic review of the uses, benefits, and limitations of social media for health communication . Journal of medical Internet research , 15 ( 4 ), e85. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Naslund JA, & Aschbrenner KA (2019). Risks to privacy with use of social media: understanding the views of social media users with serious mental illness . Psychiatric Services , appi. ps. 201800520. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Naslund JA, Aschbrenner KA, & Bartels SJ (2016). How people living with serious mental illness use smartphones, mobile apps, and social media . Psychiatric rehabilitation journal , 39 ( 4 ), 364–367. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Naslund JA, Aschbrenner KA, Marsch LA, & Bartels SJ (2016a). Feasibility and acceptability of Facebook for health promotion among people with serious mental illness . Digital health , 2 , 2055207616654822. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Naslund JA, Aschbrenner KA, Marsch LA, & Bartels SJ (2016b). The future of mental health care: peer-to-peer support and social media . Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences , 25 ( 2 ), 113–122. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Naslund JA, Aschbrenner KA, Marsch LA, McHugo GJ, & Bartels SJ (2018). Facebook for supporting a lifestyle intervention for people with major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia: an exploratory study . Psychiatric Quarterly , 59 ( 1 ), 81–94. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Naslund JA, Aschbrenner KA, McHugo GJ, Unutzer J, Marsch LA, & Bartels SJ (2017). Exploring opportunities to support mental health care using social media: A survey of social media users with mental illness . Early intervention in psychiatry . [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Naslund JA, Gonsalves PP, Gruebner O, Pendse SR, Smith SL, Sharma A, & Raviola G (2019). Digital innovations for global mental health: opportunities for data science, task sharing, and early intervention . Current Treatment Options in Psychiatry , 1–15. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Naslund JA, Grande SW, Aschbrenner KA, & Elwyn G (2014). Naturally occurring peer support through social media: the experiences of individuals with severe mental illness using YouTube . PloS one , 9 ( 10 ), e110171. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Onnela J-P, & Rauch SL (2016). Harnessing smartphone-based digital phenotyping to enhance behavioral and mental health . Neuropsychopharmacology , 41 ( 7 ), 1691. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Orben A, & Przybylski AK (2019). The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use . Nature Human Behaviour , 3 ( 2 ), 173. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Patel V, Saxena S, Lund C, Thornicroft G, Baingana F, Bolton P, … Eaton J (2018). The Lancet Commission on global mental health and sustainable development . The Lancet . [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Primack BA, Shensa A, Escobar-Viera CG, Barrett EL, Sidani JE, Colditz JB, & James AE (2017). Use of multiple social media platforms and symptoms of depression and anxiety: A nationally-representative study among US young adults . Computers in Human Behavior , 69 , 1–9. [ Google Scholar ]
• Reece AG, & Danforth CM (2017). Instagram photos reveal predictive markers of depression . EPJ Data Science , 6 ( 1 ), 15. [ Google Scholar ]
• Reece AG, Reagan AJ, Lix KL, Dodds PS, Danforth CM, & Langer EJ (2017). Forecasting the onset and course of mental illness with Twitter data . Scientific reports , 7 ( 1 ), 13006. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Rideout V, & Fox S (2018). Digital health practices, social media use, and mental well-being among teens and young adults in the U.S Retrieved from San Francisco, CA: https://www.hopelab.org/reports/pdf/a-national-survey-by-hopelab-and-well-being-trust-2018.pdf [ Google Scholar ]
• Saha K, Torous J, Ernala SK, Rizuto C, Stafford A, & De Choudhury M (2019). A computational study of mental health awareness campaigns on social media . Translational behavioral medicine . [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Schlosser DA, Campellone T, Kim D, Truong B, Vergani S, Ward C, & Vinogradov S (2016). Feasibility of PRIME: a cognitive neuroscience-informed mobile app intervention to enhance motivated behavior and improve quality of life in recent onset schizophrenia . JMIR research protocols , 5 ( 2 ). [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Schlosser DA, Campellone TR, Truong B, Etter K, Vergani S, Komaiko K, & Vinogradov S (2018). Efficacy of PRIME, a mobile app intervention designed to improve motivation in young people with schizophrenia . Schizophrenia bulletin , 44 ( 5 ), 1010–1020. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Schrank B, Sibitz I, Unger A, & Amering M (2010). How patients with schizophrenia use the internet: qualitative study . Journal of medical Internet research , 12 ( 5 ), e70. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Schueller SM, Hunter JF, Figueroa C, & Aguilera A (2019). Use of digital mental health for marginalized and underserved populations . Current Treatment Options in Psychiatry , 6 ( 3 ), 243–255. [ Google Scholar ]
• Shatte AB, Hutchinson DM, & Teague SJ (2019). Machine learning in mental health: a scoping review of methods and applications . Psychological medicine , 49 ( 9 ), 1426–1448. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Spinzy Y, Nitzan U, Becker G, Bloch Y, & Fennig S (2012). Does the Internet offer social opportunities for individuals with schizophrenia? a cross-sectional pilot study . Psychiatry research , 198 ( 2 ), 319–320. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Stiglic N, & Viner RM (2019). Effects of screentime on the health and well-being of children and adolescents: a systematic review of reviews . BMJopen , 9 ( 1 ), e023191. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sumner SA, Galik S, Mathieu J, Ward M, Kiley T, Bartholow B, … Mork P (2019). Temporal and geographic patterns of social media posts about an emerging suicide game . Journal of Adolescent Health . [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Torous J, Chan SR, Tan SY-M, Behrens J, Mathew I, Conrad EJ, … Keshavan M (2014). Patient smartphone ownership and interest in mobile apps to monitor symptoms of mental health conditions: a survey in four geographically distinct psychiatric clinics . JMIR mental health , 1 ( 1 ), e5. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Torous J, Friedman R, & Keshavan M (2014). Smartphone ownership and interest in mobile applications to monitor symptoms of mental health conditions . JMIR mHealth and uHealth , 2 ( 1 ), e2. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Torous J, & Keshavan M (2016). The role of social media in schizophrenia: evaluating risks, benefits, and potential . Current opinion in psychiatry , 29 ( 3 ), 190–195. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Torous J, Wisniewski H, Bird B, Carpenter E, David G, Elejalde E, … Henson P (2019). Creating a digital health smartphone app and digital phenotyping platform for mental health and diverse healthcare needs: an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach . Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science , 1–13. [ Google Scholar ]
• Trefflich F, Kalckreuth S, Mergl R, & Rummel-Kluge C (2015). Psychiatric patients’ internet use corresponds to the internet use of the general public . Psychiatry research , 226 , 136–141. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Twenge JM, & Campbell WK (2018). Associations between screen time and lower psychological well-being among children and adolescents: Evidence from a population-based study . Preventive medicine reports , 12 , 271–283. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Twenge JM, Joiner TE, Rogers ML, & Martin GN (2018). Increases in depressive symptoms, suicide-related outcomes, and suicide rates among US adolescents after 2010 and links to increased new media screen time . Clinical Psychological Science , 6 ( 1 ), 3–17. [ Google Scholar ]
• Tynes BM, Willis HA, Stewart AM, & Hamilton MW (2019). Race-related traumatic events online and mental health among adolescents of color . Journal of Adolescent Health , 65 ( 3 ), 371–377. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Vannucci A, Flannery KM, & Ohannessian CM (2017). Social media use and anxiety in emerging adults . Journal of affective disorders , 207 , 163–166. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Vayreda A, & Antaki C (2009). Social support and unsolicited advice in a bipolar disorder online forum . Qualitative health research , 19 ( 7 ), 931–942. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ventola CL (2014). Social media and health care professionals: benefits, risks, and best practices . Pharmacy and Therapeutics , 39 ( 7 ), 491. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• We Are Social. (2020). Digital in 2020 . Retrieved from https://wearesocial.com/global-digital-report-2019
• Webb H, Jirotka M, Stahl BC, Housley W, Edwards A, Williams M, … Burnap P (2017). The ethical challenges of publishing Twitter data for research dissemination . Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Web Science Conference. [ Google Scholar ]
• Williams ML, Burnap P, & Sloan L (2017). Towards an ethical framework for publishing Twitter data in social research: Taking into account users’ views, online context and algorithmic estimation . Sociology , 57 ( 6 ), 1149–1168. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Woods HC, & Scott H (2016). # Sleepyteens: Social media use in adolescence is associated with poor sleep quality, anxiety, depression and low self-esteem . Journal of adolescence , 57 , 41–49. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ybarra ML (2004). Linkages between depressive symptomatology and Internet harassment among young regular Internet users . Cyber Psychology & Behavior , 7 ( 2 ), 247–257. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]

Find anything you save across the site in your account

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.”

New Yorker Favorites

An excerpt from Sally Rooney’s new novel.

Why you can’t get a restaurant reservation .

After a London teen-ager plummeted into the Thames, his parents discovered that he’d been posing as an oligarch’s son .

Is it O.K. to eat any type of meat ?

Don’t put off reading this article on procrastination .

What it was like being married to the Marquis de Sade .

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

Feb 15, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 Examples of Social Media Essays

Here are 6 examples of Social Media Essays:

The Impact of Social Media on Relationships and Communication

Introduction:.

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

Positive Effects:

Connecting People Across Distances

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

Improved Communication Speed and Efficiency

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

Negative Effects:

Decreased Face-to-Face Communication

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

Decreased Emotional Intimacy

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

Increased Conflict and Miscommunication

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

Conclusion:

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

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

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

The Pervasiveness of Misinformation and Fake News on Social Media

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

The Influence of Social Media on Public Opinion

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

The Challenge of Correcting Misinformation and Fake News

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

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

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

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

Comparison and Low Self-Esteem

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

Cyberbullying and Online Harassment

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

Social Isolation

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

Addiction and Overuse

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

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

The Use of Social Media in Political Activism and Social Movements

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

Raising Awareness and Mobilizing Action

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

Connecting with like-minded individuals

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

Challenges and Limitations

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

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

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

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

Data Collection and Sharing

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

Lack of Control Over Personal Information

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

Personalized Marketing

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

Government Surveillance

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

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

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

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

Effect on Individual Privacy:

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

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

Responsibility of Social Media Companies:

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

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

Better Regulation Is Needed

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

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

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

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

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

Whether you're a student who's just starting your writing journey or looking to perfect your craft, Jenni.ai has everything you need to succeed. Our tool provides you with the necessary resources to write with confidence and clarity, no matter your experience level. You'll be able to experiment with different styles, explore new ideas , and refine your writing skills.

So why waste your time and energy struggling to write an essay on your own when you can have Jenni.ai by your side? Sign up for our free trial today and experience the difference for yourself! With Jenni.ai, you'll have the resources you need to write confidently, clearly, and creatively. Get started today and see just how easy and efficient writing can be!

Start Writing With Jenni Today

Sign up for a free Jenni AI account today. Unlock your research potential and experience the difference for yourself. Your journey to academic excellence starts here.

• Israel-Gaza War
• War in Ukraine
• US & Canada
• UK Politics
• N. Ireland Politics
• Scotland Politics
• Wales Politics
• Latin America
• Middle East
• In Pictures
• BBC InDepth
• US Election
• Election polls
• Kamala Harris
• Donald Trump
• Executive Lounge
• Technology of Business
• Women at the Helm
• Future of Business
• Science & Health
• Artificial Intelligence
• AI v the Mind
• Film & TV
• Art & Design
• Entertainment News
• Arts in Motion
• Destinations
• Australia and Pacific
• Caribbean & Bermuda
• Central America
• North America
• South America
• World’s Table
• Culture & Experiences
• The SpeciaList
• Natural Wonders
• Weather & Science
• Climate Solutions
• Sustainable Business
• Green Living

Is social media bad for you? The evidence and the unknowns

What the science suggests so far about the impact of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram on your mental well-being.

#LikeMinded

A special series about social media and well-being

This month, BBC Future is exploring social media’s impact on mental health and well-being – and seeking solutions for a happier, healthier experience on these platforms. Stay tuned for more stories , coming soon…

Share your tips for a happy life on social media with the hashtag #LikeMinded on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

This story is featured in BBC Future’s “Best of 2018” collection. Discover more of our picks .  

Three billion people , around 40% of the world’s population, use online social media – and we’re spending an average of  two hours every day sharing, liking, tweeting and updating on these platforms, according to some reports. That breaks down to around  half a million tweets and Snapchat photos shared every minute.  

With social media playing such a big part in our lives, could we be sacrificing our mental health and well-being as well as our time? What does the evidence actually suggest?

• Facebook responds to mental well-being claims
• Is it time to rethink how we use social media? An introduction to our #LikeMinded season

Since social media is relatively new to us, conclusive findings are limited. The research that does exist mainly relies on self-reporting, which can often be flawed, and the majority of studies focus on Facebook. That said, this is a fast-growing area of research, and clues are beginning to emerge. BBC Future reviewed the findings of some of the science so far:

People use social media to vent about everything from customer service to politics, but the downside to this is that our feeds often resemble an endless stream of stress. In 2015, researchers at the Pew Research Center based in Washington DC sought to find out if social media induces more stress than it relieves.  

In the  survey  of 1,800 people, women reported being more stressed than men. Twitter was found to be a “significant contributor” because it increased their awareness of other people’s stress.

But Twitter also acted as a coping mechanism – and the more women used it, the less stressed they were. The same effect wasn’t found for men, whom the researchers said had a more distant relationship with social media. Overall, the researchers concluded that social media use was linked to “modestly lower levels” of stress.

In 2014, researchers  in Austria found that participants reported lower moods after using Facebook for 20 minutes compared to those who just browsed the internet. The study suggested that people felt that way because they saw it as a waste of time.

A good or bad mood may also spread between people on social media, according to  researchers from the University of California , who assessed the emotional content of over a billion status updates from more than 100 million Facebook users between 2009 and 2012.

Bad weather increased the number of negative posts by 1%, and the researchers found that one negative post by someone in a rainy city influenced another 1.3 negative posts by friends living in dry cities. The better news is that happy posts had a stronger influence; each one inspired 1.75 more happy posts. Whether a happy post translates to a genuine boost in mood, however, remains unclear.

Researchers have looked at general anxiety provoked by social media, characterised by feelings of restlessness and worry, and trouble sleeping and concentrating. A  study  published in the journal Computers and Human Behaviour found that people who report using seven or more social media platforms were more than three times as likely as people using 0-2 platforms to have high levels of general anxiety symptoms. 

That said, it’s unclear if and how social media causes anxiety.  Researchers  from Babes-Bolyai University in Romania reviewed existing research on the relationship between social anxiety and social networking in 2016, and said the results were mixed. They concluded that more research needs to be done.

While some studies have found a link between depression and social media use, there is emerging research into how social media can actually be a force for good.  

Two  studies  involving more than 700 students found that depressive symptoms, such as low mood and feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness, were linked to the quality of online interactions. Researchers found higher levels of depressive symptoms among those who reported having more negative interactions.

A similar study  conducted in 2016 involving 1,700 people found a threefold risk of depression and anxiety among people who used the most social media platforms. Reasons for this, they suggested, include cyber-bullying, having a distorted view of other people’s lives, and feeling like time spent on social media is a waste.

However, as BBC Future will explore this month in our #LikeMinded season, scientists are also looking at how social media can be used to diagnose depression, which could help people receive treatment earlier.  Researchers  for Microsoft surveyed 476 people and analysed their Twitter profiles for depressive language, linguistic style, engagement and emotion. From this, they developed a classifier that can accurately predict depression before it causes symptoms in seven out of 10 cases.

Researchers from Harvard and Vermont Universities  analysed  166 people’s Instagram photos to create a similar tool last year with the same success rate.

Humans used to spend their evenings in darkness, but now we’re surrounded by artificial lighting all day and night.  Research has found  that this can inhibit the body’s production of the hormone melatonin, which facilitates sleep – and blue light, which is emitted by smartphone and laptop screens, is said to be the worst culprit. In other words, if you lie on the pillow at night checking Facebook and Twitter, you’re headed for restless slumber.

Last year,  researchers from the University of Pittsburgh asked  1,700 18- to 30-year-olds about their social media and sleeping habits. They found a link with sleep disturbances – and concluded blue light had a part to play. How often they logged on, rather than time spent on social media sites, was a higher predictor of disturbed sleep, suggesting “an obsessive ‘checking’”, the researchers said.

The researchers say this could be caused by physiological arousal before sleep, and the bright lights of our devices can delay circadian rhythms. But they couldn’t clarify whether social media causes disturbed sleep, or if those who have disturbed sleep spend more time on social media.  

Despite the argument from a few researchers that tweeting may be  harder to resist  than cigarettes and alcohol, social media addiction isn’t included in the latest diagnostic manual for mental health disorders.

That said, social media is changing faster than scientists can keep up with, so various groups are trying to study compulsive behaviours related to its use – for example, scientists from the Netherlands  have invented their own scale  to identify possible addiction.

And if social media addiction does exist, it would be a type of internet addiction – and that is a classified disorder. In 2011, Daria Kuss and Mark Griffiths from Nottingham Trent University in the UK have  analysed  43 previous studies on the matter, and conclude that social media addiction is a mental health problem that “may” require professional treatment. They found that excessive usage was linked to relationship problems, worse academic achievement and less participation in offline communities, and found that those who could be more vulnerable to a social media addiction include those dependent on alcohol, the highly extroverted, and those who use social media to compensate for fewer ties in real life. 

SELF-ESTEEM

Women’s magazines and their use of underweight and Photoshopped models have been long maligned for stirring self-esteem issues among young women. But now, social media, with its filters and lighting and clever angles, is taking over as a primary concern among some campaigning groups and charities.

Social media sites make more than half of users feel inadequate, according to a  survey  of 1,500 people by disability charity Scope, and half of 18- to 34-year-olds say it makes them feel unattractive.

A 2016 study  by researchers at Penn State University suggested that viewing other people’s selfies lowered self-esteem, because users compare themselves to photos of people looking their happiest.  Research  from the University of Strathclyde, Ohio University and University of Iowa also found that women compare themselves negatively to selfies of other women.

But it’s not just selfies that have the potential to dent self-esteem. A  study  of 1,000 Swedish Facebook users found that women who spent more time on Facebook reported feeling less happy and confident. The researchers concluded: “When Facebook users compare their own lives with others’ seemingly more successful careers and happy relationships, they may feel that their own lives are less successful in comparison.”

But one small study hinted that viewing your own profile, not others, might offer ego boosts.  Researchers  at Cornell University in New York put 63 students into different groups. Some sat with a mirror placed against a computer screen, for instance, while others sat in front of their own Facebook profile.

Facebook had a positive effect on self-esteem compared to other activities that boost self-awareness. Mirrors and photos, the researchers explained, make us compare ourselves to social standards, whereas looking at our own Facebook profiles might boost self-esteem because it is easier to control how we’re presented to the world.

In a  study  from 2013, researchers texted 79 participants five times a day for 14 days, asking them how they felt and how much they’d used Facebook since the last text. The more time people spent on the site, the worse they felt later on, and the more their life satisfaction declined over time.

But other research has found, that for some people, social media can help boost their well-being . Marketing researchers Jonah Berger and Eva Buechel found that people who are emotionally unstable are more likely to post about their emotions, which can help them receive support and bounce back after negative experiences.

Overall, social media’s effects on well-being are ambiguous, according to a  paper written  last year by researchers from the Netherlands. However, they suggested there is clearer evidence for the impact on one group of people: social media has a more negative effect on the well-being of those who are more socially isolated. 

RELATIONSHIPS

If you’ve ever been talking to a friend who’s pulled their phone out to scroll through Instagram, you might have wondered what social media is doing to relationships.

Even the mere presence of a phone can interfere with our interactions, particularly when we’re talking about something meaningful, according to one small study . Researchers writing in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships tasked 34 pairs of strangers with having a 10-minute conversation about an interesting event that had happened to them recently. Each pair sat in private booths, and half had a mobile phone on the top of their table.

Those with a phone in eyeshot were less positive when recalling their interaction afterwards, had less meaningful conversations and reported feeling less close to their partner than the others, who had a notebook on top of the table instead.

Romantic relationships aren’t immune, either.  Researchers  at the University of Guelph in Canada surveyed 300 people aged 17-24 in 2009 about any jealousy they felt when on Facebook, asking questions such as, ‘How likely are you to become jealous after your partner has added an unknown member of the opposite sex?’.

Women spent much more time on Facebook then men, and experienced significantly more jealousy when doing so. The researchers concluded they “felt the Facebook environment created these feelings and enhanced concerns about the quality of their relationship”.

In a  study involving  600 adults, roughly a third said social media made them feel negative emotions – mainly frustration – and envy was the main cause. This was triggered by comparing their lives to others’, and the biggest culprit was other people’s travel photos. Feeling envious caused an “envy spiral”, where people react to envy by adding to their profiles more of the same sort of content that made them jealous in the first place.

However, envy isn’t necessarily a destructive emotion – it can often make us work harder,  according to researchers  from Michigan University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. They asked 380 students to look at “envy-eliciting” photos and texts from Facebook and Twitter, including posts about buying expensive goods, travelling and getting engaged. But the type of envy the researchers found is “benign envy”, which they say is more likely to make a person work harder.

A study published  in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine last year surveyed 7,000 19- to 32-year-olds and found that those who spend the most time on social media were twice as likely to report experiencing social isolation, which can include a lack of a sense of social belonging, engagement with others and fulfilling relationships.

Spending more time on social media, the researchers said, could displace face-to-face interaction, and can also make people feel excluded.

“Exposure to such highly idealised representations of peers’ lives may elicit feelings of envy and the distorted belief that others lead happier and more successful lives, which may increase perceived social isolation.”

CONCLUSIONS?

It’s clear that in many areas, not enough is known yet to draw many strong conclusions. However, the evidence does point one way: social media affects people differently, depending on pre-existing conditions and personality traits.

As with food, gambling and many other temptations of the modern age, excessive use for some individuals is probably inadvisable. But at the same time, it would be wrong to say social media is a universally bad thing, because clearly it brings myriad benefits to our lives.

We’ll be exploring this tension more over the next month, in a series of articles and videos in our special series #LikeMinded – and hopefully providing solutions that could help us all live a happier, healthier digital life.

Join 800,000+ Future fans by liking us on  Facebook , or follow us on  Twitter .

If you liked this story,  sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter , called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.  

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

• Publications
• Our Methods
• Short Reads
• Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

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.

901 E St. NW, Suite 300 Washington, DC 20004 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 |  Media Inquiries

Research Topics

• Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It does not take policy positions. The Center conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, computational social science research and other data-driven research. Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts , its primary funder.

© 2024 Pew Research Center

• Open access
• Published: 06 July 2023

Pros & cons: impacts of social media on mental health

• Ágnes Zsila 1 , 2 &
• Marc Eric S. Reyes   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5280-1315 3  

BMC Psychology volume  11 , Article number:  201 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

512k Accesses

23 Citations

124 Altmetric

Metrics details

The use of social media significantly impacts mental health. It can enhance connection, increase self-esteem, and improve a sense of belonging. But it can also lead to tremendous stress, pressure to compare oneself to others, and increased sadness and isolation. Mindful use is essential to social media consumption.

Social media has become integral to our daily routines: we interact with family members and friends, accept invitations to public events, and join online communities to meet people who share similar preferences using these platforms. Social media has opened a new avenue for social experiences since the early 2000s, extending the possibilities for communication. According to recent research [ 1 ], people spend 2.3 h daily on social media. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat have become increasingly popular among youth in 2022, and one-third think they spend too much time on these platforms [ 2 ]. The considerable time people spend on social media worldwide has directed researchers’ attention toward the potential benefits and risks. Research shows excessive use is mainly associated with lower psychological well-being [ 3 ]. However, findings also suggest that the quality rather than the quantity of social media use can determine whether the experience will enhance or deteriorate the user’s mental health [ 4 ]. In this collection, we will explore the impact of social media use on mental health by providing comprehensive research perspectives on positive and negative effects.

Social media can provide opportunities to enhance the mental health of users by facilitating social connections and peer support [ 5 ]. Indeed, online communities can provide a space for discussions regarding health conditions, adverse life events, or everyday challenges, which may decrease the sense of stigmatization and increase belongingness and perceived emotional support. Mutual friendships, rewarding social interactions, and humor on social media also reduced stress during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 4 ].

On the other hand, several studies have pointed out the potentially detrimental effects of social media use on mental health. Concerns have been raised that social media may lead to body image dissatisfaction [ 6 ], increase the risk of addiction and cyberbullying involvement [ 5 ], contribute to phubbing behaviors [ 7 ], and negatively affects mood [ 8 ]. Excessive use has increased loneliness, fear of missing out, and decreased subjective well-being and life satisfaction [ 8 ]. Users at risk of social media addiction often report depressive symptoms and lower self-esteem [ 9 ].

Overall, findings regarding the impact of social media on mental health pointed out some essential resources for psychological well-being through rewarding online social interactions. However, there is a need to raise awareness about the possible risks associated with excessive use, which can negatively affect mental health and everyday functioning [ 9 ]. There is neither a negative nor positive consensus regarding the effects of social media on people. However, by teaching people social media literacy, we can maximize their chances of having balanced, safe, and meaningful experiences on these platforms [ 10 ].

We encourage researchers to submit their research articles and contribute to a more differentiated overview of the impact of social media on mental health. BMC Psychology welcomes submissions to its new collection, which promises to present the latest findings in the emerging field of social media research. We seek research papers using qualitative and quantitative methods, focusing on social media users’ positive and negative aspects. We believe this collection will provide a more comprehensive picture of social media’s positive and negative effects on users’ mental health.

Data Availability

Not applicable.

Statista. (2022). Time spent on social media [Chart]. Accessed June 14, 2023, from https://www.statista.com/chart/18983/time-spent-on-social-media/ .

Pew Research Center. (2023). Teens and social media: Key findings from Pew Research Center surveys. Retrieved June 14, 2023, from https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/24/teens-and-social-media-key-findings-from-pew-research-center-surveys/ .

Boer, M., Van Den Eijnden, R. J., Boniel-Nissim, M., Wong, S. L., Inchley, J. C.,Badura, P.,… Stevens, G. W. (2020). Adolescents’ intense and problematic social media use and their well-being in 29 countries. Journal of Adolescent Health , 66(6), S89-S99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2020.02.011.

Marciano L, Ostroumova M, Schulz PJ, Camerini AL. Digital media use and adolescents’ mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Front Public Health. 2022;9:2208. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2021.641831 .

Article   Google Scholar  

Naslund JA, Bondre A, Torous J, Aschbrenner KA. Social media and mental health: benefits, risks, and opportunities for research and practice. J Technol Behav Sci. 2020;5:245–57. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41347-020-00094-8 .

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Harriger JA, Thompson JK, Tiggemann M. TikTok, TikTok, the time is now: future directions in social media and body image. Body Image. 2023;44:222–6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2021.12.005 .

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Chi LC, Tang TC, Tang E. The phubbing phenomenon: a cross-sectional study on the relationships among social media addiction, fear of missing out, personality traits, and phubbing behavior. Curr Psychol. 2022;41(2):1112–23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-0135-4 .

Valkenburg PM. Social media use and well-being: what we know and what we need to know. Curr Opin Psychol. 2022;45:101294. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.101294 .

Bányai F, Zsila Á, Király O, Maraz A, Elekes Z, Griffiths MD, Urbán R, Farkas J, Rigó P Jr, Demetrovics Z. Problematic social media use: results from a large-scale nationally representative adolescent sample. PLoS ONE. 2017;12(1):e0169839. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169839 .

American Psychological Association. (2023). APA panel issues recommendations for adolescent social media use. Retrieved from https://apa-panel-issues-recommendations-for-adolescent-social-media-use-774560.html .

Download references

Acknowledgements

Ágnes Zsila was supported by the ÚNKP-22-4 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Culture and Innovation from the source of the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Institute of Psychology, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary

Ágnes Zsila

Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

Department of Psychology, College of Science, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, 1008, Philippines

Marc Eric S. Reyes

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

AZ conceived and drafted the Editorial. MESR wrote the abstract and revised the Editorial. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marc Eric S. Reyes .

Ethics declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate, consent for publication, competing interests.

The authors have no competing interests to declare relevant to the content of this article.

Additional information

Publisher’s note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Zsila, Á., Reyes, M.E.S. Pros & cons: impacts of social media on mental health. BMC Psychol 11 , 201 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-023-01243-x

Download citation

Received : 15 June 2023

Accepted : 03 July 2023

Published : 06 July 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-023-01243-x

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Social media
• Mental health

BMC Psychology

ISSN: 2050-7283

• General enquiries: [email protected]

How social media’s toxic content sends teens into ‘a dangerous spiral’

October 8, 2021 –  Eating disorders expert Bryn Austin , professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences , discusses the recent revelation that Facebook has long known that its Instagram app is harming teens ’ mental health .

Q: Leaked documents from Facebook show that the company has known for at least two years that its Instagram app is making body image issues worse for teens, particularly girls. What’s your reaction to this news?

A: I was aghast at the news—but not surprised. We’ve known for years that social media platforms—especially image-based platforms like Instagram—have very harmful effects on teen mental health, especially for teens struggling with body image, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. From experimental research, we know that Instagram, with its algorithmically-driven feeds of content tailored to each user’s engagement patterns, can draw vulnerable teens into a dangerous spiral of negative social comparison and hook them onto unrealistic ideals of appearance and body size and shape. Clinicians and parents have been sounding the alarms about this for years. So to hear that Instagram’s own research shows this too is not surprising. What astounds me, though, is what whistleblower Frances Haugen exposed: that, in internal conversations at Instagram, staff and senior leadership acknowledged these very damning findings, and yet the actions they’ve taken in response have been little more than window dressing, sidestepping the fundamental problem of the platform’s predatory algorithms. This revelation is what leaves me aghast.

Q: In a recent  blog post , Instagram’s head of public policy wrote that the company knows that social media “can be a place where people have negative experiences” and that they’re working to mitigate the problem, but added, “Issues like negative social comparison and anxiety exist in the world, so they’re going to exist on social media too.” What do you make of this argument?

A: Instagram is peddling a false narrative that the platform is simply a reflection of its users’ interests and experiences, without distortion or manipulation by the platform. But Instagram knows full well that this not true. In fact, their very business model is predicated on how much they can manipulate users’ behavior to boost engagement and extend time spent on the platform, which the platform then monetizes to sell to advertisers. Instagram is literally selling users’ attention. The company knows that strong negative emotions, which can be provoked by negative social comparison, keep users’ attention longer than other emotions—and Instagram’s algorithms are expressly designed to push teens toward toxic content so that they stay on the platform. For teens struggling with body image, anxiety, or other mental health issues, negative social comparison is a dangerous trap, intensifying their engagement with the platform while worsening their symptoms. But with Instagram’s nefarious business model, every additional minute of users’ attention—regardless of the mental health impact—translates into more profits.

Keep in mind that this is not about just about putting teens in a bad mood. Over time, with exposure to harmful content on social media, the negative impacts add up. And we now have more cause for worry than ever, with the pandemic worsening mental health stressors and social isolation for teens, pushing millions of youth to increase their social media use. We are witnessing dramatic increases in clinical level depression, anxiety, and suicidality , and eating disorders cases have doubled or even tripled at children’s hospitals across the country.

Q: What steps are necessary to lessen potential harm to teens from Instagram?

A: If we have learned anything from the recent Congressional hearings with the whistleblower, the Wall Street Journal investigative reporting, and other important research, it’s that Instagram and Facebook will not—and likely cannot—solve this very serious social problem on their own. The business model, which has proven itself to be exquisitely profitable, is self-reinforcing for investors and top management. The platform’s predatory algorithms have been aggressively guarded, keeping them from being scrutinized by the public, researchers, or government. In fact, U.S. federal regulation on social media hasn’t been meaningfully updated in decades, leaving protections for users and society woefully inadequate.

But with the new revelations, society’s opinion of the industry may have soured and there may be a new willingness to demand meaningful oversight and regulation. What’s encouraging is that on the heels of the recent Congressional hearings, there are already several pieces of legislation in the works to establish a new government system of algorithm auditors, who would have the expertise and authority to require social media algorithms to meet basic standards of safety and transparency for children and users of all ages on Instagram and other social media platforms.

Q: What advice do you have for parents, and for teens who use the platform?

A: Until we have meaningful government oversight in place, there is still a lot that teens and parents can do. Although it’s a real struggle for parents to keep their kids off social media, they can set limits on its use, for instance by requiring that everyone’s phones go into a basket at mealtimes and at bedtime. Parents can also block upsetting content and keep dialogue open about how different types of content can make a young person feel about themselves. Equally important, teens and parents can get involved in advocacy, with groups such as the Eating Disorders Coalition and others, to advance federal legislation to strengthen oversight of social media platforms. With all that we know today about the harmful effects of social media and its algorithms, combined with the powerful stories of teens, parents, and community advocates, we may finally have the opportunity to get meaningful federal regulation in place.

– Karen Feldscher

photo: iStock

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

student opinion

How Does Social Media Affect Your Mental Health?

Facebook has delayed the development of an Instagram app for children amid questions about its harmful effects on young people’s mental health. Does social media have an impact on your well-being?

By Nicole Daniels

What is your relationship with social media like? Which platforms do you spend the most time on? Which do you stay away from? How often do you log on?

What do you notice about your mental health and well-being when spending time on social networks?

In “ Facebook Delays Instagram App for Users 13 and Younger ,” Adam Satariano and Ryan Mac write about the findings of an internal study conducted by Facebook and what they mean for the Instagram Kids app that the company was developing:

Facebook said on Monday that it had paused development of an Instagram Kids service that would be tailored for children 13 years old or younger, as the social network increasingly faces questions about the app’s effect on young people’s mental health. The pullback preceded a congressional hearing this week about internal research conducted by Facebook , and reported in The Wall Street Journal , that showed the company knew of the harmful mental health effects that Instagram was having on teenage girls. The revelations have set off a public relations crisis for the Silicon Valley company and led to a fresh round of calls for new regulation. Facebook said it still wanted to build an Instagram product intended for children that would have a more “age appropriate experience,” but was postponing the plans in the face of criticism.

The article continues:

With Instagram Kids, Facebook had argued that young people were using the photo-sharing app anyway, despite age-requirement rules, so it would be better to develop a version more suitable for them. Facebook said the “kids” app was intended for ages 10 to 12 and would require parental permission to join, forgo ads and carry more age-appropriate content and features. Parents would be able to control what accounts their child followed. YouTube, which Google owns, has released a children’s version of its app. But since BuzzFeed broke the news this year that Facebook was working on the app, the company has faced scrutiny. Policymakers, regulators, child safety groups and consumer rights groups have argued that it hooks children on the app at a younger age rather than protecting them from problems with the service, including child predatory grooming, bullying and body shaming.

The article goes on to quote Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram:

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .