Social Media's Negative Effects On Mental Health

Social Media, as we know, is only growing in popularity. Given that fact, will only become more prevalent in our daily lives as time passes. It will be only foolish to pay attention to how such an important part of our culture is affecting our society and the individuals in it. It is undoubtedly clear that social media comes with a fair amount of negative and positive mental effects. Social media does negatively affect the mental health of people by providing an exposure to vulgar content, cyber-bullying, and an insufficient amount of in-person interactions. However, social media also provides people with the opportunity to break out of their shells in terms of sharing their opinions and talent online through posting their own content online.

Things like self-help forums and being able to connect with people from around the world does nothing but good for not just individuals but also our global society. We are able to understand and connect more with people despite cultural difference just by interacting with others. It also seems that social media does not negatively impact our mental health as much society tells us so since research done related to social media and negative factors of our society are not conclusive. For my primary research, I conducted a survey with 70 people on how they view social media in terms of how positive or negative social media can be. 70% of the people who took the survey were individuals between the ages of 13-18 while the other 30% of those who took the survey were over 18 (12.3% for ages 26-35, 7.7% for ages 19-25, 4.6% for those 45 and over, and 3.1% for ages 36-44). The results showed that about 65% of people described their social media feed as relatively positive while the other 45% felt the opposite. Interestingly, the vast majority of teenagers (ages 13-18) in my survey described their social media feed as either neutral or fairly positive. It seems that even the most