Using Facebook Can Make You Sad, By Heather Kelly

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The social media website/mobile app Facebook is a negative influence because it generally leaves people feeling bad about themselves. In Heather Kelly's article "Using Facebook Can Make You Sad," Ethan Kross states, "On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic need for social connection. But rather than enhancing well-being, our findings demonstrate that interacting with Facebook may have the opposite result for young adults," (1). Though Facebook tries to resolve the commonly felt feeling of loneliness, it only makes the problem worse. First, Facebook is a negative influence because it causes people to feel less important than others. Seeing continuous updates of others success makes a person think of their own life as small, non-achieving, and even pathetic. "Seeing updates of friends' successful careers, cute babies, and fabulous vacations inspires feelings of envy, loneliness and even anger," (Kelly, 1). When a teenage girl sees her best friend tagged in the status of another girl, she feels left out or sometimes replaced. Though no one is to blame, the girl now has a sense of seclusion because she scrolled through her news feed and saw a fun event she was not part of. …show more content…

When someone sees a post that seems to have a good outcome they start "comparing themselves to their friends' seemingly fantastic digital lives," (Kelly 1). Most people do not realize that their friends also have flawed sides; however, Social Media, such as Facebook, allows them to appear to have an ideal lifestyle. Because of this, a person my feel that the people with the "perfect" lives know better. So they trust others more than themselves to make not just the easy decisions both other tough, possibly life-changing decisions as

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