The social media brings negative impacts to youth.
Social media is any website that allows for social interaction which includes social
networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter; gaming sites such as Club Penguin,
Second Life and the Sims; and video sites such as YouTube and blogs (O’Keeffe et al., 2011).
Social media acts as a communication tool that allows youth to join online conversation
(Osterrieder, 2013). It also allows youth to access different kinds of videos on web and play
online game (Osterrieder, 2013).
In a world of technology, social media such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are
becoming more and more popular. Based on a research conducted by Arpan, Kumar & Rekha
(2016), between 2005 and 2013, the use of social networking sites among young adult internet
users rises from 9% to 90%. Social media has become part of daily life for an increasing number
of youth. According to Laird (2012), youth spent at least 10.6 billion minutes each day surfing
the sites which do not include mobile usage. In addition, according to Bhavana (2014), 93%
teens spend minimum 6 hours per day on social media. These statistics show that social media
has become an important role in youth’s daily life.
Based on the research, it shows that social media has brought a lot of positive impacts to
the youth. For example, social media has made youth closer to other parts of the world and stay
connected with each other (Siddiqui and Singh, 2016). Nonetheless, social media has also
brought some negative impacts to youth. This paper will stress more on the study of negative
impacts of youth in term of academic performance, social interaction, health, behavior standards,
security, privacy, and case sexting.
Social media will decrease youth’s academic performance. According to Barber (1997),
86% of teachers, computer coordinators and librarians believe that the use of internet by youth
does not increase their academic. Youth who are addicted to social media may spend
immeasurable hours on social sites and it affects their concentration and focus in particular tasks
(Bhavana, 2014). For example, the uses of social media such as MySpace, Twitter, Youtube, and
Facebook may lead to distraction of students in class. Based on a survey conducted by McCoy
(2013), out of 777 students in six U.S. universities, more than 80% of the respondents indicated
that using phone for non-class purposes such as social networking will make them pay less
attention to the class and miss some instructions. Therefore, students will lack of understanding
about the topic delivered by the lecturers and it affects the students’ academic performances.
Nonetheless, it is also argued that by accessing to social media, youth can easily communicate
with each other to do homework and group projects (Palfrey et al., 2010) and to gather outside of
class for the purpose of collaborating and exchanging ideas about assignments (O’Keeffe et al.,
2011). However, based on a survey conducted by Tayseer et al. (2014), on 30 students, the vast
majority of the respondents used social sites for social purposes, while only 18% of them used
these sites for academic purposes. This shows that social media does not really help in youth’s
academic tasks. As a result, social media has a huge amount of negative influence over youth’s
academic performances.
Next, social media will reduce face-to-face social interaction and youth’s natural
communication skills. By spending most of time on social media, youth lacks of real human
contact (Parvathy and Suchithra, 2015). In a survey among 100 students in Elon University,
Drago (2015) reveals that 18% of the students always use cell phone or tablet for social
networking or texting when spending time with family and friends. Some (73%) of the students
also admitted that they spent their time texting or using their computers or tablets even when
sitting with others while dining. These statistics demonstrate that social media has negatively
impacted on face-to-face social interaction between youth with family members and friends. As a
result, youth may lose their ability to communicate with others in face-to-face and then could
suffer from social anxiety and may become shy when communicating face-to-face with others
(Pierce, 2009). As an example, because of lacking confidence, youth may always speak in a very
low voice and will always look at the ground when talking to someone. As a proven by a survey
conducted by Porter et.al (2012), among 219 youth, the large majority of the participants (68.5%)
preferred virtual interaction such as Facebook, email, and WhatsApp, instead of communication
in person with others. In other words, social media have become a substitute for face-to-face
communication for youth (Erwin et al., 2014). In short, social media reduces face-to-face social
interaction among youth.
Social media also negatively affects youth’s health when youth spend too much time to
participate in any physical exercise such as jogging, yoga, and hiking (Parvathy et al., 2015).
This may cause obesity among youth. Besides that, spending too much time on the phone screen
or computer screen may also cause computer vision syndrome. A survey conducted by Sheedy
and Shaw-McMinn (2003) shows that 1 out of 6 patients that need eye examination had a
computer-related eye problem such as blurred and double vision. In addition, exceeding use of
social media may cause youth to suffer from “Text Neck” (Gupta et al., 2013). According to the
spine-health.com, “text neck” is the neck pain and damage sustained from looking down the
technology devices for a very long time or too frequently. To sum up, exceeding use of social
media may lead youth to physical health risks.
In addition, the improper use of social media may leave deep mental scale in youth’s
growing process. People may argue that social media is good for mental diseases because it
allows people to express their thoughts and feelings with no limit. As claimed by Hinduju and
Patchin (2008), social networking provides a virtual platform for youth to share thoughts and
stories by posting stories and photos. However, as social media allows anyone to voice out
anything to anyone at anyplace (Bhavana, 2014), cyber-bullying could easily to happen. Based
on a CBS News report (2010), 42% of teenagers are victims of cyber-bullying. Some examples
of cyber-bullying are mean text messages, email or rumors posted on social networking site.
Cyber-bullying is detrimental because it scars in youth’s growing process and might have even
driven some youth to suicide (Jung, 2012). There are many well published cases about youth
engaging in severe online attacks that prompt suicides or inflicts lasting physical or emotional
scars on others.
Next, social media may lead youth to anxiety and depression (O’Keeffe et al., 2011).
Rosen et al. (2013) revealed that youth check their messages and social networks very often.
They were scared and more anxious than older generations when they were unable to check their
social networks and messages. Furthermore, from the social media, youths get to know how their
friends are doing and they tend to compare what they see to their own lives. Youths may envy
about their friends’ vacations, possessions or relationships that are posted on social media. The
comparison behavior of youths on social media is linked to the feeling of depression. All in all,
social media will cause youths suffer from anxiety and depression.
Other than that, social media has low security and privacy which may expose youth to
cybercrimes. Nowadays, youth loves to post their daily lifestyles and personal information on
social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It becomes a trending style for youth to
showcase people everything they have done (M. Loking, Castillo, 2012). According to a survey
conducted by Madden (2013), since the emergence of social media, youth tends to share more
personal information and their daily activities more than the time before social media exist.
Madden (2013) also claimed that from 2006 to 2012, among 802 youth, the percentage of youth
posted their photos on social media has increase from 79% to 91%. However, due to low
security of social media, any unknown person can get illegal access to youth’s personal
information (Sinha et al., 2016). Therefore, it may lead youth to several danger situations such as
kidnapping, murdering and robbery. All these cases or situations can happen to the youth due to
the sharing details on the social media (Siddiqui et al. 2016). Youth’s photos, videos and statuses
can be downloaded within a few clicks. Therefore, kidnappers, murders and robbers can easily
search their targets online. This shows that social media can be one of the medium that can
reveals youth to danger. Furthermore, the statuses, photos and videos of the users in social media
remain available indefinitely (Jung, 2012). Based on the above, youth that uses social media
often have high chances of being exposed to cybercrimes and danger situations such as
kidnaping, murdering and robbery. This is due to the reason that frequent users of social media
tends to post a lot of their personal information and the fact that social media has low security
systems makes their personal information easier to access by anybody.
Social media also create negative cultural impacts to youth. There are several significant
cultural impacts on youth. First, social media reduced the learning and research capabilities on
youth. We all know that youth can get many useful information and knowledges from social
media. However, that information can causes youth to start believing and relying more on
information available on social media (Gulshan Miyagamwala, 2014). Furthermore, social media
reduce the analytical skill and critical thinking of youth in solving a problem. Therefore,
whenever facing problems, youth will only try to find the resources and steps to solve the
problem from social media. Next, social media influences the behavior standards of youth. The
videos, photos and advertisements on social media that contains negative things such as violence
may affect the behavior of youth (Siddiqui et al., 2016). For example are photos or videos of
people smoking, bullying and drugs. Those photos and videos may lead youth to the wrong side
and encourage youth to take copy the actions. As a result, social media plays an important role in
influencing the behavior standards of youth.
Other than that, another negative impact of social media is sexting. According to
O’Keeffe et al. (2011), sexting is defined as sending, receiving or forwarding sexually explicit
messages, photographs or images via cell phone, computer or other digital devices. It is also
revealed by O’Keeffe et al. (2011) that 20% of teenagers post their own nude or seminude
photographs or videos on social media. Another statistic from Mitchell et al. (2011) also claimed
that 9.6% of youth receive or create or appear in nude images. And there are some of them who
forward the images to others. From both statistics, we can see that social media does bring
negative impacts to youth because social media can become a medium to publish inappropriate
pictures thus bring bad influences and destroy youths’ mind and can cause bad consequences.
One of the consequences of sexting is on the victim itself. The victim will feel embarrassed and
go depress, isolate themselves and even worse commit suicide. There was a news that a girl
named Laura Barns has committed suicide by shooting herself because of her embarrassing
videos being shared to the internet. This is the ‘power’ of social media and the negative
consequences of using social media.
In conclusion, it seems clear that social media has brought a lot of negative impacts to
youth. Social media allows for unnecessary risks in social skills, health, academic performance,
privacy, safety and behavior standards of youth. It causes a lot of significant impacts in
psychological development of youth such as depression, low self-esteem and lack of social skills.
Other than that, the chances of youth being exposed to danger such as cybercrime, kidnapping,
murdering and many others are also high because of the culture of social media where the users
tend to post a lot of their personal information online. Another negative impact of social media is
that youth are also exposed to sexting through messaging and photographs. The act of sexting
brings negative impacts to the victim itself especially to their mind. Messages and images from
sexting might leak and this can cause embarrassment to the victims thus affecting themselves.
Therefore, we believe that social media brings more negative impacts compared to positive
impacts.
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