Bullying and its Effects on Social Media

While some teenagers get affected by the pressure of having to react to posts of their friends or respond to messages, others fear not being in the social loop. Called FOMO (fear of missing out), teens obsessively check their media feeds for updates by friends as they don’t want to miss out on jokes, activities, parties, and gossip. FOMO is also known to lead to depression and anxiety while being a major contributor to teenagers’ heavy use of social media.

It is very common to see children spending great quality of their time using other social media, resulting them to have an Internet addiction. It creates an addictive habit for children due to constantly checking the news feed from different social sites. Adolescents are the one who gets addicted to social media easily because they end up spending hours and each day watching videos, photos and other contents that are posted by their online friends. This addiction can disrupt their other interaction and activities, such as school works, study, and relationships, and other daily routines because they end up wasting a substantial amount of time on social media.

Nowadays people are being obsessed with social media where there are many possibilities of losing touch with realities resulting them to become an anti-social person because they are spending lots of time on social media than interacting and communicating directly with people. There are also a lot of negative consequences if you use social media all day. The theory has suggested that teenagers are spending a substantial amount of time on social media that they cannot even do other important activities without checking their social accounts. “It seems that the more technology we acquire, the more stressed out we become. According to the experts, almost 20% of people with social media accounts cannot go more than three hours without checking them” (Gosselt, De Jong, and Van Hoof, 2012). The researcher also studies that media can be harmful to children because it might contain violence guidelines which can influence their behaviors and mental process.

Some of the children do realize that they are wasting their time on social media, and it can affect their mood negatively, but they are not stopping from using them because they become an obsession with themselves and end up posting endless updates and selfies which can increase the narcissism in adolescences. Their moods depend on how their photos are being appreciated by others in media, and they become depressed when no one pays attention as they expected. Having their own social sites account makes children more self-centered and depression. In social media, selfies become the most popular thing to take for adolescences on their phones. They would take selfies and make stories every hour and posting it on social media. These behaviors strongly linked to narcissism and it can cause obsessions with looks. Therefore, some selfie addicts have done many dangerous things which have ended fatally because they are participating and filming themselves in social media challenges that involve engaging in absurd or dangerous activities, such as taking pictures with dangerous animals, climbing the high building, playing with fire, and many more.

Indirect communication

Social media can keep the children occupied hours and hours until the way to their past bedtime. They keep themselves too busy that they are not communicating face to face with others because they are more likely to do texting or chatting on their phones. In the modern era, children are learning to do their communication while looking at the screen resulting them to missed out real-time interaction where they can learn from each other. In addition, children are missing out the critical social skills because every answer is provided in social media that children can just look up without discussing or communicating with others.

Influence on health

Social media has bad effects on children mental health such as it can cause them anxiety, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), impulsive disorder, and loneliness. Children might start to compare their life with others because social media is more than just sharing things with others. In addition, spending too much time on online can cause illnesses such as eye problems, neck pain, and lower back problems, and many more. The effects on children are much stronger and it can also delay their emotional and social development. In addition, using various social media lead to a decline in subjective of children’s well-being because some become anxious and moody as they see that the lives of their friends are better than theirs, even though they may know that their representation is idealized. The more they relay in social media, they feel worse on a daily basis because they feel less satisfied with their lives compared to others.

Teens are also seemed to be suffering from depression after spending too much time on social networking sites. Furthermore, social media platforms had a negative effect on the brains of adolescence because it can infantilize their brains since they do not develop skills to face life and have no guidance to teaches them critical skills and support them mentally and emotionally. In extreme cases of cyberbullying, many adolescences had made an attempt to suicide because they fall depression from bullying. Children are always being attacked through social media in messaging or other sites. This situation can lead “child acquires from viewing violence are likely to influence the child's behavior in the long term” (Bushman and Huesmann, 2006). They would eventually start to feel their lives is meaningless and hopeless resulting them to think that suicide is the only path out of the torments.

Relationship

Screen relationships also detract real-life relationships and building social skills in children and teenagers. If they rely on social media, children will grow up without learning verbal cues and facial gestures of people. Social interaction is critical to developing the skills needed to understand other people’s moods and emotions. Hence children who would grow up interacting with social media may turn out to be poor at communicating with others.

Another article’s evidence suggests bullying can increase the aggression in adolescence and have a problem on their behaviors such as drug use, delinquency, and violence. In addition, the article discusses bullying can relate to depression in adolescence and suggested that it can influence their relationships. Children with bullying experiences are more likely to demonstrate aggressive or violent behavior because they are not able to self-regulate their behavior. They also have trouble asking or accepting help from others, and they also have poor academic performance because they get ignored by their peers. In this situation, they might develop self-esteem issues, depression, and stress which makes children less likely to focus their energy on academic achievement and social skills. Due to social media effect on child development, children are lacking the ability to engage and have interaction with others and themselves. They end up living for social media feeds while missing out on the actual experience of the event, which may be a spending time with their families or friends.

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