Real Side of Social Media

We’ll admit, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, they’re all addicting. Around 40% of the people in this world use it. That is three billion people using social media every day. A person spends an average of two hours on their phones, which equals to about half a million tweets, snaps, or photos uploaded online every minute. It is a fun way to communicate with your friends and family who live far away and a great way to pass time, but this may turn into an unhealthy habit. You may find yourself spending hours on your phone scrolling and scrolling through your social media. But little do you know, this is affecting the way you live in many ways. Social media is not an extremely bad thing, but using it too much has bad effects on yourself and the people around you.

For example, it can badly affect your mental health in many ways. It can lessen your attention span or shorten your social time with family and friends in person. It can cause people to feel stressed, socially isolated and can trigger feelings of jealousy and loneliness. In 2015, a study showed that in the survey of 1,800 people, women were more stressed than men because of social media sites like twitter. Social media can also cause people to compare themselves with others online, which is unhealthy. In 2016, a study made by the researchers at the Penn State University said that looking at other people's selfies can lower your self-esteem and compare yourself with others. Another negative effect social media sites can have on you is the loss of your privacy. These strangers online can threaten your safety. People on social media can easily look at where you live,who you are, and can eventually lead to identity theft, stalking, and other dangerous outcomes. Situations like these on social media can lessen or make you lose your privacy forever.

Instagram and Facebook sites can also serve as a distraction. It causes people to scroll through their feed rather than doing the more important responsibilities they have to do like homework or a project. It also makes us lose sleep. We tend to want to keep exploring our social media accounts rather than going to bed early, which is very important. Because of this loss of not getting a good enough sleep, we start becoming more grumpy or tired than usual, which is not good for our brains and we can’t focus. Social media can also cause problems like cyber-bullying, 

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