The negative impact on social media for mental health 

To start off, everyone has social media regardless of the age, surprisingly even kids at the age of 8. Social media has turned into an app where we constantly rely on each other rather than doing it independently. It is as if social media has become a part of people’s daily lives. (Am Khalaf 2023). Surprisingly, people would even say they cannot live without social media, statically around 40% of the world population use social media and spend at least 2 hours every day liking post, sharing, tweeting (J. Brown. 2018) and those main platforms are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. As people consume too much on social media it influences our behaviors and emotions, this can lead to a negative impact on their mental health.  

One of the main negative impacts that social media causes on people’s mental health is their advertisement, this provokes comparison on appearances, it increases their depression, anxiety and eating disorders. Because of this happening with the pandemic, it was worsening mental health stressors in teens, because at that time a lot of people were using social media as the only way to stay connected with people or make friends. This has caused the clinical level of depression, suicide and eating disorders. (K. Feldscher, 2021) This doesn’t just happen mentally but also physically, social media can also cause cyber bullying, who would have thought that’s possible. This affects teens’ mindset into thinking they don’t have the perfect body image; their mindset isn’t well which leads them to be vulnerable because their brain is still developing their own identity. (Columbia University, 2021) Ironically, social media effects people being antisocial, an example can be people choosing text over phone calls, chatting through messages rather than being face to face, it’s as if they replaced human interaction with social media platforms like Instagram. (J. Amedie, 2015)