Social Media is a place where people come together online and share content. The great thing about social media is that it can be used for networking, promoting yourself or products, finding information on various topics, and staying connected to loved ones. Although social media can be used for such positive and productive reasons, it can also affect adolescents in many negative ways. Young adults are not mature enough to handle the use of the internet. Sometimes there are websites used on social media sites (SMS) that parents are not aware of and can lead to a problem with their kids without them even knowing anything about it. In this essay, I will be explaining how SMS negatively impacts young adults. 

In the article, Risk of Social Media for Teens in an Urban Setting by Knowles M., Lee S. H., O’Riordan M., and Lazebnik R, these researchers speak about how they conducted a survey asking adolescents between the ages of 13 to 21 years old, from an academic center, about what they used social media for. From this research, it was viewed that social media is a dangerous activity for young people because they used it in a way to communicate with strangers, parents never really know what their kids are doing on the internet, and most of the adolescents that took the survey had access to at least one SMS some way or the other. This is what was viewed in this research. In Risk of Social Media for Teens in an Urban Setting, Knowles M., Lee S. H., O’Riordan M., and Lazebnik R explained that since parents don’t understand social media teens take advantage of that and they might sometimes use it in a negative way. In the article, they state “… While adolescents may be more experienced with technology than their parents, they lack the maturity and insight to anticipate consequences that have the potential to lead to negative outcomes.” In this quote, the authors are trying to say that adolescents don’t have enough maturity to use social media and that parents don’t really know how to handle social media because there is always something new coming out and they can’t really tell if their kids are using SMS positively or negatively. Another quote used in Knowles M., Lee S. H., O’Riordan M., and Lazebnik R article is that “…63% of participants greater than or equal to 16 years old versus 40% of those less than 16 years old have accepted a friend request from a stranger.” By saying this in the article the researchers show that most of the adolescents that were surveyed were getting involved in things that might be very risky, meeting a stranger might not result as you imagine because you never know if you are getting catfished. I agree with everything that was said in Risk of Social Media for Teens in an Urban Setting by Knowles M., Lee S. H., O’Riordan M., and Lazebnik because throughout the whole article it is shown that social media is a place where teenagers take advantage and are able to do everything they want because parents don’t really know how to use the internet due to lack of time or information and that might cause young adults to get involved in a conflict. In the article Risk of Social Media for Teens in an Urban Setting it was stated that “…Lack of supervision may increase the potential for risky behaviors.” With this, it is shown that it can be problematic for teens to use social media without a parent’s concern because they get involved in activities they don’t know anything about and it would be problematicfor them. In the article Risk of Social Media for Teens in an Urban Setting the authors were able to explain their research very well and there are many more articles that show why social media is a negative thing for adolescents.  

An additional article that shows how social media affects teens in a bad way is A Systematic Review of the Relationship between Internet use, Self-harm, and Suicidal Behavior in Young People: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown by Marchant A., Hawton K., Ann Stewart A., Montgomery P., Singaravelu V., Lloyd L., Purdy N., Daine K., and John A. In this article, researchers were able to analyze that the internet, suicidal behaviors, and self-harm have a relation. Most of the studies they did has more negative connection between the internet, and these behaviors than positive, A line from  A Systematic Review of the Relationship between Internet use, Self-harm, and Suicidal Behavior in Young People: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown that shows this is “…Perceived influences were: positive, 15 articles, 11 independent studies, n = 38,191 participants; negative, 19 articles, 18 independent studies, n = 119,524 participants; mixed, 17 articles, 17 independent studies, n = 35,235 participants.” This shows that most of the articles that Marchant A., Hawton K., Ann Stewart A., Montgomery P., Singaravelu V., Lloyd L., Purdy N., Daine K., and John A researched shows that social media has a negative connection with suicidal behavior and self-harm on young adults. Even though teens don’t know the bad from the wrong this article shows that they know social media is negatively influencing them. Marchant A., Hawton K., Ann Stewart A., Montgomery P., Singaravelu V., Lloyd L., Purdy N., Daine K., and John A stated: “…15% of girls and 26% of boys reported that either the internet or social media had influenced their self-harm.” This shows that social media does make young adults do bad things to themself and that social media isn’t the best thing for them. I do agree with some parts of this article where they speak about social media causing problems for young adults but there is one bit I disagree with. The part that doesn’t make me fully agree with this article is when they speak about how on social media young adults can seek help with self-harm and with suicidal behavior yes this might be true but this is not always the case. A Systematic Review of the Relationship between Internet use, Self-harm, and Suicidal Behavior in Young People: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown states “…However, more positive influences including advice on how to seek help was given on over half of identified sites.” This shows that social media is actually helping young adults seek help when they need it throughout the internet but I do not agree with this because just as social media gives the help to teens, it also makes teens hurt themselves at the same time. These two articles that I spoke about capture why social media isn’t safe for adolescents. In Risk of Social Media for Teens in an Urban Setting the researchers spoke about how SMS is a place where people meet unknowns and where parents are not really aware of what their kids do on these sites, this shows that social media is not a good thing for adolescents to use. In  A Systematic Review of the Relationship between Internet use, Self-harm, and Suicidal Behavior in Young People: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown the researchers spoke about how socia media negatively and positively affects young adults in suicidal behaviors and self-harm.

Are there any positive activities that teens could do on social media? Many might be asking themselves. Of course, there are many things that young adults can positively use social media for. At times I need social media to research things I need for school, to look for food recipes (that’s where I learned how to cook certain foods.), to look for help in anything I need, To get a location I need to head to, in fact, I could also communicate with the people I love or with certain jobs through SMS. And right now during this pandemic, we are all doing work from home with the internet. I’m not saying that everything used on the internet is bad for adolescents, however, I do still think that even though there are all these positive things teens can do on social media they would most of the time use it for the bad things first because as I said before young adults, including myself, are very immature and we sometimes are not able to tell whether we’re going bad or good things. We just do things for fun and to impress others and social media is a great place where we could do all of this.

In conclusion, I still believe that although social media can have some positive usage for adolescents, it can also negatively affect them. I did this essay so that parents and everyone around the world could be aware that social media can sometimes be like a drug addiction for Young adults. Teens can get addicted to SMS and also social media doesn’t always give teens the best support they need during certain times in their life. Social media would someday be considered the worst thing that has existed in parents and their child’s life and around the whole world just because parents are not aware of what is done on these social sites and because young adults don’t really know the trouble they get into every time they join a different site on social media due to lack of maturity. I hope that by reading this you realize that social media is not the best place to let your kids spend most of their time in. 

Work Cited

Article 1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2333794X14561656 Article 2: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0181722&type=printable