Social media can be a useful place for everyone. It can be used for communication, learning new stuff, and for many more things that might seem helpful. Social media might sometimes be a place where people distract themselves from their everyday problems and this is a good thing. Although there are positive ways that social media can be used for, it can be problematic for adolescents to use. There are helpful websites that young adults can use on social media, for help with their homework, or to learn something new and for many more reasons. There is google and in google you could look for tutoring help or for cooking recipes and for many more websites that would help young people learn. However, young people don’t have enough maturity to use social media in positive ways all the time because there are websites that teenagers use that aren’t really something that they should be using. Parents aren’t always aware of what their kids are doing on these sites because they don’t know how to control social media with all the changes that happen in the sites throughout the years. One of these articles is,  Knowles M., et al. (2014). The Risk of Social Media for Teens in an Urban Setting. Global Pediatric Health 1-4.In this article, they spoke about how researchers did a survey on adolescents and they asked them a series of questions about social media. The question that was asked that meant more in the article was that if these young people met with strangers in person whom they came across on social media. This is an interesting question because this is a big risk for adolescents, there are people on the other side of the screen that are not who they say they are and this is the problem of letting a young person have social media. Even though social media can be used to communicate with others, there are negative effects that it can have on adolescents. 

Many researchers have done analysis on how social media can affect adolescents in a negative way. Knowles M., et al. (2014). The Risk of Social Media for Teens in an Urban Setting. Global Pediatric Health 1-4.  Is one of the articles that shows how social media has a negative effect on adolescents. These researchers did a survey on 114 adolescents from ages 13 to 21, and the survey was asking about their age, their sex, their grade, what type of things they searched on the internet, and what they posted in the internet, but the most important question of this survey was if these young people accepted friend requests from strangers and if they met with these strangers face to face. $7% of the participants were less than 16 years old, 93% of them were part of social media, and 55% of these young people met with strangers that they found online. This is a big problem because this survey was able to show us that most young people are using social media and that half of these students are risking their lives by meeting with strangers from these sites they use. In this article it was said that most of the teens surveyed used their phones to access the internet and that they had minor supervision and were involved in risky activities on these smart devices. This is telling us, readers, that adolescents get access to the internet with phones and they are using it in a negative way because parents are not really aware of what their kids are using their phones for. This is true because older people and parents don’t know how to handle the internet and they always ask their kids for help and this is why they don’t really know what kind of risky things their kids are getting into while using the internet. Another article where researchers speak about social media negatively affecting young adults is Franchina V., et al. (2018). Fear of Missing out as a Predictor of Problematic Social Media use and Phubbing Behavior among Flemish Adolescents. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2018, 15, 2319, 2 of 18.. In this article, Frenchina V. and colleagues are trying to find out if social media use on adolescents causes fear of missing out (FOMO)  and they were trying to figure out if this was a problematic use of social media. These researchers did a survey on 2663 adolescents to see if the teens that used social media more often had more FOMO and if to see if these kids that have more FOMO use social media in a more problematic way. In this article, the research found out that yes teenagers that use social media frequently do have more FOMO and that the more FOMO these adolescents have the more problematic use of social media they have. In this article, it is stated “…’I fear my friends have more rewarding experiences than me’.” This was something that most of the adolescents that were surveyed agreed with. This shows that most of the adolescents keep up with what people around them do with social media and they do this to not feel less and to keep up with new trends. Marchant A., et al. (2017). A Systematic Review of the Relationship between Internet use, Self-harm, and Suicidal Behavior in Young People: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown. Health and care research wales 14-11 is another article that shows some ways in how social media can affect adolescents. These researchers studied many articles to see the relationship between the internet and suicidal behavior and self-harm in young adults. In this article it was found that 11 of the studies for the research was positive, 18 of the studies were negative, and 17 of the studies were both positive and negative. This is saying that most of the articles that were reviewed by these researchers show that social media has a more negative effect on adolescent’s suicidal behaviors and thoughts of self-harm than positive. This is a horrible thing because this shows that social media is causing young people to start hiring themselves due to the different negative things they could do on these sites. 

There was a researcher that did a survey on 250 adolescents from ages 13 to 19 to see if adolescents envied people through social media. This article is Charoensukmongkol P. (2017). The Impact of Social Media on Social Comparison and Envy in Teenagers: The Moderating Role of the Parent Comparing Children and In-group Competition among Friends. J Child Fam Stud 27:69–79. In the article it was said that Young adults that used social media were constantly using it to compare themselves to their close friends and to envy their friends. This researcher is trying to tell us that after he did the survey he realized that adolescents that use social media more often use it to envy what their friends get. This is a really negative thing for young people because social media might cause them to start acting up with their parents because they would want something they can’t really get in the moment. Another article that shows that social media has a negative effect on adolescents is Arora S., Budree A., Paideya S. (2019). Investigating the Usage Patterns and the Implications of Young Adults’ Social Media Usage in South Africa. Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS, volume 1034). 103 young adults ages 18 to 25 were surveyed and were asked what was the impact of social media and face to face interactions. These researchers were trying to find out if social media is a priority in a young adult’s life, and the answer is yes. By the results of this reasearch Arora S., Budree A., and Paideya S found that most of the Young adults that were surveyed galanced at their social divide at least every half an hour and that they mostly used social media everyday. With this part of the article, it is shown that social media totally is a priority in people’s and adolescent’s life and that’s not a good thing because social media might cause adolescents to stop doing an important real-world activity to start using their devices. This article also shows that social media is a problem for adolescents and for everyone all around the world, not only in one place. 

There are two more articles that I would be using that support the idea that social media has a negative effect on social media. It might cause adolescents to become isolated and lonely because they spent more time on social media than in real life. Colditz J. B., et al. (2017). Social Media Use and Perceived Social Isolation Among Young Adults in the U.S.. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 1-8. is one of the articles. In this article these researchers are speaking about 1,787 young adults being surveyed. The main purpose of this essay was to see if there is a connection between social media use and perceived social isolation. Something said by the researchers after the survey was that The use of social media was increasing social isolation in young adults. This shows that the more that young adults use social media the more social isolation they get. This lets us readers know that social media is causing young people to get addicted to being on their phones or any smart device and making these young people isolate themselves from others. The last article that will be used that shows that social media has a negative effect on young people is Fox B. (2019).  Loneliness and Social Media: A Qualitative Investigation of Young People’s Motivations for Use, and Perceptions of Social Networking Sites. Loneliness and social media in a networked society 16. . In this article, Ms. Fox did a survey on 1,400 young people to see if social media had an effect on young adult’s loneliness. In this research, it was found that yes social media does make young adults feel lonely, but there are also many more reasons why young adults get lonely, and it’s because of their transition of living. They feel like people expect more from them when they are becoming an adult. In the article, it is stated “…Although social media has opened new avenues of communication, 92% of the participants in this study declared that they have not got enough people to talk to or ask for help when they need it. The lack of communication is very often associated with loneliness.” This shows that young adults feel lonely because they barely have conversations with others. This might be because social media isolate them from others and they have no way to realize this if nobody tells them and because of this, they say that what caused their loneliness is the work they have to do, but they always have time to use social media at the end of the day. This is why social media  has a very negative effect on young adults. 

As we all could see, there has been lots of research done to show that social media has a negative effect on adolescents. I conclude to say that many articles show that social media has different negative reasons on how it can affect adolescents. These researchers were able to show that it is true that social media should be something that adolescents should be supervised on because there are many negative outcomes that these young adults and people around them could face in the future. 

References:

Arora S., Budree A., Paideya S. (2019). Investigating the Usage Patterns and the Implications of Young Adults’ Social Media Usage in South Africa. Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS, volume 1034).

https://link-springer-com.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-23525-3_7

Charoensukmongkol P. (2017). The Impact of Social Media on Social Comparison and Envy in Teenagers: The Moderating Role of the Parent Comparing Children and In-group Competition among Friends. J Child Fam Stud 27:69–79

file:///home/chronos/u-a59f67e072d49974a92ef40e43a6a980311dfce7/MyFiles/Downloads/Charoensukmongkol2018_Article_TheImpactOfSocialMediaOnSocial%20(2).pdf 

Colditz J. B., Lin L.Y., Miller E., Primack B.A., Radovic A., Rosen D., Shensa A., Sidani J. E., Whaite E. O. (2017). Social Media Use and Perceived Social Isolation Among Young Adults in the U.S.. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 1-8.

https://www-sciencedirect-com.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/science/article/pii/S0749379717300168

Fox B. (2019).  Loneliness and Social Media: A Qualitative Investigation of Young People’s Motivations for Use, and Perceptions of Social Networking Sites. Loneliness and social media in a networked society 16. 

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-24882-6_16

Franchina V., Abeele M. V., Antonius J. van Rooij, Lo Coco G., and De Marez L. (2018). Fear of Missing out as a Predictor of Problematic Social Media use and Phubbing Behavior among Flemish Adolescents. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2018, 15, 2319, 2 of 18.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6211134/

Knowles M., Lee S. H., O’Riordan M., and Lazebnik R. (2014).  Risk of Social Media for Teens in an Urban Setting. Global Pediatric Health 1-4. 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2333794X14561656

Marchant A., Hawton K., Ann Stewart A., Montgomery P., Singaravelu V., Lloyd L., Purdy N., Daine K., and John A.. (2017). A Systematic Review of the Relationship between Internet use, Self-harm, and Suicidal Behavior in Young People: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown. Health and care research wales 14-11https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5558917/