Has Social Media Become Toxic?
Being a member of the generation that grew up alongside the massive escalation in social media in the noughties, websites such as Myspace, MSN and Facebook initially presented a new refreshing opportunity to communicate with your friends and distant family outside of school, work or the occasional family gathering. Instant messaging on MSN and ‘poking’ each other on Facebook at the time seemed like an innocent game. Unbeknownst to us at the time, these websites would evolve and result in an extension of our daily life with social media now influencing all aspects of society.
However, in 2020 social media has changed for the worse, the advancement of image centric platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and now Tik Tok have resulted in a superficial change that priorities image over opinion. This enforces the narrative that what you look like or own is more important than what you have to say or believe. Although these websites do produce creative and humorous content in many cases, the consequences and price to be paid is outweighed by the negatives. These sites have unquestionably increased and impacted the frequency of mental health disorders such as social anxiety and depression due to users projecting the ideal life, that is an inaccurate depiction of reality that makes just about everything seem more interesting than it really is.
Young people being constantly bombarded with perfect and often edited pictures from their celebrity idols has a negative effect on self-body image, which simultaneously creates a need for following these actions in order to get followers and likes. The fabrication of the new use of the word ‘influencer’ has created a world where the number of followers is a form of currency that can lead to a finance stream that did not previously exist. The brain is incredibly impressionable, especially at a young age, and could there be a worse message than urging the youth of today to follow this trend?
Facebook, also the owner of Instagram and WhatsApp, has a monopoly of the social media space and holds data of just about every member of modern society with the ability to track your every interaction and movement. This data is processed in an algorithm that probably knows you better than most of the ‘friends’ that you have on the site itself. The advancement of the technological world and our subsequent dependence on it, have evolved. The concept of constant communication and instant messaging can all be achieved from a pocket-sized device that can fit into the palm of your hand, which is a slightly less daunting prospect than it would have been a few decades back.
When Twitter came into the public arena it was a simple, yet genius, concept that would become a source of global news, opinion and conversation with a limit of 140 characters which was later doubled. Twitter promoted opinion driven interaction with short and snappy posts that cut out the excess information. However, even Twitter has fallen victim to the changing social atmosphere that sees many sitting waiting for the opportunity to be outraged. The infamous phenomenon branded ‘cancel culture’ has encapsulated this change and outlined a major flaw of social media better than no other. Cancel culture is a rather large group of society waiting with baited breath to ‘cancel’ celebrities or those of an opinion different to theirs on their previous actions or even better, their old tweets. Twitter is filled with two polar opposites, the outspoken and the outraged.
Twitter and Facebook in particular have become politicised to an unhealthy extent. These networks create a feed of stories and posts that are tailor made and subsequently push agendas that have high bias and spread fear into users. The accounts you follow and the posts you are used to show you similar content that self-perpetuates more biased articles that only tell one side of the argument that fits within your already established belief system. This has fueled an increasingly high polarized society and the emergence of the ‘fake news’ media. These news outlets reign dominant on social media promoting click bait titles that deliberately mislead readers to get traffic on their site rather than attempting to inform them on news. How many times have you clicked on an article or hashtag to discover that it was misleading and failed to provide the information you expected?
So what’s the answer? Well how about we all try to take a step back from social media and stop promoting a superficial existence that installs a prioritised sense of importance on Instagram followers and likes. However, I am perfectly aware of the difficulty this proposition possesses. Even during the writing of this piece I have stopped, unintentionally, to scroll through Twitter and Instagram, yet little to my surprise very little has changed.
