The downside of social media
EDITORIAL: WHAT OTHERS THINK
It’s safe to say that our society has become addicted to all things technology — very few of us aren’t guilty to at least some degree of this. Right now, in 2018, it really is the golden age for access to information with the click of a button or just simply by touching the screen of our smartphones, we can know the answer to just about anything.
Another huge part of technology is social media — anyone under 50 right now has a Facebook account at the very least — not to mention Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter or VSCO. Yeah, it’s a lot. As social media has grown in popularity, so has the amount of people questioning if it really does anything good for us — specifically in youth.
Take a second to Google “social media and mental health,” and you’ll be faced with thousands of results ranging from research papers to news articles.
The question has to be asked: does social media do more harm than good?
Spoiler alert: There’s no real answer to this, but we can look at both sides of the coin.
An obvious point to start is that social media is great at getting information out there — it’s something we rely on a fair bit at the News. Twitter and Facebook are great tools at getting correct information into the hands of the people.
The flip side of that is social media can get a lot of bad or fake information out to the masses just as fast.
Every time we open Facebook we can find memes and articles from sources that are dodgy at best, making pretty extreme claims on issues and topics.
Many political fanpages will blatantly post pictures with 100 per cent false information, but it will still get shared thousands of times because people won’t factcheck it.
A big part of the social media discussion is how it impacts young people.
With the click of a button anyone can find anyone — which is pretty creepy, really.
Social media really pushes young people to live the “perfect” lifestyle — having them only sharing the occasional highlight — ignoring all of the average to below average times of their day.
Is the ability to compare your perfect moments with others’ a good thing? There’s no way it can be good for mental health.
Another side of the coin worth mentioning is the fitness industry.
Models are paid thousands upon thousands to push products that are unhealthy, just because they have a large following on Instagram.
A lot of these fitness models pushing products actually post a lot of interesting content about different exercises and workout equipment, which makes it hard for people to know who to trust.
If a person is pushing a product that is garbage, can we trust their workout advice?
A final note on the fitness side of social media: many big-name Instagram fitness people are using steroids, performance enhancers or have gotten plastic surgery — horrible things for the average person to compare themselves to.
An editorial from the Medicine Hat News