Social Unawareness

I believe that social media has an overall negative effect on society and the societal norms that come along with social media. I have seen numerous posts on TikTok that attempt to normalize things that shouldn’t be normal. It’s honestly sickening to see the things that people normalize. I have seen people trying to literally normalize cheating on your partner, and other people get behind them and reinforce their argument. I have also seen people glorifying harming yourself, which should not even be posted for others to see. People are getting too comfortable with social media, and it is scary. I can also almost guarantee that if you go on any social media platform you will see people promoting drugs no matter the level of intensity. There are so many more things that I’m missing too that should not have a light shined upon them. In my opinion, we were never meant to be this connected with people across the world. Tik Tok often has content that shouldn’t be shared to the public, especially to a young kid. I have seen numerous posts on TikTok from a young individual with hateful or harmful comments under it. There has also been so many reports of cyberbullying from the app, multiple leading to suicide even.

It’s the same story of cyberbullying when it comes to the app Snapchat. However, on Snapchat, it is a lot easier to avoid sensitive content. Snapchat lets you choose who you have added on the app, as opposed to TikTok where your feed is almost one hundred percent random. Another social media platform with a negative side is Facebook. One of the biggest problems I have with Facebook is that there is so much advertisement for scam links. Facebook should try to find a way to filter those posts better especially since the large demographic that is on the app daily is in the older population and are more gullible and likely to fall for these trick posts.

Social media has a positive side to it as well. Snapchat is a great way to stay in touch with all of your friends, but you have to be extremely careful that you actually know the people that you have on the app. Tik Tok even has some positive sides to it as it can inform you about new information that you might not be able to find on another social media app, or other form of media. As far as positive goes, Facebook is another great way to stay in contact with the older people in your life. On Facebook you can also almost completely customize your feed as it is more friend oriented meaning that you almost never see stuff you do not want to see. I believe that the biggest positive that comes from social media is the connections that you can hold. Social media lets you keep connections between people who are out of state and even out of country. I think that if you really need to contact someone I think that you should just have their number in your phone.

In conclusion, I believe that the negatives that social media brings along, outweigh the positives, as there are alternatives to social media.

“Handcuff and Locked With Smart Phone” by Jangra Works is licensed under CC BY 2.0.