Stephanie Pita

Professor Wernick

English 110

Social media has been the center of almost everyone’s world as much as I can remember. It has helped people do many different things easily that they couldn’t do before. One example of that would be to find out questions they have easily through google like “How many stars are in the American Flag?”. But social media has also brought many bad effects to society, specifically teenagers nowadays who are the ones growing up with it. But there are some fiction and non-fiction sides to this topic of the effects of social media.

Social media has affected teenagers in a bad way and that’s a true statement. Nowadays we can see that the number of anxiety and depression has gone up by a lot compared to kids in the 90’s and 2000’s. The reason for this is that we have more technology that leads us to use social media. Before kids in the 90’s didn’t have all of what we have now. They spend most of their tie outside hanging out with their friends or doing something and not spending their whole tie at home using their phones. In most of these social media platforms teenagers tend to compare themselves to other people that they see and follow. For example nowadays girls start to hate how they look and how they live because they compare themselves to people like Kylie or Kendall Jenner. Also because they feel like they are being left out of a life that they wish they were living and feel like they deserve to be there. But sometimes the life that they see other people living like celebrities is not always what they think it is because they might be living a false life but advertise a better part in their life for social media. Another true statement about social media is that it has exposed teenagers to bullying more and more. Nowadays bullies comment on other peoples post and say disrespectful things about them. This goes back to the depression that other teenagers are getting and it is because of the bullying.

But there are also false statements about how social media has affected teenagers. One of them would be that social media is bad and all of it. This is false because social media has helped other teenagers communicate with each other. Since some teenagers are anti-social this has helped them stay in touch with their generation especially now during the pandemic. Social media has also helped teenagers express themselves by posting how they feel or what they love to do. Some teenagers don’t really like to show out their feelings to people around them so I feel like they like to use social media as a good way for them to say how they feel. Also social media is not bad because it has taught them about new things that they didn’t know before like new cultures, traditions or just other things. It has also inspired other people to do different things they have seen on social media like becoming someone or doing something they always wanted to do but never done.

Social media has both its ups and downs just like everything else in life. Every generation grows up with something that has both sides to it so I say that nowadays social media has taken over. It has affected the generation of now but it has also given them a positive out of something toxic that it has created. Eventually there can be more positive sides to social media and its effectiveness on teenagers.