Social Media- A Potential Devil in Disguise

When I hear the word social media, the first thing that crosses my mind is connecting with people.

Humans are social beings looking to establish effective rapport to sustain life. The strength of connections we build has an enormous effect on our mental health and emotions. Connecting socially to people and building strong relations helps in easing out stress and anxiety boost self-worth and confidence but it can also lead to some serious mental health issues emotional imbalance.

Social media has become a non- separable part of our lives. But, for many of us, it has become a mere game about the number of likes and comments we get on our posts or how recognized we are in the world of social media. This is one of the major reasons affecting the mental health of the people. People nowadays rely completely on social media platforms like Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. Of course, social media is important and it helps you grow if correct and authentic content is seen but what we need to understand is that it can never be a replacement for the real-world connections we build.

I would like to subsidize my argument by stating some negative aspects of how social media could be a devil if there is a lot of involvement.

Self-doubt and Anxiety: People post highly manipulated images of themselves on social media which could plant anxiety in terms of how someone looks or how intriguing someone’s life is.

Fear of missing out (FOMO): FOMO has been around for quite a while now in the world of social media and came into existence with the rise of social media itself. The perception that you are missing out on things social on media might fuel anxiety and negatively trigger your self-esteem.

Cyberbullying: Harassment, Fat Shaming, Video Shaming, Character Assassination, the list just grows each day. Social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook could be the major hotspots where we get to see the problem of cyberbullying the most.

Loss of Authenticity just to gain views and likes: Some creators and influencers just tend to make content about what’s trending….even if the content does not appeal to them at times. Many people use social media just to keep up with the ongoing trend.

Most social media sites have a severe lack of online authenticity. People use Snapchat to share their exciting adventures, post about how much they love their significant other on Facebook or any other social media platform and load up their profile page with heavily staged photos.

But in reality, you have no way of knowing whether this is all a farce. While it looks great on the surface, no wonder everything could be hollow inside. A person could be just desperate for Instagram likes as a form of validation. A lot of people post stuff on social media that they don’t perceive or it’s just that they think would be cool if it goes on to their social media wall and this creates a kind of hypocrisy loop.

One could get out of this mess by quitting lying on social media. However, in this generation of social media influencers have so much popularity, we can’t expect someone to stay away from social media completely.

Too much involvement and Lack of Self-investment: All of our leisure time goes into scrolling through social media walls, leaving you little or no time for reflecting on what your perception is, what your personality is, and what your actions are.

Engaging in malpractices to gain likes: a lot of people involve in malpractices just to get their content noticed on social media. Youtube fake views have been a major problem these days. This hinders the growth of meaningful content that is being put up.

Piracy and Fake content: There is a whole lot of fake content and rumors being consumed and spread on social media which is again killing the authentic content that some people are putting up. This hinders the growth of those who are contributing some genuine stuff online.

Social Media Ads and Paid Promotions: A lot of times influencers endorse products or organizations just for the hefty amount that they are offered by the companies even when they might not believe in the product/organization they vouch for.

So talking about how to escape the negativity of social media we could take up some practices like taking a day off from social media, looking for an alternative hobby, tracking the time you spend and limiting the same, be selective of what content you follow, be absolutely honest on social media, and very importantly do not care about the likes and followers.

It's ironic to say that the technology that is being designed in bringing people closer tends to make people more lonely and anxious and to escape this situation we need to keep in mind that social media is only meant to connect with people not to impress them.