Is Social Media Responsible For The Moral Degradation Of Teenagers?

Carol González

Mrs. Frances Ramos

English Class

01/05/2019

12 “A”

Is Social Media Responsible For The Moral Degradation Of Teenagers?

“Social media is a dangerous place to seek affirmation, acceptance, identity, and security.”-Cornelius Lindsey

Throughout these past years the use of social media has increased to a rate where it has become an obsession to society. Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and other internet websites in which you can enter with just one click, have become a part of our lives.

since the creation of internet the access to social websites and the research of information have become easier to us, because just by typing some keywords, and a click on your keyboard you can look for the information you were looking for and you can get even more information.

Social networks are currently a problem since they have been causing anxiety, depression, and decreased self-esteem in adolescents. The networks are taking everyone to a world full of superficial relationships, full of false stereotypes that tell us that we occupy impossible things to be happy, causing us to be distracted and lose value for our normal life. Sometimes, teenagers get nervous if they do not see notifications from a social network, they get stressed if they do not have enough followers, if they do not receive any message, or if they do not get enough "likes" in what they post. This is called FOMO (which in English would be: fear of missing out), a syndrome that consists of the fear of losing something. This causes anxiety in the person because he does not know what is happening in social networks.

Social networks provoke an increase in dopamine, creating immediate retribution when listening to the sound of receiving a message, making adolescents dependent and addicted to technological devices as if they were a drug. When losing this retribution it creates a feeling of emptiness in their interior, the necessity of the technology, crisis of panic and sadness.

For its part, the depression is created by the same feeling of anxiety and people fall into a cycle of bad decisions and erroneous concept happiness is, which creates a pseudo-depression that ends up becoming real. Some cases that cause depression are destructive comments, which is often seen in social networks. This provokes insecurities in the person, which makes him want to change his way of acting, his way of seeing himself, or that he becomes antisocial since he is afraid of being rejected by others. This is called "cyberbullying".

Cyberbullying is very serious and causes too many problems for teenagers.

Cyberbullying is a term used to describe when a child or adolescent is molested, threatened, harassed, humiliated, ashamed or abused by another child or adolescent, through the Internet or any means of communication such as mobile phones or tablets.

Cyberbullying occurs most of the time through insults, threats, discrimination or ridicule. Other cases are to make public some shameful photograph, make public information, identity theft, and other charges that are classified as child violence.

A study that was conducted in 2017 demonstrates the effects of social networks on adolescents.

The #StatusOfMind study, conducted in 2017 by the Royal Society of the United Kingdom for Public Health, surveyed young British people between 14 and 24 years old, about the positive and negative effects of social networks on their physical and mental health. The conclusions related to the use of social platforms with higher rates of anxiety, depression and lack of sleep among young people and pointed to Instagram as the social network with the greatest impact on the self-esteem of the respondents, followed by Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter.

When looking at the excessive and unreal number of stereotypes that tell us how we should be, not being able to meet these expectations make young people feel inferior, without value and a sense of chronic sadness that cannot be filled with anything. In our society, Instagram pages such as esmv_beauties, sps_society, sps_smashes and many more are pages that upload the most popular and beautiful women and men which can end up decreasing and affecting the self-esteem, self-worth and decrease slowly by slowly the moral of those other people who didn’t make it to these Instagram profiles.

Social networks, despite saying that they connect everyone with others, end up leaving them away from their real person and causing people to act in the wrong way and take wrong decisions, affect the character and make people feel bad and therefore degrade their moral.