How Social Media Can Have an Impact on The Way Young People Feel About Themselves

Blog post #3

Welcome back Bloggers and blogger enthusiasts! 

Thank you for taking the time to have a read of my second blog post. I hope you found it interesting and that it opened up your mind to the certain negatives of social media and how these negatives can have an impact on young people in this day and age. 

This blog post will be about how social media can have a huge impact on the way young people feel about themselves/the way they look.

Now don't get me wrong, I personally like the fact that people all over the world can express how they feel, and show their friends online, a new outfit they've recently bought or how they've got into great shape, for example. That's fine. That's not the problem here. The problem here is that there are a lot of people on social media who post pictures of 

themselves that aren't exactly untouched. This involves both men and women.

I'm pretty sure that everyone knows that most, if not all magazines tend to airbrush the models to make the women look skinnier and to make the men look stronger/more toned, and this has a bad effect on young people as they think that the way people in magazines look is the way they should look too. Well this also happens on social media as well, mainly 

on Instagram. 

Thanks to the very high and mostly unrealistic body expectations that society expects, young people have become so focused on the fact that they must look good in every picture they take to gain the approval of their online peers (followers) and to gain lots of attention and popularity (likes). This includes comparing themselves to the hundreds of other girls and guys they see on their news feed who have “the perfect figure” or “the perfect look.” Terms like these make young people feel as though that they must look like these people who are branded as these terms, to fit in or become popular, for example. Therefore if these young people don’t look like the people who are branded as these terms, then they use filters and Photoshop on their photos to dramatically change the way they look online in order to gain approval, popularity etc. This is a very bad thing as they forget what's more important in life, like making themselves happy, instead of trying to please others. Another bad thing about this is that it can lead to serious health risks like eating disorders and depression. (This topic will be discussed in a future blog post).

There have been many news reports online of young people, especially girls, who had eating disorders because of what they saw online and mainly from the harsh comments they received from people online as well. (This topic is something that will be discussed further in a future blog post).

A solution for this is meaningful communication and understanding. The parents of these young people can educate their children by telling them that their worth is not based on

how many likes and followers that they get on social media, but how they are as a person in the real world and how they feel about themselves as well. Another method could be to make a group online where young people can share their thoughts and feelings on social media’s harsh reality with each other. This sort of thing will make young people feel less alone about how they feel about social media superficial society.

Overall, social media is a very useful tool for communicating online with friends, family and businesses. However it can be used to make young people feel bad about the way they look which needs to be stopped.

To conclude, I will leave you with this:

Do you agree or disagree with what has been discussed? And what do you think can be done to change this?

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog post.

Until next time...