Social media is harmful because young people can have a distorted sense of how they should look and act due to the unrealistic standards that are propagated and promoted on the platform. In recent years celebrities, models, and athletes have become active on every platform of social media. These public figures often share their personal lives with their fan base and attempt to shape their public image through their posts. Their Snapchat stories, Instagram posts, and Facebook updates advertise their “perfect” bodies, expensive cars, and extravagant jewelry. Even people who aren’t in the limelight tend to put only positive images of themselves on social media. This creates a false image of a desirable lifestyle that is constantly on display. When we are so exposed to people looking happier and more successful than we are, we can begin to believe that if we aren’t living this lifestyle, we are inferior, unhappy, and unsuccessful.
Professor Nichola Rumsey, co-director of the Centre for Appearance Research at the University of the West of England, talks about the evolution of distorted body image in an article for The Guardian. She says:
“When I was growing up, I compared myself to my classmates and people on the school bus. We were a motley crew of people in different shapes and sizes, with very different appearance. But with the advent of social media, standards of comparison are now much more extreme, and hugely unrealistic.”
Rumsey describes how before the widespread popularity of social media, we didn’t have as much exposure to unrealistic beauty standards; we could only compare ourselves to the diverse shapes, sizes, and colors of the people in our communities. It’s hard enough being a young adolescent girl who has to figure out who they are and grapple with their changing body. Now, most adolescents have cell phones and social media, which means that there is even more pressure to meet these unrealistic standards. Pia Guerrero, founder of a adiosbarbie.com, a website on body image, says: “We are vulnerable to external messages that say we will be better people if we look a certain way, and then we associate a certain appearance with being happy. When we can’t attain that beauty ideal, we become unhappy.” Not only do we become unhappy, we can also turn to drastic measures to change our appearance in order to look more like the people we see on social media.
In some extreme cases, this unhappiness caused by excessive exposure to social media may lead to eating disorders. In a USA Today article called “Social Media Helps Fuel Some Eating Disorders,” Claire Mysko, head of youth outreach for the National Eating Disorders Association says, “Social media amplifies behaviors associated with eating disorders — obsessions, comparisons and competition — with a constant stream of imagery and camaraderie-building, and how easy it is to seek and gain approval.” Statistics even show that within the past ten years when more young people have started to use social media, hospital visits for eating disorders has increased by 24 percent. While we can’t say that exposure to unrealistic beauty standards on social media causes eating disorders, there does seem to be a correlation between them.
These effects can also be seen in the increasing rate of plastic surgery over the past decade. From 1997 to 2007, cosmetic procedures rose 457% to almost 12 million procedures done every year. This includes a 754% increase in non-surgical procedures like botox and lip fillers. Kylie Jenner, a young reality TV star with 80.5 million Instagram followers (and counting), has been heavily publicized for altering her lips and breasts through plastic surgery. Although most people know of her cosmetic procedures, when we see how she receives millions of likes on photos, it makes us feel as though we would gain more approval from society if we had similar features.
Luckily, if young people know how to change their ways of thinking about social media, they can be protected from seemingly harmless images. Protection from the physical and mental harm that these images can cause starts with recognizing what is real on social media. It’s important that people in our generation know that celebrities occasionally use manipulation software and filters to edit the photos they post to make them appear thinner and have clearer skin. They are creating the perfect illusion to make themselves feel better about their insecurities so that they won’t affect their public image. While they are improving their self-esteem, they are hurting ours.
Social media sites are also changing their policies to help protect young people from the effects of unrealistic beauty standards on their sites. Instagram, for example, banned certain hashtags like #thinspiration, #thinspo, #proanorexia, #probulimia and #loseweight and instituted new guidelines against self-harm images and accounts. Individuals are also beginning to share their personal histories and photos of recovery on social media, using hashtags like #edrecovery, #edsoldier and #foodisfuel and posting images of their meals. With the increased awareness that unrealistic standards can cause physical and mental harm, people are using social media for it’s true purpose: to bring people together.