Taylor Paradoski

Social media is harmful to today’s younger people because of its pairing with cyberbullying and other dangers online. Teenagers will check their apps every hour of the day to make sure they are “caught up on the latest gossip”, and in some ways researchers have retrieved enough data to correctly label social media an addiction, much like those of alcoholism and drug addiction. However, the main concern that we should be worried about is the impression of social media on these teens and how it has implemented the emergence of cyberbullying, as well as the prominent danger of online sexual harassment.  Researchers have found that teenagers are the perfect age group target for sexual harassment through social media, where “false, illicit, demeaning and vulgar comments can be posted online by mischievous and unknown persons.” Along with sexual harassment comes a connection to pedophiles, whose identity can be kept secret thanks to social media and its ability to mask anyone and anything. The problem with social media is that its setup allows for teenagers to be easy targets to unscrupulous people who engage them in harmful conversations unanimously, because of the fact that they can pose as teenagers and lure the younger generation into meeting them outside of the virtual world. Social media also affects a teenager’s self and security through the act of being bullied through the apps. The federal government has defined cyberbullying as “bullying that takes place using electronic technology”. Brigham Young University child development researchers went on to conduct an experiment that would analyze bullying and its ability to create some form of a social hierarchy. Brigham Young University’s program “analyzes the behavior of a group of teenage girls as they use online verbal innuendos and emotional attacks to vie for attention and create a social hierarchy”. In this podcast experiment, Brigham Young University’s researchers found that in this particular situation, a group of 8th grade girls were among those at a local middle school that, through social media, bullied those that did not necessarily belong or fit into their group’s standards. This study is much similar to the one created and written by Robert Thornberg, School Bullying as A Collective Action: Stigma Processes and Identity Struggling. In Thornberg’s experiment, it is important to note that through extensive research he has found that bullying comes from the formation of two distinctive groups: the insiders and the outsiders. The insiders are essentially the bullies, and are in charge of deciding who makes it into their inner circle, while whoever does not “make the cut” is cast into the outsiders and potentially relentlessly bullied. This type of bullying is seen in social media, and is most commonly known as cyberbullying, the number one danger of social media that is harmful to the younger generation, whose minds are so very impressionable at that age. Cyberbullying is found to occur among those who participate in and have a large presence in social media. The issue that is making social media even more harmful to today’s younger generation is the fact that social media is a growing industry, resulting in a huge amount of social media use among teenagers. This addiction directly correlates to the theory that cyberbullying is more dangerous when social media use is high. Therefore, cyberbullying is exceptionally high today. Another study conducted by government researchers shows that “approximately 93% of U.S. Youths ages 12-17 use the internet, a significant increase from 2004… Survey date shows that a significant number of youths report that they have been harassed online in the past year”. This survey was conducted in the year 2010, and the numbers keep exponentially rising over the years to the current year 2016.Too many tragic stories have been told over the recent years of teenagers and young children who had taken their lives due to the amount of cyberbullying they had received and the damage it had long-term caused. In the news the other day I saw a story that the New York Daily News had picked up; parents in Texas were trying to sue 6 cyberbullies that had harassed their teenage daughter through the social media app, Instagram. The consequences of cyberbullying are detrimental to today’s younger people. Cyber bullying leads to emotional harm, where victims endure a long list of things, including depression, anxiety, low self–esteem physiological complaints, problem concentrating, school failure, and school avoidance. Cyberbullying is now being classified as more harmful and more dangerous than bullying in the form of face-to-face because of the ability of bullies to “hide behind a screen” and feel they are shielded from the consequences that come from bullying in person. Cyber bullying will continue to harm today’s younger people through social media, as social media has become a huge part of today’s society. Ultimately, cyberbullying has led to severe dysfunction, externalized violence, and suicide, all due to the ability of an individual to open up their smartphone and simply click on a social media app.