Social Media Self Identity

Social media is an essential part in a young persons life. The daily average time spent on social media is 2hours 29 minutes. So why do the youth use social media so much?

Social Media is a massive part of a young persons life as it is a way to connect and form relationships with people. Social media helps people to enable; identity expression, experimentation and exploration which is completely natural in a humans life. However as most things do it has its negatives..

Social media can be great at times however it can be severely damaging to a persons mental health and self esteem shaping them into a person who they don't want to be at all. Cyberbullying is a giant issue in the online world right now as it fulfills the trolls desire of interaction and ability to cause conflict against others. An interesting statistic i found is that "one in five children between the age of 10 and 15 in England and Wales have experienced one form of cyberbullying". This statistic clearly shows the sheer size of the issue and how big of a problem it is at the moment. Many children across the world experience cyberbullying and many of these children simply put up with it and take no action against the perpetrators. Below i have shared a video of how you can deal with and stop cyberbullying.

Social media is filled with negativity and toxicity one platform in particular is twitter, as you may find that twitter is the motherload for negativity and toxicity. I'm sure that within a quick five minute mindless scroll on twitter you will find a form of racism, sexism or homophobia to state a few of the many issues on this colossal social media platform. I believe that there is a severe lack of consequence on social media to what people are saying as the trolls face no fear of prosecution. An example of this is the Euro 2021 final were England lost on penalties to Italy, in this game three of England's black players missed penalties to cause England to lose the match. The following day of the game these players faced an abundance of racism as murals were vandalised with horrific things and the players faced a lot of backlash online. All of this could've been stopped if there was more consequence to peoples actions online. One way in which i believe that this could have been stopped is it should take a form of identification to create a social media account as it would be easier to prosecute the wrong doers and more people would think before they type, i think that if these steps were followed social media would be a much better place for all to live and express themselves freely.

After all the evidence shown why do people still use social media so much? Well i believe it is because that people like the confrontational elements on it, as i think that most of the stereotypes that are being spread stem from online into real world as they think it is acceptable due to a lack of consequence. So i think that this can create a persons identity and show who they are, as you can learn a lot about a person on how they present themselves online.