Would you believe the fact that social media is the most toxic environment to partake in? Several factors play a role in this toxicity such as misinformation, propaganda, and immature teens negatively talking about others. Social media provides a digital environment for the exchange of ideas, but teens’ social media usage needs to be monitored and restricted due to it consisting of money grabbing businesses making their users addicted and the substantial amounts of toxicity.
Money grabbing corporations take advantage of users on social media. Billions of users across the globe put in billions of dollars into the revenue of these corporations (“Social”). The more watch time users spend, the more money you rake in for them. The sole purpose of these corporations is to get you addicted to social media apps so you can watch a countless amount of advertisements which do not benefit your mental health in the long run. For instance, businesses and corporations have made increasingly great efforts to connect their marketing with the users by making these platforms more attention grabbing, enticing, and addicting (Chen). This vividly shows how the more we use these social platforms, the more of a rabbit hole of addiction we fall into.
Toxicity consisting of misinformation and propaganda also occurs within social media. For instance, a teen posted fake graduations from ivy league school simply as a “prank” (Chen). This negligible joke may seem funny, but can be detrimental to this teen’s academic career for future college opportunities and acceptances. Not only the teen himself, but others' mental health could be altered by this by feeling the need to be more academically successful compared to the ivy league bound student who has lied. Additionally, the extent of the difference between satire/sarcasm and serious information have become so distant that people can’t distinguish the difference between facts and misinformation or disinformation (“Opinion”). The fake news and satire people post on social media can grow more rapidly than one can think. Since you are bombarded with so much information, it is hard to even differentiate between fake news and real news. This vividly illustrates the variety of types of toxicity on these social networking sites. Toxicity does not necessarily only mean hateful comments, but truly means cyberbullying, propaganda, misinformation, pranks, and more. One may say social media serves as a safe place for users to express their creative and funky ideas, but the negative effects brought along with it outweigh the positives by a ton.
In summation, social media may bring several benefits to society, but in the grand scheme of things teens’ social media usage should be reduced due to money-grabbing corporations, toxicity, and several other problems. The undeveloped brains of teenagers can not have access to countless hours of the cruel power of social media at their very own fingertips. Society as a whole will diminish and disparage if action is not implemented immediately.
Chen, Brian X "The Future of Social Media Is a Lot Less Social." Gale Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection, Gale, 2023. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints,
"OPINION: Toxicity on Social Media." New York Times, 15 May 2022, p. 6(L). Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints,
"Social Media." Gale Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection, Gale, 2024. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints,