Essay - Is Social Media Killing Teenagers?

 Is Social Media Killing Teenagers?

The Internet has been helping humans in so many fields. Through the internet, we can do anything easily such as search for any information, share any ideas and content, or even communicate with others at any distance. This type of socializing through the internet has established the term Social Media. Social Media has been used by humans of any Age including teenagers because there are no laws that rule the use of it. Regardless of all its benefits, social media also has many negative impacts on teenagers such as being a distractor in their lives, exposing them many inappropriate contents, and even leading them to do cybercrime. 

Social media does bring pleasure to anyone who uses it. But who would have thought that this pleasure would cause an addiction that would make their life disturbed? Social media addiction in teenagers has been linked to many problems. Many teenagers become lazy due the social media addiction. They are more concerned with being active and cool on social media than being active, cool, and smart students at school. This addiction makes them lazy to study at night and instead enjoy scrolling social media. They often forget to fulfill their daily needs such as sleep because they always stare at their phone from morning until the next morning. This could be proven that phones they used to scroll social media produced blue light and radiated it so that dopamine increased in their brain. The increase in dopamine makes them happier but also caused a sleep problem named Insomnia. In addition, teenagers also feel more comfortable socializing through the internet rather than in real life.  These actions could lead them to individualism, sickness, and stupidity over time they will be trapped in an unrealistic relationship without realizing that their life is lonely and ruined because of social media addiction.

Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and so on have been becoming popular apps for sharing any content easily. This convenience allows some individuals to share content that is not good, such as sadistic and pornographic content. Everyone can see these contents, even teenagers who are not old enough to see these contents. This is also supported because there is no proper system for limiting content to suit its users. As a result, teenagers can be influenced, imitate, or even dare to do this to others. It has been widely reported in the media that many juvenile delinquents such as brawls and sexual harassments are inspired by the content they see on social media.

Lastly, after the addiction that social media caused in teenagers, social media also can lead them to do cyber crimes such as cyberbullying and fraud. On Twitter, many teenagers have been reported as scammers for K-pop goods such as concert tickets, albums, photocards, and so on. The fraud they committed was not small and it was almost like a big fraud because the nominal value could reach more than tens of millions of rupiah. This was triggered by their unpreparedness to bear a lot of money from buyers of these K-pop goods, and many know that K-pop goods are not cheap. It could also be because they were inspired by previous fraudsters who could not be caught by the police due to limited self-identity on social media. In addition, the presence of a comment section in sharing apps such as Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok turns out to be a disaster for the uploader. Instead of complementing, many humans judge the uploader by typing many bad words or even death threats. These actions also can be imitated by teenagers who are still unable to master their physical and psychological functions without knowing that they are doing cyber-bullying. As a result, many teenagers were arrested by the police. After all, they were reported as bullies, or even teenagers who committed suicide because they were victims of bullying. 

In conclusion, social media has been giving many bad impacts on teenagers due to their mentality which is still unstable because they are in a transition period from the child to the adult phase. Therefore, parents around them, such as parents, teachers, and others, must be able to supervise and guide teenagers who are in a period of self-identification. Don't let them use social media as a place to imitate everything. Providing supervision and understanding that they must be able to filter and only take the good things from social media is the right thing because in reality humans cannot control the content that appears on social media apart from themselves as users.

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