short answer essay mlc

Do any graduates of Master Leader Course (MLC) have insights or lessons learned they can share?

New education course to fill E-8 'knowledge gap' 10 Votes 8 Comments
Is the new Master Leader Course needed? 2 Votes 2 Comments
Sergeants Major Academy holds graduation for Master Leader Course pilot class 32 Votes 4 Comments
In the 18E course are they implementing cyber related lessons? 10 Votes 12 Comments
What is the course structure and workload for the non-resident Master Leader Course? 11 Votes 18 Comments
What is the pass/fail rate of the Master Leader Course (MLC)? 6 Votes 4 Comments

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short answer essay mlc

Do any graduates of Master Leader Course (MLC) have insights or lessons learned they can share?

New education course to fill E-8 'knowledge gap' 10 Votes 8 Comments
Is the new Master Leader Course needed? 2 Votes 2 Comments
Sergeants Major Academy holds graduation for Master Leader Course pilot class 32 Votes 4 Comments
In the 18E course are they implementing cyber related lessons? 10 Votes 12 Comments
What is the course structure and workload for the non-resident Master Leader Course? 11 Votes 18 Comments
What is the pass/fail rate of the Master Leader Course (MLC)? 6 Votes 4 Comments

Join nearly 2 million former and current members of the US military, just like you.

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Explore All Groups
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Welcome to RallyPoint!

essay on the impact of social media

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The Impact of Social Media Essay - 100, 200, 500 Words

Essay on The Impact of Social Media -

Social media is now an integral part of daily life, used for everything from shopping to emailing, learning, and conducting business. People's lifestyles are changing as a result of social media. Social media includes blogging and social networking sites that enable quick connections between users . Here are a few sample essays on the impact of social media.

100 Words Essay on The Impact of Social Media

200 words essay on the impact of social media, 500 words essay on the impact of social media.

The Impact of Social Media Essay - 100, 200, 500 Words

Social media is a tool that has grown incredibly popular across all generations due to its user-friendly interface. Youth is the largest user group on social media, which is both an impressive and a frightening problem at the same time.

Social media has increased our connections and given us access to almost the entire world . However, we must be careful not to lose our uniqueness in the midst of all the transient but captivating social media trends that affect us.

Social media's enormous reach is a potent feature that makes me wonder about times when it is not being used for good. However, social media has both good and bad aspects, which are debatable topics, just like our opinions.

The development and widespread use of social media represented one of the biggest revolutions in mass communication. Social media has had and continues to have a profound impact, ushering in a brand-new era. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Linkedin, WhatsApp, and others are some notable social media sites. The current generation has the good fortune to be present for some of the most amazing technological advancements ever.

Social media has greatly expanded the possibilities for communication . The pace of human life must also quicken due to the advancement of technology. Nearly all generations have used social media, but the younger generation dominates it. The youth also develop new, unified trends, but these are transient in comparison to earlier trends.

A global community has been formed as a result of social media. People can freely express themselves and their opinions on a variety of subjects on social media, from politics to the arts. Additionally, social media has aided companies in expanding their customer base and audience. But despite all the positive features of social media, almost everyone is aware of how addictive it can be. Social media also appeared to have caused a rise in the emotional distance among people. For our own well-being, we need to exercise caution when using social media.

Being social animals, humans constantly seek out ways to integrate themselves into society. There were few communication options in the past. People made small talk with each other as they passed. In the past, socialising was limited to going to each other's homes, hosting large gatherings, and holding meetings in bars, parks, and other public places. The time has changed right now. Because of their busy schedules, increased distance from one another, and financial worries, people have reduced their social activities. Social networking websites and applications have ushered in a revolution in the world since the advent of technology, compensating for the old trend.

Impact of Social Media on Education

Social media has been used as an innovative method of education . According to a survey of earlier studies, 90% of college students use social networks. Instead of learning how to use these media for good, students should be taught how to use them more effectively. In educational classes, these media are typically only used for messaging or texting. The level and pace of student collaboration have improved due to social media. Through various social media platforms like Facebook, Orkut, Instagram , and others, students can quickly and easily communicate or share information with one another . Online tests are also administered by social networking sites, and these tests are crucial for advancing students' academic performance.

Although social media has numerous positive impacts, it also has some negative ones. The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about a negative impact is the kind of distraction that the students in the class may experience due to the teachers' inability to identify students who are paying attention in class or not. It is possible that the students were misled by the inaccurate information posted in some of the scenarios.

Impact of Social Media on Business

The newest hot topic in marketing is social media, which is used by businesses, organisations, and brands to spread news, make friends, establish connections, and gain followers. Businesses use social media to improve performance in a variety of ways, including by achieving business goals and raising the organisation's yearly sales . Social media has the advantage of serving as a platform for two-way communication between a company and its stockholders. Through various social networking sites, businesses can be promoted. To reach the greatest number of users or customers, many businesses advertise their products or services on social media. Social media allows customers to interact and connect with businesses on a more personal level .

Impact of Social Media on Society

We are all aware of the enormous influence social media has on our society. The most well-known social media platforms are widely used online. Online communication and social interaction have changed as a result of some social media platforms. People can use social networking sites to get in touch with old friends, coworkers, and friends . People can also use it to make new friends and share information with them, such as photos, videos, and audio files. Social media also alters society's way of life.

Social media can lead to addiction, which is one of its negative effects. People spend a lot of time on social networking sites, which can distract them from their intended task and cause them to lose focus. Social media can easily have a negative impact on children, as sometimes people post images and videos that are violent or otherwise harmful, which can have an impact on how children or teenagers behave.

Explore Career Options (By Industry)

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Data Administrator

Database professionals use software to store and organise data such as financial information, and customer shipping records. Individuals who opt for a career as data administrators ensure that data is available for users and secured from unauthorised sales. DB administrators may work in various types of industries. It may involve computer systems design, service firms, insurance companies, banks and hospitals.

Bio Medical Engineer

The field of biomedical engineering opens up a universe of expert chances. An Individual in the biomedical engineering career path work in the field of engineering as well as medicine, in order to find out solutions to common problems of the two fields. The biomedical engineering job opportunities are to collaborate with doctors and researchers to develop medical systems, equipment, or devices that can solve clinical problems. Here we will be discussing jobs after biomedical engineering, how to get a job in biomedical engineering, biomedical engineering scope, and salary.

Ethical Hacker

A career as ethical hacker involves various challenges and provides lucrative opportunities in the digital era where every giant business and startup owns its cyberspace on the world wide web. Individuals in the ethical hacker career path try to find the vulnerabilities in the cyber system to get its authority. If he or she succeeds in it then he or she gets its illegal authority. Individuals in the ethical hacker career path then steal information or delete the file that could affect the business, functioning, or services of the organization.

Data Analyst

The invention of the database has given fresh breath to the people involved in the data analytics career path. Analysis refers to splitting up a whole into its individual components for individual analysis. Data analysis is a method through which raw data are processed and transformed into information that would be beneficial for user strategic thinking.

Data are collected and examined to respond to questions, evaluate hypotheses or contradict theories. It is a tool for analyzing, transforming, modeling, and arranging data with useful knowledge, to assist in decision-making and methods, encompassing various strategies, and is used in different fields of business, research, and social science.

Water Manager

A career as water manager needs to provide clean water, preventing flood damage, and disposing of sewage and other wastes. He or she also repairs and maintains structures that control the flow of water, such as reservoirs, sea defense walls, and pumping stations. In addition to these, the Manager has other responsibilities related to water resource management.

Geothermal Engineer

Individuals who opt for a career as geothermal engineers are the professionals involved in the processing of geothermal energy. The responsibilities of geothermal engineers may vary depending on the workplace location. Those who work in fields design facilities to process and distribute geothermal energy. They oversee the functioning of machinery used in the field.

Geotechnical engineer

The role of geotechnical engineer starts with reviewing the projects needed to define the required material properties. The work responsibilities are followed by a site investigation of rock, soil, fault distribution and bedrock properties on and below an area of interest. The investigation is aimed to improve the ground engineering design and determine their engineering properties that include how they will interact with, on or in a proposed construction.

The role of geotechnical engineer in mining includes designing and determining the type of foundations, earthworks, and or pavement subgrades required for the intended man-made structures to be made. Geotechnical engineering jobs are involved in earthen and concrete dam construction projects, working under a range of normal and extreme loading conditions.

Operations Manager

Individuals in the operations manager jobs are responsible for ensuring the efficiency of each department to acquire its optimal goal. They plan the use of resources and distribution of materials. The operations manager's job description includes managing budgets, negotiating contracts, and performing administrative tasks.

Budget Analyst

Budget analysis, in a nutshell, entails thoroughly analyzing the details of a financial budget. The budget analysis aims to better understand and manage revenue. Budget analysts assist in the achievement of financial targets, the preservation of profitability, and the pursuit of long-term growth for a business. Budget analysts generally have a bachelor's degree in accounting, finance, economics, or a closely related field. Knowledge of Financial Management is of prime importance in this career.

Finance Executive

A career as a Finance Executive requires one to be responsible for monitoring an organisation's income, investments and expenses to create and evaluate financial reports. His or her role involves performing audits, invoices, and budget preparations. He or she manages accounting activities, bank reconciliations, and payable and receivable accounts.

Product Manager

A Product Manager is a professional responsible for product planning and marketing. He or she manages the product throughout the Product Life Cycle, gathering and prioritising the product. A product manager job description includes defining the product vision and working closely with team members of other departments to deliver winning products.

Investment Banker

An Investment Banking career involves the invention and generation of capital for other organizations, governments, and other entities. Individuals who opt for a career as Investment Bankers are the head of a team dedicated to raising capital by issuing bonds. Investment bankers are termed as the experts who have their fingers on the pulse of the current financial and investing climate. Students can pursue various Investment Banker courses, such as Banking and Insurance , and Economics to opt for an Investment Banking career path.

Underwriter

An underwriter is a person who assesses and evaluates the risk of insurance in his or her field like mortgage, loan, health policy, investment, and so on and so forth. The underwriter career path does involve risks as analysing the risks means finding out if there is a way for the insurance underwriter jobs to recover the money from its clients. If the risk turns out to be too much for the company then in the future it is an underwriter who will be held accountable for it. Therefore, one must carry out his or her job with a lot of attention and diligence.

A career as financial advisor is all about assessing one’s financial situation, understanding what one wants to do with his or her money, and helping in creating a plan to reach one’s financial objectives. An Individual who opts for a career as financial advisor helps individuals and corporations reduce spending, pay off their debt, and save and invest for the future. The financial advisor job description includes working closely with both individuals and corporations to help them attain their financial objectives.

Welding Engineer

Welding Engineer Job Description: A Welding Engineer work involves managing welding projects and supervising welding teams. He or she is responsible for reviewing welding procedures, processes and documentation. A career as Welding Engineer involves conducting failure analyses and causes on welding issues.

Transportation Planner

A career as Transportation Planner requires technical application of science and technology in engineering, particularly the concepts, equipment and technologies involved in the production of products and services. In fields like land use, infrastructure review, ecological standards and street design, he or she considers issues of health, environment and performance. A Transportation Planner assigns resources for implementing and designing programmes. He or she is responsible for assessing needs, preparing plans and forecasts and compliance with regulations.

Conservation Architect

A Conservation Architect is a professional responsible for conserving and restoring buildings or monuments having a historic value. He or she applies techniques to document and stabilise the object’s state without any further damage. A Conservation Architect restores the monuments and heritage buildings to bring them back to their original state.

Safety Manager

A Safety Manager is a professional responsible for employee’s safety at work. He or she plans, implements and oversees the company’s employee safety. A Safety Manager ensures compliance and adherence to Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) guidelines.

A Team Leader is a professional responsible for guiding, monitoring and leading the entire group. He or she is responsible for motivating team members by providing a pleasant work environment to them and inspiring positive communication. A Team Leader contributes to the achievement of the organisation’s goals. He or she improves the confidence, product knowledge and communication skills of the team members and empowers them.

Structural Engineer

A Structural Engineer designs buildings, bridges, and other related structures. He or she analyzes the structures and makes sure the structures are strong enough to be used by the people. A career as a Structural Engineer requires working in the construction process. It comes under the civil engineering discipline. A Structure Engineer creates structural models with the help of computer-aided design software.

Individuals in the architecture career are the building designers who plan the whole construction keeping the safety and requirements of the people. Individuals in architect career in India provides professional services for new constructions, alterations, renovations and several other activities. Individuals in architectural careers in India visit site locations to visualize their projects and prepare scaled drawings to submit to a client or employer as a design. Individuals in architecture careers also estimate build costs, materials needed, and the projected time frame to complete a build.

Landscape Architect

Having a landscape architecture career, you are involved in site analysis, site inventory, land planning, planting design, grading, stormwater management, suitable design, and construction specification. Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park in New York introduced the title “landscape architect”. The Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) proclaims that "Landscape Architects research, plan, design and advise on the stewardship, conservation and sustainability of development of the environment and spaces, both within and beyond the built environment". Therefore, individuals who opt for a career as a landscape architect are those who are educated and experienced in landscape architecture. Students need to pursue various landscape architecture degrees, such as M.Des , M.Plan to become landscape architects. If you have more questions regarding a career as a landscape architect or how to become a landscape architect then you can read the article to get your doubts cleared.

Orthotist and Prosthetist

Orthotists and Prosthetists are professionals who provide aid to patients with disabilities. They fix them to artificial limbs (prosthetics) and help them to regain stability. There are times when people lose their limbs in an accident. In some other occasions, they are born without a limb or orthopaedic impairment. Orthotists and prosthetists play a crucial role in their lives with fixing them to assistive devices and provide mobility.

Veterinary Doctor

A veterinary doctor is a medical professional with a degree in veterinary science. The veterinary science qualification is the minimum requirement to become a veterinary doctor. There are numerous veterinary science courses offered by various institutes. He or she is employed at zoos to ensure they are provided with good health facilities and medical care to improve their life expectancy.

Pathologist

A career in pathology in India is filled with several responsibilities as it is a medical branch and affects human lives. The demand for pathologists has been increasing over the past few years as people are getting more aware of different diseases. Not only that, but an increase in population and lifestyle changes have also contributed to the increase in a pathologist’s demand. The pathology careers provide an extremely huge number of opportunities and if you want to be a part of the medical field you can consider being a pathologist. If you want to know more about a career in pathology in India then continue reading this article.

Speech Therapist

Gynaecologist.

Gynaecology can be defined as the study of the female body. The job outlook for gynaecology is excellent since there is evergreen demand for one because of their responsibility of dealing with not only women’s health but also fertility and pregnancy issues. Although most women prefer to have a women obstetrician gynaecologist as their doctor, men also explore a career as a gynaecologist and there are ample amounts of male doctors in the field who are gynaecologists and aid women during delivery and childbirth.

An oncologist is a specialised doctor responsible for providing medical care to patients diagnosed with cancer. He or she uses several therapies to control the cancer and its effect on the human body such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiation therapy and biopsy. An oncologist designs a treatment plan based on a pathology report after diagnosing the type of cancer and where it is spreading inside the body.

Audiologist

The audiologist career involves audiology professionals who are responsible to treat hearing loss and proactively preventing the relevant damage. Individuals who opt for a career as an audiologist use various testing strategies with the aim to determine if someone has a normal sensitivity to sounds or not. After the identification of hearing loss, a hearing doctor is required to determine which sections of the hearing are affected, to what extent they are affected, and where the wound causing the hearing loss is found. As soon as the hearing loss is identified, the patients are provided with recommendations for interventions and rehabilitation such as hearing aids, cochlear implants, and appropriate medical referrals. While audiology is a branch of science that studies and researches hearing, balance, and related disorders.

Healthcare Social Worker

Healthcare social workers help patients to access services and information about health-related issues. He or she assists people with everything from locating medical treatment to assisting with the cost of care to recover from an illness or injury. A career as Healthcare Social Worker requires working with groups of people, individuals, and families in various healthcare settings such as hospitals, mental health clinics, child welfare, schools, human service agencies, nursing homes, private practices, and other healthcare settings.

For an individual who opts for a career as an actor, the primary responsibility is to completely speak to the character he or she is playing and to persuade the crowd that the character is genuine by connecting with them and bringing them into the story. This applies to significant roles and littler parts, as all roles join to make an effective creation. Here in this article, we will discuss how to become an actor in India, actor exams, actor salary in India, and actor jobs.

Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats create and direct original routines for themselves, in addition to developing interpretations of existing routines. The work of circus acrobats can be seen in a variety of performance settings, including circus, reality shows, sports events like the Olympics, movies and commercials. Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats must be prepared to face rejections and intermittent periods of work. The creativity of acrobats may extend to other aspects of the performance. For example, acrobats in the circus may work with gym trainers, celebrities or collaborate with other professionals to enhance such performance elements as costume and or maybe at the teaching end of the career.

Video Game Designer

Career as a video game designer is filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. A video game designer is someone who is involved in the process of creating a game from day one. He or she is responsible for fulfilling duties like designing the character of the game, the several levels involved, plot, art and similar other elements. Individuals who opt for a career as a video game designer may also write the codes for the game using different programming languages.

Depending on the video game designer job description and experience they may also have to lead a team and do the early testing of the game in order to suggest changes and find loopholes.

Talent Agent

The career as a Talent Agent is filled with responsibilities. A Talent Agent is someone who is involved in the pre-production process of the film. It is a very busy job for a Talent Agent but as and when an individual gains experience and progresses in the career he or she can have people assisting him or her in work. Depending on one’s responsibilities, number of clients and experience he or she may also have to lead a team and work with juniors under him or her in a talent agency. In order to know more about the job of a talent agent continue reading the article.

If you want to know more about talent agent meaning, how to become a Talent Agent, or Talent Agent job description then continue reading this article.

Radio Jockey

Radio Jockey is an exciting, promising career and a great challenge for music lovers. If you are really interested in a career as radio jockey, then it is very important for an RJ to have an automatic, fun, and friendly personality. If you want to get a job done in this field, a strong command of the language and a good voice are always good things. Apart from this, in order to be a good radio jockey, you will also listen to good radio jockeys so that you can understand their style and later make your own by practicing.

A career as radio jockey has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. If you want to know more about a career as radio jockey, and how to become a radio jockey then continue reading the article.

An individual who is pursuing a career as a producer is responsible for managing the business aspects of production. They are involved in each aspect of production from its inception to deception. Famous movie producers review the script, recommend changes and visualise the story.

They are responsible for overseeing the finance involved in the project and distributing the film for broadcasting on various platforms. A career as a producer is quite fulfilling as well as exhaustive in terms of playing different roles in order for a production to be successful. Famous movie producers are responsible for hiring creative and technical personnel on contract basis.

Fashion Blogger

Fashion bloggers use multiple social media platforms to recommend or share ideas related to fashion. A fashion blogger is a person who writes about fashion, publishes pictures of outfits, jewellery, accessories. Fashion blogger works as a model, journalist, and a stylist in the fashion industry. In current fashion times, these bloggers have crossed into becoming a star in fashion magazines, commercials, or campaigns.

Photographer

Photography is considered both a science and an art, an artistic means of expression in which the camera replaces the pen. In a career as a photographer, an individual is hired to capture the moments of public and private events, such as press conferences or weddings, or may also work inside a studio, where people go to get their picture clicked. Photography is divided into many streams each generating numerous career opportunities in photography. With the boom in advertising, media, and the fashion industry, photography has emerged as a lucrative and thrilling career option for many Indian youths.

Copy Writer

In a career as a copywriter, one has to consult with the client and understand the brief well. A career as a copywriter has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. Several new mediums of advertising are opening therefore making it a lucrative career choice. Students can pursue various copywriter courses such as Journalism , Advertising , Marketing Management . Here, we have discussed how to become a freelance copywriter, copywriter career path, how to become a copywriter in India, and copywriting career outlook.

Careers in journalism are filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. One cannot afford to miss out on the details. As it is the small details that provide insights into a story. Depending on those insights a journalist goes about writing a news article. A journalism career can be stressful at times but if you are someone who is passionate about it then it is the right choice for you. If you want to know more about the media field and journalist career then continue reading this article.

For publishing books, newspapers, magazines and digital material, editorial and commercial strategies are set by publishers. Individuals in publishing career paths make choices about the markets their businesses will reach and the type of content that their audience will be served. Individuals in book publisher careers collaborate with editorial staff, designers, authors, and freelance contributors who develop and manage the creation of content.

In a career as a vlogger, one generally works for himself or herself. However, once an individual has gained viewership there are several brands and companies that approach them for paid collaboration. It is one of those fields where an individual can earn well while following his or her passion.

Ever since internet costs got reduced the viewership for these types of content has increased on a large scale. Therefore, a career as a vlogger has a lot to offer. If you want to know more about the Vlogger eligibility, roles and responsibilities then continue reading the article.

Individuals in the editor career path is an unsung hero of the news industry who polishes the language of the news stories provided by stringers, reporters, copywriters and content writers and also news agencies. Individuals who opt for a career as an editor make it more persuasive, concise and clear for readers. In this article, we will discuss the details of the editor's career path such as how to become an editor in India, editor salary in India and editor skills and qualities.

Fashion Journalist

Fashion journalism involves performing research and writing about the most recent fashion trends. Journalists obtain this knowledge by collaborating with stylists, conducting interviews with fashion designers, and attending fashion shows, photoshoots, and conferences. A fashion Journalist job is to write copy for trade and advertisement journals, fashion magazines, newspapers, and online fashion forums about style and fashion.

Multimedia Specialist

A multimedia specialist is a media professional who creates, audio, videos, graphic image files, computer animations for multimedia applications. He or she is responsible for planning, producing, and maintaining websites and applications.

Corporate Executive

Are you searching for a Corporate Executive job description? A Corporate Executive role comes with administrative duties. He or she provides support to the leadership of the organisation. A Corporate Executive fulfils the business purpose and ensures its financial stability. In this article, we are going to discuss how to become corporate executive.

Production Manager

Quality controller.

A quality controller plays a crucial role in an organisation. He or she is responsible for performing quality checks on manufactured products. He or she identifies the defects in a product and rejects the product.

A quality controller records detailed information about products with defects and sends it to the supervisor or plant manager to take necessary actions to improve the production process.

Metrologist

You might be googling Metrologist meaning. Well, we have an easily understandable Metrologist definition for you. A metrologist is a professional who stays involved in measurement practices in varying industries including electrical and electronics. A Metrologist is responsible for developing processes and systems for measuring objects and repairing electrical instruments. He or she also involved in writing specifications of experimental electronic units.

Production Worker

A production worker is a vital part of any manufacturing operation, as he or she plays a leading role in improving the efficiency of the production process. Career as a Production Worker requires ensuring that the equipment and machinery used in the production of goods are designed to meet the needs of the customers.

AWS Solution Architect

An AWS Solution Architect is someone who specializes in developing and implementing cloud computing systems. He or she has a good understanding of the various aspects of cloud computing and can confidently deploy and manage their systems. He or she troubleshoots the issues and evaluates the risk from the third party.

Azure Administrator

An Azure Administrator is a professional responsible for implementing, monitoring, and maintaining Azure Solutions. He or she manages cloud infrastructure service instances and various cloud servers as well as sets up public and private cloud systems.

Information Security Manager

Individuals in the information security manager career path involves in overseeing and controlling all aspects of computer security. The IT security manager job description includes planning and carrying out security measures to protect the business data and information from corruption, theft, unauthorised access, and deliberate attack

Computer Programmer

Careers in computer programming primarily refer to the systematic act of writing code and moreover include wider computer science areas. The word 'programmer' or 'coder' has entered into practice with the growing number of newly self-taught tech enthusiasts. Computer programming careers involve the use of designs created by software developers and engineers and transforming them into commands that can be implemented by computers. These commands result in regular usage of social media sites, word-processing applications and browsers.

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6 Example Essays on Social Media | Advantages, Effects, and Outlines

Got an essay assignment about the effects of social media we got you covered check out our examples and outlines below.

Social media has become one of our society's most prominent ways of communication and information sharing in a very short time. It has changed how we communicate and has given us a platform to express our views and opinions and connect with others. It keeps us informed about the world around us. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn have brought individuals from all over the world together, breaking down geographical borders and fostering a genuinely global community.

However, social media comes with its difficulties. With the rise of misinformation, cyberbullying, and privacy problems, it's critical to utilize these platforms properly and be aware of the risks. Students in the academic world are frequently assigned essays about the impact of social media on numerous elements of our lives, such as relationships, politics, and culture. These essays necessitate a thorough comprehension of the subject matter, critical thinking, and the ability to synthesize and convey information clearly and succinctly.

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So, whether you're a student looking to better your essay writing skills or want to remain up to date on the latest social media advancements, Jenni.ai is here to help. Jenni.ai is the ideal tool for helping you write your finest essay ever, thanks to its simple design, an extensive database of example essays, and cutting-edge AI technology. So, why delay? Sign up for a free trial of Jenni.ai today and begin exploring the worlds of social networking and essay writing!

Want to learn how to write an argumentative essay? Check out these inspiring examples!

We will provide various examples of social media essays so you may get a feel for the genre.

6 Examples of Social Media Essays

Here are 6 examples of Social Media Essays:

The Impact of Social Media on Relationships and Communication

Introduction:.

The way we share information and build relationships has evolved as a direct result of the prevalence of social media in our daily lives. The influence of social media on interpersonal connections and conversation is a hot topic. Although social media has many positive effects, such as bringing people together regardless of physical proximity and making communication quicker and more accessible, it also has a dark side that can affect interpersonal connections and dialogue.

Positive Effects:

Connecting People Across Distances

One of social media's most significant benefits is its ability to connect individuals across long distances. People can use social media platforms to interact and stay in touch with friends and family far away. People can now maintain intimate relationships with those they care about, even when physically separated.

Improved Communication Speed and Efficiency

Additionally, the proliferation of social media sites has accelerated and simplified communication. Thanks to instant messaging, users can have short, timely conversations rather than lengthy ones via email. Furthermore, social media facilitates group communication, such as with classmates or employees, by providing a unified forum for such activities.

Negative Effects:

Decreased Face-to-Face Communication

The decline in in-person interaction is one of social media's most pernicious consequences on interpersonal connections and dialogue. People's reliance on digital communication over in-person contact has increased along with the popularity of social media. Face-to-face interaction has suffered as a result, which has adverse effects on interpersonal relationships and the development of social skills.

Decreased Emotional Intimacy

Another adverse effect of social media on relationships and communication is decreased emotional intimacy. Digital communication lacks the nonverbal cues and facial expressions critical in building emotional connections with others. This can make it more difficult for people to develop close and meaningful relationships, leading to increased loneliness and isolation.

Increased Conflict and Miscommunication

Finally, social media can also lead to increased conflict and miscommunication. The anonymity and distance provided by digital communication can lead to misunderstandings and hurtful comments that might not have been made face-to-face. Additionally, social media can provide a platform for cyberbullying, which can have severe consequences for the victim's mental health and well-being.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, the impact of social media on relationships and communication is a complex issue with both positive and negative effects. While social media platforms offer many benefits, such as connecting people across distances and enabling faster and more accessible communication, they also have a dark side that can negatively affect relationships and communication. It is up to individuals to use social media responsibly and to prioritize in-person communication in their relationships and interactions with others.

The Role of Social Media in the Spread of Misinformation and Fake News

Social media has revolutionized the way information is shared and disseminated. However, the ease and speed at which data can be spread on social media also make it a powerful tool for spreading misinformation and fake news. Misinformation and fake news can seriously affect public opinion, influence political decisions, and even cause harm to individuals and communities.

The Pervasiveness of Misinformation and Fake News on Social Media

Misinformation and fake news are prevalent on social media platforms, where they can spread quickly and reach a large audience. This is partly due to the way social media algorithms work, which prioritizes content likely to generate engagement, such as sensational or controversial stories. As a result, false information can spread rapidly and be widely shared before it is fact-checked or debunked.

The Influence of Social Media on Public Opinion

Social media can significantly impact public opinion, as people are likelier to believe the information they see shared by their friends and followers. This can lead to a self-reinforcing cycle, where misinformation and fake news are spread and reinforced, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

The Challenge of Correcting Misinformation and Fake News

Correcting misinformation and fake news on social media can be a challenging task. This is partly due to the speed at which false information can spread and the difficulty of reaching the same audience exposed to the wrong information in the first place. Additionally, some individuals may be resistant to accepting correction, primarily if the incorrect information supports their beliefs or biases.

In conclusion, the function of social media in disseminating misinformation and fake news is complex and urgent. While social media has revolutionized the sharing of information, it has also made it simpler for false information to propagate and be widely believed. Individuals must be accountable for the information they share and consume, and social media firms must take measures to prevent the spread of disinformation and fake news on their platforms.

The Effects of Social Media on Mental Health and Well-Being

Social media has become an integral part of modern life, with billions of people around the world using platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to stay connected with others and access information. However, while social media has many benefits, it can also negatively affect mental health and well-being.

Comparison and Low Self-Esteem

One of the key ways that social media can affect mental health is by promoting feelings of comparison and low self-esteem. People often present a curated version of their lives on social media, highlighting their successes and hiding their struggles. This can lead others to compare themselves unfavorably, leading to feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem.

Cyberbullying and Online Harassment

Another way that social media can negatively impact mental health is through cyberbullying and online harassment. Social media provides a platform for anonymous individuals to harass and abuse others, leading to feelings of anxiety, fear, and depression.

Social Isolation

Despite its name, social media can also contribute to feelings of isolation. At the same time, people may have many online friends but need more meaningful in-person connections and support. This can lead to feelings of loneliness and depression.

Addiction and Overuse

Finally, social media can be addictive, leading to overuse and negatively impacting mental health and well-being. People may spend hours each day scrolling through their feeds, neglecting other important areas of their lives, such as work, family, and self-care.

In sum, social media has positive and negative consequences on one's psychological and emotional well-being. Realizing this, and taking measures like reducing one's social media use, reaching out to loved ones for help, and prioritizing one's well-being, are crucial. In addition, it's vital that social media giants take ownership of their platforms and actively encourage excellent mental health and well-being.

The Use of Social Media in Political Activism and Social Movements

Social media has recently become increasingly crucial in political action and social movements. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have given people new ways to express themselves, organize protests, and raise awareness about social and political issues.

Raising Awareness and Mobilizing Action

One of the most important uses of social media in political activity and social movements has been to raise awareness about important issues and mobilize action. Hashtags such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, for example, have brought attention to sexual harassment and racial injustice, respectively. Similarly, social media has been used to organize protests and other political actions, allowing people to band together and express themselves on a bigger scale.

Connecting with like-minded individuals

A second method in that social media has been utilized in political activity and social movements is to unite like-minded individuals. Through social media, individuals can join online groups, share knowledge and resources, and work with others to accomplish shared objectives. This has been especially significant for geographically scattered individuals or those without access to traditional means of political organizing.

Challenges and Limitations

As a vehicle for political action and social movements, social media has faced many obstacles and restrictions despite its many advantages. For instance, the propagation of misinformation and fake news on social media can impede attempts to disseminate accurate and reliable information. In addition, social media corporations have been condemned for censorship and insufficient protection of user rights.

In conclusion, social media has emerged as a potent instrument for political activism and social movements, giving voice to previously unheard communities and galvanizing support for change. Social media presents many opportunities for communication and collaboration. Still, users and institutions must be conscious of the risks and limitations of these tools to promote their responsible and productive usage.

The Potential Privacy Concerns Raised by Social Media Use and Data Collection Practices

With billions of users each day on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, social media has ingrained itself into every aspect of our lives. While these platforms offer a straightforward method to communicate with others and exchange information, they also raise significant concerns over data collecting and privacy. This article will examine the possible privacy issues posed by social media use and data-gathering techniques.

Data Collection and Sharing

The gathering and sharing of personal data are significant privacy issues brought up by social media use. Social networking sites gather user data, including details about their relationships, hobbies, and routines. This information is made available to third-party businesses for various uses, such as marketing and advertising. This can lead to serious concerns about who has access to and uses our personal information.

Lack of Control Over Personal Information

The absence of user control over personal information is a significant privacy issue brought up by social media usage. Social media makes it challenging to limit who has access to and how data is utilized once it has been posted. Sensitive information may end up being extensively disseminated and may be used maliciously as a result.

Personalized Marketing

Social media companies utilize the information they gather about users to target them with adverts relevant to their interests and usage patterns. Although this could be useful, it might also cause consumers to worry about their privacy since they might feel that their personal information is being used without their permission. Furthermore, there are issues with the integrity of the data being used to target users and the possibility of prejudice based on individual traits.

Government Surveillance

Using social media might spark worries about government surveillance. There are significant concerns regarding privacy and free expression when governments in some nations utilize social media platforms to follow and monitor residents.

In conclusion, social media use raises significant concerns regarding data collecting and privacy. While these platforms make it easy to interact with people and exchange information, they also gather a lot of personal information, which raises questions about who may access it and how it will be used. Users should be aware of these privacy issues and take precautions to safeguard their personal information, such as exercising caution when choosing what details to disclose on social media and keeping their information sharing with other firms to a minimum.

The Ethical and Privacy Concerns Surrounding Social Media Use And Data Collection

Our use of social media to communicate with loved ones, acquire information, and even conduct business has become a crucial part of our everyday lives. The extensive use of social media does, however, raise some ethical and privacy issues that must be resolved. The influence of social media use and data collecting on user rights, the accountability of social media businesses, and the need for improved regulation are all topics that will be covered in this article.

Effect on Individual Privacy:

Social networking sites gather tons of personal data from their users, including delicate information like search history, location data, and even health data. Each user's detailed profile may be created with this data and sold to advertising or used for other reasons. Concerns regarding the privacy of personal information might arise because social media businesses can use this data to target users with customized adverts.

Additionally, individuals might need to know how much their personal information is being gathered and exploited. Data breaches or the unauthorized sharing of personal information with other parties may result in instances where sensitive information is exposed. Users should be aware of the privacy rules of social media firms and take precautions to secure their data.

Responsibility of Social Media Companies:

Social media firms should ensure that they responsibly and ethically gather and use user information. This entails establishing strong security measures to safeguard sensitive information and ensuring users are informed of what information is being collected and how it is used.

Many social media businesses, nevertheless, have come under fire for not upholding these obligations. For instance, the Cambridge Analytica incident highlighted how Facebook users' personal information was exploited for political objectives without their knowledge. This demonstrates the necessity of social media corporations being held responsible for their deeds and ensuring that they are safeguarding the security and privacy of their users.

Better Regulation Is Needed

There is a need for tighter regulation in this field, given the effect, social media has on individual privacy as well as the obligations of social media firms. The creation of laws and regulations that ensure social media companies are gathering and using user information ethically and responsibly, as well as making sure users are aware of their rights and have the ability to control the information that is being collected about them, are all part of this.

Additionally, legislation should ensure that social media businesses are held responsible for their behavior, for example, by levying fines for data breaches or the unauthorized use of personal data. This will provide social media businesses with a significant incentive to prioritize their users' privacy and security and ensure they are upholding their obligations.

In conclusion, social media has fundamentally changed how we engage and communicate with one another, but this increased convenience also raises several ethical and privacy issues. Essential concerns that need to be addressed include the effect of social media on individual privacy, the accountability of social media businesses, and the requirement for greater regulation to safeguard user rights. We can make everyone's online experience safer and more secure by looking more closely at these issues.

In conclusion, social media is a complex and multifaceted topic that has recently captured the world's attention. With its ever-growing influence on our lives, it's no surprise that it has become a popular subject for students to explore in their writing. Whether you are writing an argumentative essay on the impact of social media on privacy, a persuasive essay on the role of social media in politics, or a descriptive essay on the changes social media has brought to the way we communicate, there are countless angles to approach this subject.

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Social Media and Its Impacts on Society Essay

Introductory essay, criminal impacts of social media, social impacts of the social media, effects of social media on economies.

Social media is a communication medium, through which people in different geographical locations can interact freely via the Internet. In the contemporary world, communication technology has grown tremendously with the fast development of the high-speed Internet, high quality mobile phones, and computers that enable people to access the Internet from various parts of the world.

In 2010, the Google search engine registered over one trillion different URLs, which is an indication of the tremendous growth of the global Internet community. By December 2013, Facebook had over 1.11 billion users with active accounts and the number has increased ever since.

People carry out different forms of communications ranging from social interactions to business transactions over the social media. Social media has provided all necessary forms of communication including video conferencing for distance learning and corporate meetings. This development has emerged from the fast growth of communication technology, which transverses different economic levels across the world.

The rise of social media has been facilitated by the emergence of the Internet, which came into existence with the development of the first electronic computer in the 1950s. However, the first computers were designed to serve large corporations, governments, and the military.

Remarkable growth of the Internet was achieved in the early 1970s when email was invented coupled with a social network that linked the Duke University and the University of North Carolina in 1979. However, the growth of social media heightened in the early 21 st century with the invention of Facebook, YouTube, Google, and other social media platforms (Boyd & Ellison, 2007).

Social media is very important as it trespasses different economic levels across the world. For instance, through social media, a person based in the United States can interact freely with an individual in Somalia without any form of economic and social hindrance.

In the past, such people would have connected in educational environments, but the situation has changed with the entry of the Internet and social media. In addition, social media is the fastest way of communication as people can chat through messaging or use the video talks while many miles apart. Hence, social media and the Internet are the only ways that global community can be formed.

Social media has influenced the society criminally, socially, and economically. Criminally, social media has led to the growth of Internet criminals. Crimes committed over the social media are of different magnitudes and they mainly include impostors, hacking, and hate speeches.

These forms of crimes have an adverse impact on society as they interfere with the individual’s right for privacy coupled with causing social stigma (Schaar, Valdez, & Ziefle, 2013). Secondly, social media has contributed to the growth of cultural and value degradation across various parts of the world.

Apparently, a fast-growing social community is emerging across the contemporary world due to the development of new unified behaviours across different cultures, thus leading to the degradation of the traditional cultural norms.

Thirdly, social media has led to an unparalleled economic growth across the world. By allowing people to share ideas, the resultant effect is the fast economic growth as some people acquire economic ideas over the social media and implement them in different places.

In addition, the desire to be on social media has created good opportunities for communication technology companies to sell their products in different economies across the world.

Even though social media was developed for noble reasons, it has turned out to be the greatest threat to humanity as far as cybercrimes are concerned. Some people use social media with the intention of earning a living out of criminal activities whereby they determine easy targets through the platform. Criminal gangs such as terrorist groups also use the same media to issue threats or commit an attack.

However, every country has a right to control communication and conduct surveillance on the Internet users with the help of law enforcers. Cyber terrorism is one of the worst attacks that can happen to a nation since it can crash the economy within a very short time. Therefore, it is advisable to regulate the use of social media and conduct surveillance to ensure safety at all times.

It is necessary to investigate crimes through the social media as such move has many advantages over other ways. First, it is easier to get hold of personal information and communication data of a suspect without his or her awareness. The developed countries arrest a suspect only after a crime communication is done beyond reasonable doubts.

Technology has provided law enforcers with systems that track the geographical location of a suspect, thus making an arrest easy. Secondly, it offers a broad level of surveillance as the majority of people are on social media. This aspect allows law enforcers to carry out investigations from a single point, while investigating many suspects at the same time.

Thirdly, it takes lesser time to detect a suspect over the social media as compared to the traditional ways of investigation, which take a long time to accomplish the same task. Hence, social media offers a suitable and efficient way of conducting criminal investigations to the law enforcers.

However, using social media to conduct criminal investigations comes with several demerits (Melander, 2010). For instance, the majority of the people in social media are literate, and thus criminals are capable of heightening their criminal activities beyond the reach of law enforcers.

The most notorious criminal gangs are not feared because they have more sophisticated weapons than the government forces, as they have knowledgeable people who develop systems that create a firewall around them. In addition, social media is dynamic and hence law enforcers will be required to keep on updating themselves on the usage of the media, thus making it hard for them to reach the criminals.

Criminals are capable of using disguised accounts where they communicate through coded messages that are illegible to anyone outside the gang, which makes it hard for the government forces to identify them. Therefore, social media is a complex platform for conducting criminal investigations for the law enforcers.

In conclusion, social media can be used to combat criminal activities, but the individual’s security begins with oneself. It can be a quick way of identifying criminal suspects, but also a hard way of reaching them as it is dynamic and those criminals have their own ways of disguising themselves over the media.

However, the law enforcers cannot sit back and fail to conduct surveillance; on the contrary, they need to keep upgrading their surveillance skills as it helps to prevent cybercrime activities. Hence, social media surveillance has more advantages than disadvantages, and thus governments across the world should uphold it at any cost.

The growth of social media has had great impacts on the social wellbeing of humankind across the world over the last two decades. Given that man is a social being, social media has contributed greatly to the fulfilment of this purpose by bringing together a global community in one communication platform.

Interestingly, in the contemporary world, people are hardly alone provided they have the Internet, mobile phones, or computers within their reach. Social media has allowed people to travel less and communicate more, thus saving a great deal of time spent in the traditional way of doing things.

However, it has brought about both advantages and disadvantages to the social life whereby some people have gained and others lost values due to its influence in their lives. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the foresaid demerits, social media is a great communication tool, which is slowly becoming indispensable in the contemporary world (Knobel & Lankshear, 2008).

By looking at the cause and effects of social media on society in the contemporary world, it becomes clear that this platform is a complex subject to humanity’s social welfare. It is often difficult to realise when social media is good or bad to the users until the repercussions manifest. Hence, the responsibility lies with the users. The users’ ignorance about the downside of social media results in the breakdown of the social fabric.

Many people cannot differentiate what is good from evil, and thus they give in too much to social media. The media freedom that comes with social media hinders governments’ control over the social media, which allows the platform to impact the society tremendously, both negatively and positively.

The perception that social media is good has led to many people nullifying the view that it is harmful if not kept under check. Social media is a community platform and just like in any other community, there should be laws and regulations to keep people’s behaviours under close check.

The advantages of social media brings to society are numerous, but this paper majors on three aspects. First, social media has contributed greatly to the empowering of the societies in many parts across the world. In the contemporary world, news spreads faster across the social networks, as compared to traditional mediums like print media.

Some few decades back, it took a very long time for the world to get major news, which enabled few people to have power over the majority. However, the scenario has changed as the majority can keep the few in power under check over the social media. The majority of the governing individuals are on social media, which deters them from exercising authoritative powers excessively over their citizens.

Secondly, social media has influenced the world society towards the adoption of a near single culture that is congruent to the dynamism of the global technology. Therefore, youths unsurprisingly dress the same in nearly all countries due to the influence of social media, which has led to the development of a common global culture.

Thirdly, the influence of social media has also led to the growth and development of social behaviours as every culture competes with the world’s leading cultures. Colonialists and missionaries were the first shakers of the world traditional cultures followed by economic and technological advancements, but none of them had a major impact on different cultures like the case of social media.

Social media also has had its disadvantages for the society. Some people are suffering due to the effects of social media. First, cultural value degradation is a major crisis that the world is suffering from and it has emerged from the influences of social media. Cultural heritage is the greatest pride that different social groups have enjoyed for many years.

However, the idea of adopting a common global cultural phenomenon has posed risk of loss of cultural heritages to many cultures across the world. Some of the cultural heritages that are passed to every new generation include rituals, dancing, and dressing codes among others, but the current and future generations will hardly adopt that heritage as they have already adopted a new global culture.

Secondly, social media has contributed to social isolations of some groups. The illiterate and economically challenged individuals have been excluded from the new culture to a point of marginalisation. This aspect has led to social dualism, in which those with access to social media ridicule the less fortunate who cannot enjoy the perquisites that come with this form of communication.

This case of marginalisation and ridicule is extreme in the developing nations where the majority of people are not in the social media, thus causing a cultural crisis in the society. Thirdly, social media has contributed to the spreading of immoral behaviours across the world (Ferri, Grifoni, & Guzzo, 2012).

What seems good to a certain society is not always good to another, but the youths are vulnerable to what brings utmost pleasure, which in most cases is immoral.

In conclusion, social media is a good way of communication across different cultures and at the same time bad if not controlled. Notably, it is hard to control the influences of social media to a culture, as the youths are the most vulnerable and active on the platform.

Hence, the entire responsibility lies in the hands of individual users to determine the benefits that come with social media. Unfortunately, those missing from social media feel alienated and marginalised.

However, the advantages of social media outweigh the disadvantages and thus social media has become indispensable in the contemporary world. People should thus embrace social media as it simplifies communication and global interaction.

Global village is a common terminology in the modern day world and it is often used to refer to the fast growing world economy. Social media has greatly contributed to the fast growth of world economies since it has brought together both sellers and buyers in a common platform. Amongst the richest traders in the world, the majority get their customers through the Internet and social media.

Social media allows for trade transactions between parties that are very far from each other and hence contributing to the growth of a global economy. Traditionally, it was harder to do business across and within nations as it took long to reach customers and it demanded huge capital for advertisements.

However, the case is very different today as start-ups are capable of posing major threats to the old businesses due to the influence of the social media. In addition, economic activities are kept in check through social media and economic decision makers are aware of the power of social media, and thus they execute their strategies with extreme carefulness.

The first element in the cause and effects of social media on economies is the availability of many customers on the platform. People are key drivers of the economy as every trader relies on customers for trade. Hence, the availability of many people on social media has created an excellent opportunity for traders to reach out to many people through advertising via the media.

Secondly, social media brings people of different economic, professional, and cultural backgrounds together, which serve as a key determinant of economic growth. Hence, people have the power to question economic decisions, and thus contribute to the making of decisions that favour their economic wellbeing.

For instance, the Obamacare has received great social media attention and people have voiced their concerns via this platform. Thirdly, the world’s most thriving businesses are those in the information technology sector where social media has created huge demands for different products.

There is a great desire for people to get into the social media and others want to communicate effectively using the best available communication devices in the market, and thus mobile telecommunication firms have a huge demand to meet. The huge demand and supply for communication products have played a major role in economic growth across the world.

Advantages of social media effects on economy are numerous. First, social media enables producers to reach out to many customers. Social media has allowed producers to get wide market coverage for their products with less effort, which assures good sales and profits. In so doing, start-up businesses reach their full growth within a short time, thus increasing governments’ revenues.

Traditionally, it was hard for start-ups to reach their full growth due to lack of huge capital investments required for advertisement and product promotions. However, the scenario has changed in the contemporary world as a trader can do advertisement and product promotion over social media without incurring huge costs and logistical challenges.

Secondly, social media has enabled the creation of job opportunities in different economies across the world. It is easier for an individual with an economically viable idea to attract investors on social media and within a short time, the idea comes to reality, thus creating job opportunities.

In addition, the fast growing trend of businesses advertising their products over the social media creates job opportunities, as they demand more labour investments. Thirdly, social media helps traders to identify new markets for their products.

The world economy is nowadays a uniform economy whereby high quality products have potential to sell to other economies with ease. The social media enables a buyer to purchase products available in the world markets. In such a case, ordering products from social media sends a signal to the producers that a new market exists in a certain area.

However, social media has negative effects on economies as explained in this paragraph. First, local products still face competition from imported products. Buying foreign products exposes local products, which in most cases are expensive or inferior, to the risk of extinction.

In the worst case scenario, the government loses revenue, and thus loss of employment and increase dependency on the government by the population. Some governments control this scenario by imposing high taxes on imported goods, but the long-term solution is to improve the quality of local products and charge customers less (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007).

Secondly, social media has led to globalisation of world cultures, which has enabled some people to emigrate to fast thriving economies. For instance, developing nations have lost talents and productive people to the developed nations as the latter present more promising job offers as compared to the former.

This mass emigration from developing countries has led to loss of capable workforce, thus curtailing the probability of achieving economic goals in third world countries. However, the world economies can take advantage of social media and the world’s new cultural phenomenon to add value to their local mechanisms in a bid to avoid brain drain.

Thirdly, social media has also contributed to reduced productivity of employees as many employers are addicted to it, and thus spend a lot of time communicating with their friends. These behaviours are hard to contain and, in worst-case scenarios, they lead to loss making and unemployment.

In conclusion, social media is good for economic growth, but it has both advantages and disadvantages. However, the sole responsibility of its outcome lies in the hands of the users. It is recommendable to use social media towards achieving economic advantage by nearly all stakeholders in an economy.

Producers can take advantage of social media to identify products that best satisfy the targeted customers in the global phenomenon and capitalise on their strengths to gain a competitive advantage.

Boyd, M., & Ellison, B. (2007). Social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13 (1), 4-45.

Ellison, B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook friends: social capital and college student’s use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12 (1), 1143–1168.

Ferri, F., Grifoni, P., & Guzzo, T. (2012). New forms of social and professional digital relationships: the case of Facebook. Social Network Analysis and Mining Journal, 2 (6), 121-137.

Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (2008). Digital Literacy and Participation in Online Social Networking Spaces . New York, NY: Peter Lang

Melander, L. (2010). College students’ perceptions of intimate partner cyber harassment. Cyber Psychology, Behaviour, and Social Networking, 13 (3), 263– 268.

Schaar, K., Valdez, C., & Ziefle, M. (2013). The impact of user diversity on the willingness to disclose personal information in social network services. in human factors in computing and informatics . Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlang.

Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, December 23). Social Media and Its Impacts on Society. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-and-its-impacts-on-society/

"Social Media and Its Impacts on Society." IvyPanda , 23 Dec. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-and-its-impacts-on-society/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Social Media and Its Impacts on Society'. 23 December.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Social Media and Its Impacts on Society." December 23, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-and-its-impacts-on-society/.

1. IvyPanda . "Social Media and Its Impacts on Society." December 23, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-and-its-impacts-on-society/.

Bibliography

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The Use of Force by Law Enforcers
Mass Media & Law Enforcers in Community Policing
Group Cohesiveness for Law Enforcers
Contrast the different levels of police operations and their unique operations
Narcotics Investigations and Drug Enforcement
Criminal Justice and Law Enforcement
Challenges of Law Enforcement in Society
Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Trends
Use of Force in Law Enforcement
Serial Killers: Law Enforcement Response to Serial Killing
Diversity Issues Related to Communication Barriers
The Role of Effective Communication
Communication Strategies: Image Restoration Theory
Effective Communication Strategies
Effective Communication: Presenting One's Ideas

A business journal from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

The Impact of Social Media: Is it Irreplaceable?

July 26, 2019 • 15 min read.

Social media as we know it has barely reached its 20th birthday, but it’s changed the fabric of everyday life. What does the future hold for the sector and the players currently at the top?

Public Policy

In little more than a decade, the impact of social media has gone from being an entertaining extra to a fully integrated part of nearly every aspect of daily life for many.

Recently in the realm of commerce, Facebook faced skepticism in its testimony to the Senate Banking Committee on Libra, its proposed cryptocurrency and alternative financial system . In politics, heartthrob Justin Bieber tweeted the President of the United States, imploring him to “let those kids out of cages.” In law enforcement, the Philadelphia police department moved to terminate more than a dozen police officers after their racist comments on social media were revealed.

And in the ultimate meshing of the digital and physical worlds, Elon Musk raised the specter of essentially removing the space between social and media through the invention — at some future time — of a brain implant that connects human tissue to computer chips.

All this, in the span of about a week.

As quickly as social media has insinuated itself into politics, the workplace, home life, and elsewhere, it continues to evolve at lightning speed, making it tricky to predict which way it will morph next. It’s hard to recall now, but SixDegrees.com, Friendster, and Makeoutclub.com were each once the next big thing, while one survivor has continued to grow in astonishing ways. In 2006, Facebook had 7.3 million registered users and reportedly turned down a $750 million buyout offer. In the first quarter of 2019, the company could claim 2.38 billion active users, with a market capitalization hovering around half a trillion dollars.

“In 2007 I argued that Facebook might not be around in 15 years. I’m clearly wrong, but it is interesting to see how things have changed,” says Jonah Berger, Wharton marketing professor and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On . The challenge going forward is not just having the best features, but staying relevant, he says. “Social media isn’t a utility. It’s not like power or water where all people care about is whether it works. Young people care about what using one platform or another says about them. It’s not cool to use the same site as your parents and grandparents, so they’re always looking for the hot new thing.”

Just a dozen years ago, everyone was talking about a different set of social networking services, “and I don’t think anyone quite expected Facebook to become so huge and so dominant,” says Kevin Werbach, Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics. “At that point, this was an interesting discussion about tech start-ups.

“Today, Facebook is one of the most valuable companies on earth and front and center in a whole range of public policy debates, so the scope of issues we’re thinking about with social media are broader than then,” Werbach adds.

Cambridge Analytica , the impact of social media on the last presidential election and other issues may have eroded public trust, Werbach said, but “social media has become really fundamental to the way that billions of people get information about the world and connect with each other, which raises the stakes enormously.”

Just Say No

“Facebook is dangerous,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) at July’s hearing of the Senate Banking Committee. “Facebook has said, ‘just trust us.’ And every time Americans trust you, they seem to get burned.”

Social media has plenty of detractors, but by and large, do Americans agree with Brown’s sentiment? In 2018, 42% of those surveyed in a Pew Research Center survey said they had taken a break from checking the platform for a period of several weeks or more, while 26% said they had deleted the Facebook app from their cellphone.

A year later, though, despite the reputational beating social media had taken, the 2019 iteration of the same Pew survey found social media use unchanged from 2018.

Facebook has its critics, says Wharton marketing professor Pinar Yildirim, and they are mainly concerned about two things: mishandling consumer data and poorly managing access to it by third-party providers; and the level of disinformation spreading on Facebook.

“Social media isn’t a utility. It’s not like power or water where all people care about is whether it works. Young people care about what using one platform or another says about them.” –Jonah Berger

“The question is, are we at a point where the social media organizations and their activities should be regulated for the benefit of the consumer? I do not think more regulation will necessarily help, but certainly this is what is on the table,” says Yildirim. “In the period leading to the [2020 U.S. presidential] elections, we will hear a range of discussions about regulation on the tech industry.”

Some proposals relate to stricter regulation on collection and use of consumer data, Yildirim adds, noting that the European Union already moved to stricter regulations last year by adopting the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) . “A number of companies in the U.S. and around the world adopted the GDPR protocol for all of their customers, not just for the residents of EU,” she says. “We will likely hear more discussions on regulation of such data, and we will likely see stricter regulation of this data.”

The other discussion bound to intensify is around the separation of Big Tech into smaller, easier to regulate units. “Most of us academics do not think that dividing organizations into smaller units is sufficient to improve their compliance with regulation. It also does not necessarily mean they will be less competitive,” says Yildirim. “For instance, in the discussion of Facebook, it is not even clear yet how breaking up the company would work, given that it does not have very clear boundaries between different business units.”

Even if such regulations never come to pass, the discussions “may nevertheless hurt Big Tech financially, given that most companies are publicly traded and it adds to the uncertainty,” Yildirim notes.

One prominent commentator about the negative impact of social media is Jaron Lanier, whose fervent opposition makes itself apparent in the plainspoken title of his 2018 book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now . He cites loss of free will, social media’s erosion of the truth and destruction of empathy, its tendency to make people unhappy, and the way in which it is “making politics impossible.” The title of the last chapter: “Social Media Hates Your Soul.”

Lanier is no tech troglodyte. A polymath who bridges the digital and analog realms, he is a musician and writer, has worked as a scientist for Microsoft, and was co-founder of pioneering virtual reality company VPL Research. The nastiness that online existence brings out in users “turned out to be like crude oil for the social media companies and other behavior manipulation empires that quickly came to dominate the internet, because it fuelled negative behavioral feedback,” he writes.

“Social media has become really fundamental to the way that billions of people get information about the world and connect with each other, which raises the stakes enormously.” –Kevin Werbach

Worse, there is an addictive quality to social media, and that is a big issue, says Berger. “Social media is like a drug, but what makes it particularly addictive is that it is adaptive. It adjusts based on your preferences and behaviors,” he says, “which makes it both more useful and engaging and interesting, and more addictive.”

The effect of that drug on mental health is only beginning to be examined, but a recent University of Pennsylvania study makes the case that limiting use of social media can be a good thing. Researchers looked at a group of 143 Penn undergraduates, using baseline monitoring and randomly assigning each to either a group limiting Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat use to 10 minutes per platform per day, or to one told to use social media as usual for three weeks. The results, published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology , showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks in the group limiting use compared to the control group.

However, “both groups showed significant decreases in anxiety and fear of missing out over baseline, suggesting a benefit of increased self-monitoring,” wrote the authors of “ No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression .”

Monetizing a League (and a Reality) All Their Own

No one, though, is predicting that social media is a fad that will pass like its analog antecedent of the 1970s, citizens band radio. It will, however, evolve. The idea of social media as just a way to reconnect with high school friends seems quaint now. The impact of social media today is a big tent, including not only networks like Facebook, but also forums like Reddit and video-sharing platforms.

“The question is, are we at a point where the social media organizations and their activities should be regulated for the benefit of the consumer?” –Pinar Yildirim

Virtual worlds and gaming have become a major part of the sector, too. Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader says gamers are creating their own user-generated content through virtual worlds — and the revenue to go with it. He points to one group of gamers that use Grand Theft Auto as a kind of stage or departure point “to have their own virtual show.” In NoPixel, the Grand Theft Auto roleplaying server, “not much really happens and millions are tuning in to watch them. Just watching, not even participating, and it’s either live-streamed or recorded. And people are making donations to support this thing. The gamers are making hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“Now imagine having a 30-person reality show all filmed live and you can take the perspective of one person and then watch it again from another person’s perspective,” he continues. “Along the way, they can have a tip jar or talk about things they endorse. That kind of immersive media starts to build the bridge to what we like to get out of TV, but even better. Those things are on the periphery right now, but I think they are going to take over.”

Big players have noticed the potential of virtual sports and are getting into the act. In a striking example of the physical world imitating the digital one, media companies are putting up real-life stadiums where teams compete in video games. Comcast Spectator in March announced that it is building a new $50 million stadium in South Philadelphia that will be the home of the Philadelphia Fusion, the city’s e-sports team in the Overwatch League.

E-sports is serious business, with revenues globally — including advertising, sponsorships, and media rights — expected to reach $1.1 billion in 2019, according to gaming industry analytics company Newzoo.

“E-sports is absolutely here to stay,” says Fader, “and I think it’s a safe bet to say that e-sports will dominate most traditional sports, managing far more revenue and having more impact on our consciousness than baseball.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Facebook has begun making deals to carry e-sports content. In fact, it is diversification like this that may keep Facebook from ending up like its failed upstart peers. One thing that Facebook has managed to do that MySpace, Friendster, and others didn’t, is “a very good job of creating functional integration with the value they are delivering, as opposed to being a place to just share photos or send messages, it serves a lot of diversified functions,” says Keith E. Niedermeier, director of Wharton’s undergraduate marketing program and an adjunct professor of marketing. “They are creating groups and group connections, but you see them moving into lots of other services like streaming entertainment, mobile payments, and customer-to-customer buying and selling.”

“[WeChat] has really instantiated itself as a day-to-day tool in China, and it’s clear to me that Facebook would like to emulate that sort of thing.” –Keith Niedermeier

In China, WeChat has become the biggest mobile payment platform in the world and it is the platform for many third-party apps for things like bike sharing and ordering airplane tickets. “It has really instantiated itself as a day-to-day tool in China, and it’s clear to me that Facebook would like to emulate that sort of thing,” says Niedermeier.

Among nascent social media platforms that are particularly promising right now, Yildirim says that “social media platforms which are directed at achieving some objectives with smaller scale and more homogenous people stand a higher chance of entering the market and being able to compete with large, general-purpose platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.”

Irreplaceable – and Damaging?

Of course, many have begun to believe that the biggest challenge around the impact of social media may be the way it is changing society. The “attention-grabbing algorithms underlying social media … propel authoritarian practices that aim to sow confusion, ignorance, prejudice, and chaos, thereby facilitating manipulation and undermining accountability,” writes University of Toronto political science professor Ronald Deibert in a January essay in the Journal of Democracy .

Berger notes that any piece of information can now get attention, whether it is true or false. This means more potential for movements both welcome as well as malevolent. “Before, only media companies had reach, so it was harder for false information to spread. It could happen, but it was slow. Now anyone can share anything, and because people tend to believe what they see, false information can spread just as, if not more easily, than the truth.

“It’s certainly allowed more things to bubble up rather than flow from the top down,” says Berger. Absent gatekeepers, “everyone is their own media company, broadcasting to the particular set of people that follow them. It used to be that a major label signing you was the path to stardom. Now artists can build their own following online and break through that way. Social media has certainly made fame and attention more democratic, though not always in a good way.”

Deibert writes that “in a short period of time, digital technologies have become pervasive and deeply embedded in all that we do. Unwinding them completely is neither possible nor desirable.”

His cri de coeur argues: that citizens have the right to know what companies and governments are doing with their personal data, and that this right be extended internationally to hold autocratic regimes to account; that companies be barred from selling products and services that enable infringements on human rights and harms to civil society; for the creation of independent agencies with real power to hold social-media platforms to account; and the creation and enforcement of strong antitrust laws to end dominance of a very few social-media companies.

“Social media has certainly made fame and attention more democratic, though not always in a good way.” –Jonah Berger

The rising tide of concern is now extending across sectors. The U.S. Justice Department has recently begun an anti-trust investigation into how tech companies operate in social media, search, and retail services. In July, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the award of nearly $50 million in new funding to 11 U.S. universities to research how technology is transforming democracy. The foundation is also soliciting additional grant proposals to fund policy and legal research into the “rules, norms, and governance” that should be applied to social media and technology companies.

Given all of the reasons not to engage with social media — the privacy issues, the slippery-slope addiction aspect of it, its role in spreading incivility — do we want to try to put the genie back in the bottle? Can we? Does social media definitely have a future?

“Yes, surely it does,” says Yildirim. “Social connections are fabrics of society. Just as the telegraph or telephone as an innovation of communication did not reduce social connectivity, online social networks did not either. If anything, it likely increased connectivity, or reduced the cost of communicating with others.”

It is thanks to online social networks that individuals likely have larger social networks, she says, and while many criticize the fact that we are in touch with large numbers of individuals in a superficial way, these light connections may nevertheless be contributing to our lives when it comes to economic and social outcomes — ranging from finding jobs to meeting new people.

“We are used to being in contact with more individuals, and it is easier to remain in contact with people we only met once. Giving up on this does not seem likely for humans,” she says. “The technology with which we keep in touch may change, may evolve, but we will have social connections and platforms which enable them. Facebook may be gone in 10 years, but there will be something else.”

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Social Media's Impact on Society

This article was updated on: 11/19/2021

Social media is an undeniable force in modern society. With over half the global population using social platforms, and the average person spending at least two hours scrolling through them every day , it can’t be overstated that our digital spaces have altered our lives as we knew them. From giving us new ways to come together and stay connected with the world around us, to providing outlets for self-expression, social media has fundamentally changed the way we initiate, build and maintain our relationships.

But while these digital communities have become commonplace in our daily lives, researchers are only beginning to understand the consequences of social media use on future generations. Social media models are changing every day, with major platforms like Meta and Instagram evolving into primary digital advertising spaces as much as social ones. A critical responsibility falls on marketers to spread messages that inform, rather than contribute to the sea of misinformation that thrives on social media.

Read on to see what’s on marketers’ minds when it comes to the impact of social media on society:

MENTAL HEALTH

You’ve likely heard about the negative impacts that social media can have on mental health. Experts are weighing in on the role that the algorithms and design of social platforms play in exasperating these concerns.

At SXSW 2019 , Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Human Technology, talked about the “digital loneliness epidemic,” which focused on the rise of depression and loneliness as it relates to social media use. During the panel, Raskin spoke about the “infinite scroll,” the design principle that enables users to continuously scroll through their feeds, without ever having to decide whether to keep going—it’s hard to imagine what the bottom of a TikTok feed would look like, and that’s intentional. But with the knowledge that mental health concerns are undeniably linked to social media use, the dilemma we’re now facing is when does good design become inhumane design?

Arguably, Rankin’s term for social media use could now be renamed the “digital loneliness pandemic ” as the world faces unprecedented isolation during the COVID-19 outbreak. In 2020 the Ad Council released a study exploring factors that cause loneliness, and what can be done to alleviate it. Interestingly, our research found that while social isolation is one factor that can cause loneliness, 73% of respondents typically maintain interpersonal relationships via technology, including engaging with others on social media. Simply put, social media use can both contribute to and help mitigate feelings of isolation. So how do we address this Catch-22? We should ask ourselves how we can use social media as a platform to foster positive digital communities as young adults rely on it more and more to cope with isolation.

Findings like these have been useful as we reexamine the focuses of Ad Council campaigns. In May 2020, our iconic Seize the Awkward campaign launched new creative highlighting ways young people could use digital communications tools to stay connected and check in on one another’s mental health while practicing physical distancing. A year later, we launched another mental health initiative, Sound It Out , which harnesses the power of music to speak to 10-14-year-olds’ emotional wellbeing. Ad Council has seen the importance of spreading awareness around mental health concerns as they relate to social media consumption in young adults—who will become the next generation of marketers.

EXTREMISM & HATE

Another trend on experts’ minds is how the algorithms behind these massively influential social media platforms may contribute to the rise of extremism and online radicalization.

Major social networking sites have faced criticism over how their advanced algorithms can lead users to increasingly fringe content. These platforms are central to discussions around online extremism, as social forums have become spaces for extreme communities to form and build influence digitally. However, these platforms are responding to concerns and troubleshooting functionalities that have the potential to result in dangerous outcomes. Meta, for example, announced test prompts to provide anti-extremism resources and support for users it believes have been exposed to extremist content on their feeds.

But as extremist groups continue to turn to fringe chatrooms and the “dark web” that begin on social media, combing through the underbelly of the internet and stopping the spread of hateful narratives is a daunting task. Promoting public service messages around Racial Justice and Diversity & Inclusion are just some of the ways that Ad Council and other marketers are using these platforms to move the needle away from hateful messaging and use these platforms to change mindsets in a positive way.

PUBLIC HEALTH CRISES

Social media can be both a space to enlighten and spread messages of doubt. The information age we’re all living in has enabled marketers to intervene as educators and providers of informative messaging to all facets of the American public. And no time has this been more urgent than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Public health efforts around mask mandates and vaccine rollouts have now become increasingly polarized issues. Social media platforms have turned into breeding grounds for spreading disinformation around vaccinations, and as a result, has contributed to vaccine hesitancy among the American public. Meta, Instagram, and other platforms have begun to flag certain messages as false, but the work of regulating misinformation, especially during a pandemic, will be an enduring problem. To combat this, Ad Council and the COVID Collaborative have put a particular emphasis on our historic COVID-19 Vaccine Education initiative, which has connected trusted messengers with the “uncommitted” American public who feel the most uncertainty around getting the vaccine.

Living during a global pandemic has only solidified a societal need for social media as a way to stay connected to the world at large. During the pandemic, these platforms have been used to promote hopeful and educational messages, like #AloneTogether , and ensures that social media marketing can act as a public service.

DIGITAL ACTIVISM

Beyond serving as an educational resource, social media has been the space for digital activism across a myriad of social justice issues. Movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have gone viral thanks to the power of social media. What starts as a simple hashtag has resulted in real change, from passing sexual harassment legislation in response to #MeToo, to pushing for criminal justice reform because of BLM activists. In these cases, social media empowered likeminded people to organize around a specific cause in a way not possible before.

It’s impossible to separate the role of social media from the scalable impact that these movements have had on society. #MeToo and BLM are just two examples of movements that have sparked national attention due in large part to conversations that began on social media.

SO, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR MARKETERS?

Social media is a great equalizer that allows for large-scale discourse and an endless, unfiltered stream of content. Looking beyond the repercussions for a generation born on social media, these platforms remain an essential way for marketers to reach their audiences.

Whether you argue there are more benefits or disadvantages to a world run on social media, we can all agree that social media has fundamentally shifted how society communicates. With every scroll, view, like, comment and share, we’re taught something new about the impact of social media on the way we think and see the world.

But until we find a way to hold platforms more accountable for the global consequences of social media use, it’s up to marketers to use these digital resources as engines of progressive messaging. We can’t control the adverse effects of the Internet, but as marketers, we can do our part in ensuring that the right messages are being spread and that social media remains a force for social good.

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Chapter 6: 21st-century media and issues

6.10.2 Social media and communication (research essay)

Lindsey Matier

English 102, April 2021

Communication is extremely important in today’s world, whether it be verbal or nonverbal. It can take place through many different forms such as through writing, speaking, listening and physical actions. These forms of communication evolve and continue to improve over time. As humans, we rely on communication for almost everything and it is a way of life. Communication has evolved from talking to writing letters to texting or talking over the phone. Every time a new form of communication is brought up and becomes more popular, we have to adapt and evolve to that new lifestyle. Throughout all the new forms of communication and ways of evolving, social media has been one of the most influential so far. Social media has allowed us to create new ways of communicating, such as texting or posting through different apps. It can connect us with people all over the world and give us a platform to express ourselves in ways that have not been possible before. While social media started off as a small form of technology, it has morphed into aspects of our everyday life. Now there are apps for everything from social media profiles to online shopping. While social media and technology itself has evolved, this has also affected our communication with each other and the world. Social media has created a fast track for information in a matter of seconds. It can give people a platform with millions of followers overnight for doing practically anything. It can help people express themselves in new ways and connect with people who have similar interests. The end goal of social media is to make people happy and ultimately make lives easier.

Introduction

With all this being said, it is evident that social media is in our everyday lives and will continue to change. It has a very strong grip on society as social media usage continues to rise throughout the years. Generalizing social media, we are exposed to forms of media at almost all times of the day. Answering the question of what media is will help give a better understanding of social media as a whole. Media can be defined as a way of mass communication. This could include siting in the car listening to ads on the radio all the way to scrolling on twitter. We are exposed to social media less often than generalized media, but it tends to come in greater quantities when exposed. For example, for people that wake up and check twitter it is an instant flood of information with every scroll. Everything from politics to sports to celebrity news is available at the fingertips. The concern is not all focused on the overwhelming information, but also the overwhelming number of comments and opinions. If we wanted to debate or talk about something before social media it had to be done in person, face to face. Now with social media, we are able to fight with people in comment sections on a backup account with a different name and no connection to who we really are. This new form of communication takes away the vulnerability of speaking to people and having genuine conversation, and makes up for it in internet trolls. Overall, social media is impacting the way we communicate with each other and the real questions are: Is social media impacting us in a positive or negative way? Do the positive aspects outweigh the negative aspects? Is social media hindering the way we communicate in person with each other? Is their more room for improvement when it comes to dealing with communication in the social media spectrum? How is social media impacting younger generation’s communication versus older generation’s communication? How can we help improve our communication skills on social media and in real life?

Personal Research

Along with the other studies that I found from the sources I chose, I also conducted my own study to determine more accurate and recent data. I asked students mostly within high school and college range questions relating to social media and communication. I tried to get a wide range of data dealing with social media apps, screen time, and overall communication as a result of social media. I expected to see almost all negative responses about social media and communication. I figured that most people would respond saying that it has affected them negatively rather than positively, but the results were different compared to what I expected.

The first questions I asked had to do with social media itself. I asked questions about their most used social media apps, screen time, what age they were allowed to start using social media, and whether or not they think social media has had a negative or positive impact on them. As expected, most of the social media apps were some of the most popular ones like Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. Overall, the average screen time for all apps was evenly split between 4-6 and 6-8 hours, which I also expected. Something that did surprise me was the amount of time spent on certain social media apps. The data was split pretty evenly three ways and all between 1-4 hours. The next two questions dealt with when they group surveyed started using social media. I asked these questions because a lot of the points I want to discuss later in my paper have to deal with age and whether younger generations are suffering when it comes to communication. More than half the people surveyed said that they wished that they had waited to get social media until they were older. Some said that it is not appropriate for younger kids and that it is just toxic in general. Something that I really like that a couple people mentioned was that in reality, social media at a young age is stupid and useless. A lot of people said they wish they would have enjoyed their childhood more and they would be more extroverted now if they had not been exposed that early. The last question of this section that I asked was if they thought social media has had a more positive or negative impact on them. Overall, the data was split but leaning slightly towards the more positive side. The positive answers mostly dealt with being able to talk to stay in contact with people and meeting new friends. The negative answers all related to mental health and feeling bad about themselves. A lot of people said it is toxic and very controlling and takes up too much of our time.

The next set of questions I asked had to do more with communication and interaction with and without social media. I asked questions like how they feel about social media and how it has impacted their communication, their mental health, and if it has made our lives easier. I decided to ask questions like these because I figured I would get a wide range of responses and a lot of people’s different opinions. I started off by asking if people are an introvert or an extrovert to get an idea of what the responses would be like, and 66% said somewhere in between the two. The response for the next question really shocked me because I received such a one-side response. I asked if they think social media has impacted their communication and the way they interact with others and 75% (18/24 people) said yes. This is the information that I was looking for along with the next two questions. The next question asked if they think social media has negatively impacted their mental health and 50% said yes. I also plan on using this as a research question to show that social media can affect our mental health and therefore affect the way we interact with and around other people. The last two questions are similar but the responses were both very good. Almost everyone answered yes to the question asking if social media has made our lives easier. Everyone that answered yes said they think so because it helps them talk to friends, stay in touch with people they do not see as much, and meet new people that they are comfortable talking to. The people that said no also made good points such as it takes over our lives and it is filled with too much hate and cancel culture. I agree with both sides and am very happy that people can feel a positive response especially when it comes to communicating with other people online. The last question I asked was used to wrap up the whole survey and topic. I asked if they think social media has made our generation’s communication improve or worsen. The data was pretty evenly split, and most people gave a positive and a negative. The people that said improve gave that answer because they said it broadens our communication and allows us to talk to people at a wider range. The people who said it has made it worse all said that it is ruining our face-to-face interaction and causing us to lose emotion. They said that some people do not even know how to have a proper in person conversation and that they are too dependent on their phones. Overall, I agree with both arguments that people made but I do think that the positives outweigh the negatives in most of these situations and questions.

Research Questions

The first question I want to ask has to deal with the overall social media and communication connection and has multiple other questions I would like to cover within it. The main question is: Is social media hindering the way we communicate with each other? I also want to touch on questions like: Is social media impacting us in a positive or negative way? Do the positives outweigh the negatives? The second set of research questions I have is: Is their more room for improvement when it comes to dealing with communication in the social media spectrum? How can we help improve our communication skills on social media and in real life? How is social media impacting younger generation’s communication versus older generation’s communication?

Research Question One

Social media and communication have a direct connection to each other and both have a strong impact on the outcome of the other. My first research question has to do with that. My questions center around how social media has impacted our communication, and whether or not it is positive or negative. First, I think it is important to note the changes and different characteristics that come into play when talking about this. Things like age and problems going on in our world can affect our social media usage and communication. While we connect to people on a deeper level when talking to the in person, social media has also given us a newer and more broad way of communicating. The article “How Social Media Affects Our Ability to Communicate” by Stacey Hanke, talks about different ways social media has impacted our communication. Social media has become so relevant in our day to day lives and Hanke describes it in a couple different ways. She describes it as information binging and the fear of missing out, social graces and conversational boredom. Within these, she explains how social media has become an excuse and escape to talk to people face to face. Hanke also talks about how even though it is limiting our in person communication, it can sometimes make communicating in general easier, by being able to talk to each other in just a few words (Hanke 1). In another article by Ryan J. Fuller titled “The Impact of Social Media Use on Our Social Skills”, he discusses similar topics to Hanke’s article but also brings up more positive attributes of social media. Fuller starts of his article by giving some statistics, stating that 75% of teens own cellphones and 25% of them using it for social media, and also says that they use 7.5 hours a day using it (Fuller 1). I am glad that this was brought up because it is important to know how much time is spent on social media, scrolling through feed. Next, Fuller starts to discuss some of the benefits of social media. He briefly explains how social media is beneficial because we are able to stay in touch with our friends and family, and share important parts of our lives with them. He also explains how it helps people reach out to new friends and provide themselves with more opportunities (Fuller 1). Overall, I really like that he mentioned these because it is important to keep in mind the vast majority of social media and communication. While some use it for more simpler purposes likes just keeping up to date with what is going on in the world, others use it to make new friends, find new job opportunities, and stay in touch with people. Another topic I find important when it comes to answering this research question is how Covid affected everything. With the pandemic, we were left inside with nothing to do but what was at our fingertips. This pandemic increased social media usage drastically. The article “Social Media Insights Into US Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Analysis of Twitter Data” by Danny Valdez et al, shows extensive research into determining just how much social media usage in the United States increased during the pandemic. They did experiments and surveys to determine multiple responses to research questions and show how much we rely on social media to communicate with each other. During the pandemic, everyone spent more time on their social media and their phone in general, probably more than they would like to admit. The article helps give more insight into this claim. There is the idea that social media was meant as an addition to our lives. For some people, it has become an addiction and a new piece of their life. The article focuses on how social media could be a toxic place and have a negative effect on our mental health. The time period for this information focuses around the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from Twitter, Valdez created a study to determine the mood of people during the pandemic and the usage throughout (Valdez et al 2). Collecting tweets with certain hashtags and during time periods, the goal was to determine how much the pandemic affected people’s moods, and how much they put out and shared on social media. They used hashtags, timeline data, and tweets from different periods such as the first lockdown, different stay at home orders, etc. Given the responses to the data, they were able to determine the increase in social media usage. We cannot determine if this had a positive or negative effect on the people who were using Twitter, but we can infer that social media is becoming a key part of our lives. Not being able to talk to people as much in person during the first few months of the pandemic greatly affected communication, in positive and negative ways. Communication over the phone increased due to the amount of free time that people had and were able to spend talking to others. Contrary to that, in person communication also decreased given that people were not really allowed to leave the house. The next article by Tayebi et al, “The Role of Information Systems in Communication Through Social Media” focuses a lot about how we have evolved over time with social media and communication. They start off by talking about how social networks are like social media societies. They explain it by resembling it to a human society, as it is filled with people communicating, regardless of time or place. They also exemplify other aspects such as emotional support, information, emotions (Tayebi 2). Social media is constantly looked at through such a negative light due to some of the major bad events that have taken place. While it can be difficult at times to look past the negatives, it is important to recognize and acknowledge the positives. The growth of scientific research would not be possible without the amount of information received from the media (Tayebi 3). Without social media and media in general, we would not be where we are today as a society. As mentioned earlier, it is so easy to get lost in the negative aspects of social media and discard the positive ones. Positive parts of social media such as widespread communication and unlimited access to information makes it all worth it. Staying on topic with positive aspects of social media and communication, social media in the workplace has also broken down barriers for communication. The article “A Guide to the Successful Use of Social Media in the Workplace” by Clark Boyd gives insight into how social media has improved the workplace, and ultimately communication and interaction as a whole. Companies can use social media as a form of branding and way to communicate their products (Boyd 4). Boyd states, “Harvard Business Review finds that 82% of employees believe social media improves work relationships. Left to their own devices, your teams will connect and communicate on social networks, both inside and outside the office.” This directly relates to the research question asking whether social media hinders our communication with each other. Social media also helps when it comes to dealing with complaints placed online. By seeing these through social media, it can help the company communicate either with the person or their company the concerns that are being stated (Boyd 9). Overall, it is safe to say that social media has directly affected communication throughout different aspects of our lives.

Research Question Two

My second set of research questions has a lot to do with the future and how we can improve. Questions such as: Is their more room for improvement when it comes to dealing with communication in the social media spectrum? How can we help improve our communication skills on social media and in real life? How is social media impacting younger generation’s communication versus older generation’s communication? The article “What is Literacy” by James Paul Gee talks a lot about the basics of communication. I find this an important article to talk about before I go into more detail with this second research question. Gee explains discourse as a socially accepted way of speaking, thinking, and acting (Gee 1). It is important to note this because social media has changed that discourse for us. We no longer communicate and interact the same way in which we use to therefore almost giving us a new discourse. Another thing Gee discusses is identity kits. Gee explains identity kits as “appropriate costumes and instructions on how to act and talk” (Gee 2). This relates to social media because there is a certain way we communicate online that we wouldn’t do in person. For example, we use emojis and abbreviations to communicate on social media or over text, but this is something we would not do when communicating face-to-face. There are also some basic well-known rules of social media that follow along the lines of an identity kit. Such as, for Instagram it is a common idea not to like people’s pictures from too long ago. When you say this aloud it sounds like it is not a big deal and silly almost, but for people that use social media it is something that makes sense. The next article is going to focus more on the question that has to do with room for improvement of communication. The article “The Positive Effect of Not Following Others on Social Media” by Francesca Valsesia, Davide Proserpio, and Joseph C. Nunes involves how we deal with social media and how we react to it. The article has a lot to do with pyramid schemes and marketing schemes on social media, simply due to follower count. Social media has a lot of power over us and the content we see. Influencers have too much impact on what we see every day and this overall effects our communication (Valsesia 1). Social media feeds us information at our fingertips, whether it be true or false. Valsesia is trying to get the point across that social media has no impact on our lives without the phone and therefore, having a smaller follower count is better for our communication and overall wellbeing in the first place. Leading into my next article, social media can have a huge impact on the younger generation. This leads into part of my second research question dealing with the younger generation and their communication. The article “The Impact of Social Media on Youth Mental Health: Challenges and Opportunities” by Jacqueline Nesi shows how social media is a very complex brand of information and makes it complicated for everyone. Younger kids having access to it and multiple devices like computers and phones makes it that much more difficult. There are a lot of positives and negatives for younger kids having access to social media and the internet in general. It has an impact on their mental health and studies show it leads to signs of depression, body dysmorphia, eating disorders (Nesi 2). It can also affect their communication and outward identity due to things such as bullying, internet drama, and behavioral problems. While it does have serious negative risks, social media also can bring a lot of new positive ones. Things like creative ideas, humor and entertainment, and being able to explore their identity are all really great positives that social media gives us (Nesi 4). Most of them using it as a way to connect with friends and family and help them feel a sense of acceptance and belonging (Nesi 4). Similarly to this, social media has given a great outlet for kids and young adults to speak out on issues going on in the world. The article “Building Bridges: Exploring the Communication Trends and Perceived Sociopolitical Benefits of Adolescents Engaging in Online Social Justice Efforts” by Mariah Elsa Kornbluh goes into detail about the racial injustices in the world and how they are communicated through social media. Social media networks can help connect kids to different backgrounds and aspects of their lives (Kornbluh 1). Kornbluh expresses how a society only can flourish under civic engagement and being able to express ourselves, and social media is helping us do that. It is helping the younger generation prepare for the civic role that they will undergo (Kornbluh 2). Social media helps play a major role in participating in political movements and bringing awareness to topics (Kornbluh 3). This all is done by the younger generation and would not be possible without them. So, while it is easy to look at the negative parts of social media and how it effects the younger generation, it also brings great awareness to real life problems in our world. This last article I wanted to go over dealing with this research question has to do with the pandemic. The article “Responses to COVID-19 in Higher Education: Social Media Usage for Sustaining Formal Academic Communication in Developing Countries” by Abu Elnasr E. Sobaih, Ahmed M. Hasanein and Ahmed E. Abu Elnasr briefly talks about communication with social media in higher education systems. Education systems had to switch from in person learning and communication to online learning, which was a struggle for everyone. Throughout the time that this took place, results showed that social media had a positive effect on students dealing with this (Sobaih 1). Students used social media to build a community and help support each other through this rough time. Through these results, proper usage of social media can be shown as a positive result for a new era of learning (Sobaih 1). This is just one more reason why social media can help us improve our future.

After answering my research questions, it has become clear to me that while social media does have negative aspects, the positive aspects outweigh them. Between the articles and my own research, I have enough evidence to prove that social media does effect communication, but in a more positive way. The way we act and present ourselves is heavily influenced by social media and communication between generations are different and can be seen that way. It is important to note the accomplishments we have made as a society with social media and the media in general. It has helped connect families, provide support groups, and provide entertainment in desperate times. Our communication has changed because of social media but has changed and helped us for the better in the long run. Keeping social media a positive place and staying away from the toxic people on it will only help us grow and learn new things about ourselves.

Works Cited

Boyd, Clark. “A Guide to Using Social Media in the Workplace in 2021.” The Blueprint , The Blueprint, 13 May 2020, www.fool.com/the-blueprint/social-media-in-the-workplace/.

https://www.fool.com/the-blueprint/social-media-in-the-workplace/

D, Valdez, et al. “Social Media Insights Into US Mental Health During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Analysis of Twitter Data.” Journal of Medical Internet Research , vol. 22, no. 12, 14 Dec. 2020, pp. 1438–8871.

http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu:2050/eds/detail/detail? vid=8&sid=ff59b04c-b868-44cd-b864-4538e112a2ea%40sessionmgr103&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#AN=33284783&db=mnh

J, Nesi. “The Impact of Social Media on Youth Health: Challenges and Opportunities.” North Carolina Medical Journal , vol. 81, no. 2, 2020, pp. 116–121.

http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu:2050/eds/detail/detail?vid=10&sid=ff59b04c-b868-44cd-b864-4538e112a2ea%40sessionmgr103&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#AN=32132255&db=mnh

Gee, James Paul. “What is literacy.” Negotiating academic literacies: Teaching and learning across languages and cultures (1998): 51-59.

https://academic.jamespaulgee.com/pdfs/Gee%20What%20is%20Literacy.pdf

Hanke, Stacey. “How Social Media Affects Our Ability to Communicate.” Thrive Global , 13 Sept. 2018, thriveglobal.com/stories/how-social-media-affects-our-ability-to-communicate/.

https://thriveglobal.com/stories/how-social-media-affects-our-ability-to-communicate/

http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu:2050/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&sid=467b825c-34f8-4e47-95df-e5b2b61bbaf4%40sessionmgr4006

Kornbluh, Mariah Elsa. “Building Bridges.” Youth & Society , vol. 51, no. 8, 2017, pp. 1104–1126., doi:10.1177/0044118×17723656.

https://journals-sagepub-com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/0044118X17723656

Retchin, Sarah, et al. “The Impact of Social Media Use on Social Skills.” New York Behavioral Health , 1 Dec. 2020, newyorkbehavioralhealth.com/the-impact-of-social-media-use-on-social-skills/.

https://newyorkbehavioralhealth.com/the-impact-of-social-media-use-on-social-skills/

Sobaih, Abu Elnasr E., et al. “Responses to COVID-19 in Higher Education: Social Media Usage for Sustaining Formal Academic Communication in Developing Countries.” MDPI , Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 12 Aug. 2020, www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6520/htm.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6520/htm

Tayeb, Seyed Mohammad, et al. “The Role of Information Systems in Communication through Social Media.” International Journal of Data and Network Science , vol. 3, no. 3, 2019, pp. 245–268., doi:10.5267/j.ijdns.2019.2.002.

http://www.growingscience.com/ijds/Vol3/ijdns_2019_15.pdf

Valsesia, Francesca, et al. “The Positive Effect of Not Following Others on Social Media .” Journal of Marketing Research , vol. 57, no. 6, Dec. 2020, pp. 1152–1168.

https://www.francescavalsesia.com/uploads/1/0/5/1/105151509/the_positive_effect_of_not_following_others_on_social_media.pdf

Understanding Literacy in Our Lives by Lindsey Matier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Why social media has changed the world — and how to fix it

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Sinan Aral and his new book The Hype Machine

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Are you on social media a lot? When is the last time you checked Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram? Last night? Before breakfast? Five minutes ago?

If so, you are not alone — which is the point, of course. Humans are highly social creatures. Our brains have become wired to process social information, and we usually feel better when we are connected. Social media taps into this tendency.

“Human brains have essentially evolved because of sociality more than any other thing,” says Sinan Aral, an MIT professor and expert in information technology and marketing. “When you develop a population-scale technology that delivers social signals to the tune of trillions per day in real-time, the rise of social media isn’t unexpected. It’s like tossing a lit match into a pool of gasoline.”

The numbers make this clear. In 2005, about 7 percent of American adults used social media. But by 2017, 80 percent of American adults used Facebook alone. About 3.5 billion people on the planet, out of 7.7 billion, are active social media participants. Globally, during a typical day, people post 500 million tweets, share over 10 billion pieces of Facebook content, and watch over a billion hours of YouTube video.

As social media platforms have grown, though, the once-prevalent, gauzy utopian vision of online community has disappeared. Along with the benefits of easy connectivity and increased information, social media has also become a vehicle for disinformation and political attacks from beyond sovereign borders.

“Social media disrupts our elections, our economy, and our health,” says Aral, who is the David Austin Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Now Aral has written a book about it. In “The Hype Machine,” published this month by Currency, a Random House imprint, Aral details why social media platforms have become so successful yet so problematic, and suggests ways to improve them.

As Aral notes, the book covers some of the same territory as “The Social Dilemma,” a documentary that is one of the most popular films on Netflix at the moment. But Aral’s book, as he puts it, "starts where ‘The Social Dilemma’ leaves off and goes one step further to ask: What can we do about it?”

“This machine exists in every facet of our lives,” Aral says. “And the question in the book is, what do we do? How do we achieve the promise of this machine and avoid the peril? We’re at a crossroads. What we do next is essential, so I want to equip people, policymakers, and platforms to help us achieve the good outcomes and avoid the bad outcomes.”

When “engagement” equals anger

“The Hype Machine” draws on Aral’s own research about social networks, as well as other findings, from the cognitive sciences, computer science, business, politics, and more. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, for instance, have found that people obtain bigger hits of dopamine — the chemical in our brains highly bound up with motivation and reward — when their social media posts receive more likes.

At the same time, consider a 2018 MIT study by Soroush Vosoughi, an MIT PhD student and now an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth College; Deb Roy, MIT professor of media arts and sciences and executive director of the MIT Media Lab; and Aral, who has been studying social networking for 20 years. The three researchers found that on Twitter, from 2006 to 2017, false news stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true ones. Why? Most likely because false news has greater novelty value compared to the truth, and provokes stronger reactions — especially disgust and surprise.

In this light, the essential tension surrounding social media companies is that their platforms gain audiences and revenue when posts provoke strong emotional responses, often based on dubious content.

“This is a well-designed, well-thought-out machine that has objectives it maximizes,” Aral says. “The business models that run the social-media industrial complex have a lot to do with the outcomes we’re seeing — it’s an attention economy, and businesses want you engaged. How do they get engagement? Well, they give you little dopamine hits, and … get you riled up. That’s why I call it the hype machine. We know strong emotions get us engaged, so [that favors] anger and salacious content.”

From Russia to marketing

“The Hype Machine” explores both the political implications and business dimensions of social media in depth. Certainly social media is fertile terrain for misinformation campaigns. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russia spread false information to at least 126 million people on Facebook and another 20 million people on Instagram (which Facebook owns), and was responsible for 10 million tweets. About 44 percent of adult Americans visited a false news source in the final weeks of the campaign.

“I think we need to be a lot more vigilant than we are,” says Aral.

We do not know if Russia’s efforts altered the outcome of the 2016 election, Aral says, though they may have been fairly effective. Curiously, it is not clear if the same is true of most U.S. corporate engagement efforts.

As Aral examines, digital advertising on most big U.S. online platforms is often wildly ineffective, with academic studies showing that the “lift” generated by ad campaigns — the extent to which they affect consumer action — has been overstated by a factor of hundreds, in some cases. Simply counting clicks on ads is not enough. Instead, online engagement tends to be more effective among new consumers, and when it is targeted well; in that sense, there is a parallel between good marketing and guerilla social media campaigns.

“The two questions I get asked the most these days,” Aral says, “are, one, did Russia succeed in intervening in our democracy? And two, how do I measure the ROI [return on investment] from marketing investments? As I was writing this book, I realized the answer to those two questions is the same.”

Ideas for improvement

“The Hype Machine” has received praise from many commentators. Foster Provost, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, says it is a “masterful integration of science, business, law, and policy.” Duncan Watts, a university professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says the book is “essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got here and how we can get somewhere better.”

In that vein, “The Hype Machine” has several detailed suggestions for improving social media. Aral favors automated and user-generated labeling of false news, and limiting revenue-collection that is based on false content. He also calls for firms to help scholars better research the issue of election interference.

Aral believes federal privacy measures could be useful, if we learn from the benefits and missteps of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and a new California law that lets consumers stop some data-sharing and allows people to find out what information companies have stored about them. He does not endorse breaking up Facebook, and suggests instead that the social media economy needs structural reform. He calls for data portability and interoperability, so “consumers would own their identities and could freely switch from one network to another.” Aral believes that without such fundamental changes, new platforms will simply replace the old ones, propelled by the network effects that drive the social-media economy.

“I do not advocate any one silver bullet,” says Aral, who emphasizes that changes in four areas together — money, code, norms, and laws — can alter the trajectory of the social media industry.

But if things continue without change, Aral adds, Facebook and the other social media giants risk substantial civic backlash and user burnout.

“If you get me angry and riled up, I might click more in the short term, but I might also grow really tired and annoyed by how this is making my life miserable, and I might turn you off entirely,” Aral observes. “I mean, that’s why we have a Delete Facebook movement, that’s why we have a Stop Hate for Profit movement. People are pushing back against the short-term vision, and I think we need to embrace this longer-term vision of a healthier communications ecosystem.”

Changing the social media giants can seem like a tall order. Still, Aral says, these firms are not necessarily destined for domination.

“I don’t think this technology or any other technology has some deterministic endpoint,” Aral says. “I want to bring us back to a more practical reality, which is that technology is what we make it, and we are abdicating our responsibility to steer technology toward good and away from bad. That is the path I try to illuminate in this book.”

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Press mentions.

Prof. Sinan Aral’s new book, “The Hype Machine,” has been selected as one of the best books of the year about AI by Wired . Gilad Edelman notes that Aral’s book is “an engagingly written shortcut to expertise on what the likes of Facebook and Twitter are doing to our brains and our society.”

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Danny Crichton of TechCrunch about his new book, “The Hype Machine,” which explores the future of social media. Aral notes that he believes a starting point “for solving the social media crisis is creating competition in the social media economy.”

New York Times

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with New York Times editorial board member Greg Bensinger about how social media platforms can reduce the spread of misinformation. “Human-in-the-loop moderation is the right solution,” says Aral. “It’s not a simple silver bullet, but it would give accountability where these companies have in the past blamed software.”

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Kara Miller of GBH’s Innovation Hub about his research examining the impact of social media on everything from business re-openings during the Covid-19 pandemic to politics.

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with NPR’s Michael Martin about his new book, “The Hype Machine,” which explores the benefits and downfalls posed by social media. “I've been researching social media for 20 years. I've seen its evolution and also the techno utopianism and dystopianism,” says Aral. “I thought it was appropriate to have a book that asks, 'what can we do to really fix the social media morass we find ourselves in?'”

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The catch to putting warning labels on fake news

“When people are consuming news on social media, their inclination to share that news with others interferes with their ability to assess its accuracy, according to a new study co-authored by MIT researchers.”

Our itch to share helps spread Covid-19 misinformation

MIT Professor Regina Barzilay (left) and CSAIL PhD student Tal Schuster are studying detectors of machine-generated text.

Better fact-checking for fake news

Pictured (left to right): Seated, Soroush Vosoughi, a postdoc at the Media Lab's Laboratory for Social Machines; Sinan Aral, the David Austin Professor of Management at MIT Sloan; and Deb Roy, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab, who also served as Twitter's Chief Media Scientist from 2013 to 2017.

Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories

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Lydia Brosnahan and an unidentified man stand in front of a window; the man is wearing a virtual reality headset.

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Social Media Essay: A Full Guide

In an era where a single tweet can spark a global conversation and an Instagram post can redefine trends, it's fascinating to note that the average person spends approximately 2 hours and 31 minutes per day on social media platforms. That's more than 900 hours a year devoted to scrolling, liking, and sharing in the vast digital landscape. As we find ourselves deeply intertwined in the fabric of online communities, the significance of understanding and articulating the dynamics of social media through the written word, particularly in an essay on social media, becomes increasingly apparent. So, why embark on the journey of crafting an essay on this ubiquitous aspect of modern life? Join us as we unravel the layers of social media's impact, explore its nuances, and discover the art of conveying these insights through the written form.

Short Description

In this article, we'll explore how to write an essay on social media and the purpose behind these narratives while also delving into a myriad of engaging topics. From the heartbeat of online connections to the rhythm of effective storytelling, we'll guide you organically through the process, sharing insights on structure, approach, and the creative essence that makes each essay unique. And if you're seeking assistance, pondering - ' I wish I could find someone to write my essay ,' we'll also furnish example essays to empower you to tackle such tasks independently.

Why Write a Social Media Essay

In a world buzzing with hashtags, filters, and the constant hum of notifications, the idea of sitting down to craft an essay about social media might seem as out of place as a cassette tape in a streaming era. Yet, there's something oddly therapeutic, almost rebellious, about pausing in the midst of 280-character wisdom to delve deeper into the why behind our digital existence.

So, what is social media essay, and what's the purpose of writing it? Well, it's more than just an exercise in intellectual curiosity. It's a personal journey, a reflective pause in the ceaseless scroll. While writing the essay, we gain the power to articulate the intangible, to breathe life into the pixels that dance across our screens. It's an opportunity to make sense of the chaos, to find meaning in the memes, and perhaps, in the process, to uncover a bit more about ourselves in this digital wilderness.

Let's face it - our online lives are a fast-paced carousel of memes, viral challenges, and carefully curated selfies. So, why bother wrestling with words and paragraphs in a world where brevity is king? The answer lies in the art of unraveling the digital tapestry that envelops us.

There's a magic in articulating the dance between the profound and the mundane that occurs within the confines of our screens. An essay becomes a lens, focusing our attention on the subtleties of social media dynamics – the inside jokes that become global phenomena, the ripple effect of a well-timed retweet, and the silent conversations unfolding in the comment sections.

6 Key Tips for Crafting a Social Media Essay

Now that we've set sail into the realm of essays on the digital landscape, it's only fair to equip ourselves with a few trusty tools for the journey. Think of these tips as your compass, helping you navigate the sometimes choppy, often unpredictable waters of crafting an essay on social media.

Embrace Your Authentic Voice: Just like your favorite Instagram filter can't hide the real you, your essay should reflect your genuine thoughts and feelings. Don't be afraid to let your unique voice shine through – whether it's witty, contemplative, or a delightful blend of both.
Dive into the Details: Social media isn't just about the grand gestures; it's the small, often unnoticed details that weave the most compelling narratives. Explore the minutiae of your online experiences – the peculiar hashtags, the quirky bios, and the unexpected connections that leave a lasting imprint.
Craft Your Hashtag Haiku: Much like poetry, brevity can be your ally in social media essays. Think of hashtags as haikus – succinct, impactful, and capable of conveying a universe of meaning in just a few characters. Choose them wisely.
Engage with the Comments Section: The comments section is the lively pub where digital conversations unfold. Dive in, clink glasses, and engage with the diverse perspectives swirling around. It's in these interactions that the real magic happens – where ideas collide, evolve, and sometimes, transform.
Navigate the Memescape: Memes are the folklore of the digital age, carrying tales of humor, irony, and cultural resonance. Don't shy away from exploring the memescape in your essay. Unravel the layers, decipher the symbolism, and appreciate the humor that often holds up a mirror to society.
Be Mindful of the Clickbait Pitfalls: While clickbait might be the flashy neon sign on the digital highway, it's essential to tread carefully. Ensure your essay isn't just a sensational headline but a thoughtful exploration that goes beyond the surface.

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Social Media Essay Structure

In the age of viral tweets and digital conversations, tackling the essay format is more than just stringing words together—it's about creating a roadmap. As we navigate this landscape of likes and retweets, understanding the structural foundations becomes key. So, let's cut through the noise and explore the practical aspects of how to write a social media essay that mirrors the rhythm of our online experiences.

Form an Outline

Now that we've acknowledged the importance of structure in your essay, the next step is to build a solid roadmap. Think of it like planning a road trip; you wouldn't hit the highway without a map or GPS, right? Similarly, creating an outline for your essay gives you a clear direction and ensures your thoughts flow smoothly.

So, whether you decide to order an essay online or tackle it yourself, here's a simple way to go about it:

Introduction (Where You Start):

Briefly introduce the topic.
State your social media essay thesis or main idea.
Example: 'Let's begin by introducing the impact of social media on modern communication, focusing on its role in shaping opinions and fostering connections.'

Body Paragraphs (The Journey):

Each paragraph should cover a specific social media essay argument and point.
Use examples or evidence to support your ideas.
Example: 'The first aspect we'll explore is how social media amplifies voices. For instance, hashtags like #ClimateAction mobilize a global audience around environmental issues.'

Transitions (Smooth Turns):

Guide your readers from one point to the next.
Ensure a logical flow between paragraphs.
Example: 'Having discussed the amplification of voices, let's now shift our focus to the influence of social media in spreading information.'

Counter Arguments (Addressing Detours):

Acknowledge different perspectives.
Counter Arguments with evidence or reasoning.
Example: 'While social media can be a powerful tool for connectivity, critics argue that it also contributes to the spread of misinformation. Let's explore this counterargument and analyze its validity.'

Conclusion (The Destination):

Summarize your main points.
Restate your thesis and leave a lasting impression.
Example: 'In conclusion, social media serves as both a bridge and a battleground of ideas. Understanding its nuances is crucial in navigating this digital landscape.'

Creating an outline for your essay not only streamlines the writing process but also ensures your readers embark on a clear and organized journey through your insights on social media. If you're exploring more options, you might even want to buy thesis for more convenience.

Make a Social Media Essay Introduction

Begin your introduction by presenting a concise overview of the key theme or topic you're addressing. Clearly state the main purpose or argument of your essay, giving readers a roadmap for what to expect. Integrate social media essay hooks like a relevant statistic, quote, or provocative question to capture attention.

For instance, if your essay is about the impact of social media on personal relationships, you might start by mentioning a statistic on the percentage of couples who met online.

Social Media Essay Body Paragraph

Structure each social media essay body paragraph around a specific aspect of your chosen topic. Start with a clear topic sentence that encapsulates the main idea of the paragraph. Provide concrete examples, data, or case studies to support your points and strengthen your argument. Maintain a logical flow between paragraphs by using effective transitions.

If your essay focuses on the positive effects of social media on business marketing, dedicate a paragraph to showcasing successful campaigns and how they leveraged different platforms.

Social Media Essay Conclusion

In your conclusion, succinctly recap the main points discussed in the body paragraphs. Reinforce your thesis statement and emphasize its broader implications. Rather than introducing new information, use the conclusion to leave a lasting impression on your readers. Consider prompting further thought or suggesting practical applications of your findings.

For instance, if your essay examined the impact of social media on political discourse, conclude by encouraging readers to critically evaluate the information they encounter online and actively engage in constructive conversations.

Proofread and Revise

In the process of writing social media essay, proofreading and revising are indispensable steps that can significantly enhance the overall quality of your work. Begin by meticulously checking for grammatical errors, ensuring that your sentences are clear and concise. Pay attention to the flow of your ideas, confirming that each paragraph seamlessly transitions into the next.

During the proofreading phase, keep an eye out for any inconsistencies in tone or style. This is an opportunity to refine your language and ensure that it aligns with the intended voice of your essay. Look for repetitive phrases or unnecessary words that might detract from the clarity of your message.

As you revise, consider the effectiveness of your hook. Does it still resonate as strongly as you intended? Can it be tweaked to better captivate your audience? A compelling hook sets the tone for your entire essay, so invest time in perfecting this crucial element.

Furthermore, don't hesitate to seek feedback from peers or mentors. Another perspective can provide valuable insights into areas that may need improvement. Fresh eyes often catch nuances that the writer might overlook. Alternatively, you might also explore the option to buy coursework for additional support.

Social Media Essay Topics

In the vast realm of social media, where every like and share contributes to the digital narrative, choosing the right essay topic becomes a crucial compass for exploration. Let's explore thought-provoking topics that not only capture attention but also invite insightful discussions on the intricacies of our interconnected world.

Impact on Society:

The Role of Social Media in Redefining Friendship and Social Bonds
How Has TikTok Influenced Global Pop Culture Trends?
The Impact of Social Media on Political Polarization
Social Media and Mental Health: Exploring the Connection
The Evolution of Language on Social Media Platforms
Examining the Influence of Social Media on Body Image
Fake News and Its Proliferation on Social Media
Social Media and the Rise of Influencer Marketing
The Intersection of Social Media and Dating Apps
Has Social Media Narrowed or Expanded Cultural Perspectives?
The Role of Social Media in Fostering Global Communities
The Influence of Social Media on Consumer Behavior
Analyzing the Impact of Social Media on News Consumption
The Rise of 'Cancel Culture' on Social Media Platforms
Social Media and Its Role in Spreading Disinformation
The Impact of Social Media on Language and Communication Skills
Social Media and its Influence on Political Movements
The Relationship Between Social Media Use and Sleep Patterns
Social Media and the Accessibility of Educational Resources
The Cultural Significance of Memes on Social Media

Individual and Identity:

The Impact of Social Media Addiction on Personal Relationships and Intimacy
Self-Expression and Authenticity on Social Networking Sites
Social Media and Its Influence on Teenage Identity Formation
The Role of Social Media in Shaping Beauty Standards
Navigating Online Dating and Relationships in the Social Media Age
The Impact of Social Media on Parenting Styles
Social Media and Its Influence on Body Positivity Movements
The Perception of Success: Social Media's Role in Achievement Culture
Social Media and the Construction of Online Persona vs. Real Self
Social Media and Its Influence on Lifestyle Choices
The Role of Social Media in Shaping Career Aspirations
The Intersection of Mental Health Narratives and Social Media
The Impact of Social Media on Self-Esteem and Well-Being
How Social Media Influences Gender Identity and Expression
Exploring the Concept of Digital Detox in the Social Media Era
The Role of Social Media in Shaping Cultural Identity
The Connection Between Social Media and Impulse Buying
Social Media and Its Influence on Dietary Choices
Balancing Privacy and Self-Disclosure on Social Media
The Impact of Social Media on Friendships Over Time

Digital Activism and Advocacy:

The Effectiveness of Hashtag Movements in Promoting Social Change
Social Media and Its Role in Amplifying Underrepresented Voices
The Impact of Social Media on Global Environmental Activism
Online Activism: The Evolution from Clicktivism to Concrete Action
The Role of Social Media in Advancing LGBTQ+ Rights
Social Media and Its Impact on Anti-Racism Movements
Analyzing the Challenges of Digital Advocacy in Authoritarian Regimes
Social Media and the Global Fight Against Cyberbullying
The Intersection of Social Media and Mental Health Advocacy
Examining the Role of Social Media in Humanitarian Campaigns
Crowdsourcing for Change: How Social Media Fuels Fundraising
The Challenges of Digital Activism in the Age of Information Overload
Social Media and Its Impact on Disability Advocacy
The Role of Social Media in Combating Gender-Based Violence
Online Petitions and Their Influence on Policy Change
Exploring the Intersection of Social Media and Animal Rights Activism
The Impact of Social Media on Indigenous Rights Advocacy
Digital Advocacy and Its Role in Healthcare Reform
Social Media's Influence on Youth Activism
Navigating Challenges in Allyship on Social Media Platforms

Privacy and Ethics:

The Implications of Facial Recognition Technology on Social Media
Social Media Platforms and the Ethics of User Data Collection
The Role of Social Media in Combating Deepfakes
Balancing Freedom of Speech and Moderation on Social Media
Social Media and the Challenges of Regulating Disinformation
Ethical Considerations in Targeted Advertising on Social Media
The Impact of Social Media Algorithms on User Behavior
Social Media and the Right to Privacy: Where to Draw the Line?
The Influence of Social Media on Political Manipulation and Propaganda
Data Security Concerns in the Era of Social Media
The Ethics of Social Media Influencer Marketing
Social Media and Its Role in Combating Cyberbullying
The Impact of Social Media on Juror Bias in Legal Cases
Exploring the Ethics of Incorporating Social Media Usage in Hiring Decisions by Employers
Social Media and Its Role in Combating Hate Speech
Balancing Personalization with Privacy in Social Media Websites
The Influence of Social Media on Public Perceptions of Law Enforcement
Social Media and the Challenges of Content Moderation
Addressing Online Harassment: Ethical Considerations for Platforms
The Responsibility of Social Media Platforms in Protecting User Privacy

Future Trends and Innovations:

The Future of Social Media: Emerging Platforms and Trends
The Role of Augmented Reality (AR) in Shaping the Future of Social Media
Virtual Reality (VR) and Its Potential Impact on Social Media Engagement
The Rise of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) and Social Media
Social Media and the Evolution of Live Streaming Culture
The Impact of Voice Search and Voice Assistants on Social Media
Social Commerce: The Future of E-Commerce Through Social Media
Exploring the Influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Social Media
The Role of Blockchain Technology in Enhancing Social Media Security
Social Media and the Integration of Virtual Influencers
The Future of Social Media Content: Short-Form vs. Long-Form
The Influence of User-Generated Content on Future Social Media Trends
Social Media and the Adoption of 5G Technology
The Potential of Gamification in Shaping Social Media Engagement
The Impact of Social Media on the Future of Work and Remote Collaboration
Exploring the Relationship Between Social Media and Mental Health Apps
The Influence of User Privacy Concerns on Future Social Media Developments
Social Media and the Role of Ephemeral Content in Communication
The Intersection of Social Media and Virtual Events
Predicting the Next Wave of Social Media Influencer Trends

If these topics piqued your interest, you'll likely find persuasive essay topics equally fascinating! Dive into our article for a variety of options that might just spark your curiosity and inspire your next writing venture.

Social Media Essay Example

Crafting a standout essay isn't just about the words; it's about weaving a narrative that grabs your reader's attention. Before we say our goodbyes, why not take a peek at our sample essays? Our seasoned writers poured their expertise into creating persuasive pieces, offering you insights into both how to write an essay on social media and the kind of polished language that can elevate your own writing.

Wrapping Up

As our college essay service experts conclude this article, we've journeyed through the emotional complexities, societal reflections, and transformative potentials embedded in our digital narratives. An essay on social media is a portal into the intricate dance of our online lives, urging introspection, empathy, and an awareness of diverse stories. Let your essays authentically reflect, sparking conversations that enrich our collective experience in this ever-evolving digital realm.

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Essay on Social Media

Here we have shared the Essay on Social Media in detail so you can use it in your exam or assignment of 150, 250, 400, 500, or 1000 words.

You can use this Essay on Social Media in any assignment or project whether you are in school (class 10th or 12th), college, or preparing for answer writing in competitive exams.

Topics covered in this article.

Essay on Social Media in 150 words

Essay on social media in 200-300 words, essay on social media in 500-1000 words.

Social media has revolutionized communication and connectivity, allowing individuals to share content, connect with others, and participate in virtual communities. While it brings opportunities for instant communication and global connectivity, it also presents challenges. Issues like cyberbullying, privacy concerns, and the spread of misinformation are prevalent. However, responsible use of social media can lead to positive outcomes. It has played a significant role in raising awareness, mobilizing communities, and giving a voice to marginalized groups. Social media can be a platform for positive change and social justice. It is crucial for users to be mindful of their online actions, promote responsible use, and strive for meaningful connections. Social media has transformed the way we communicate, and its impact on society will continue to evolve as we navigate the digital age.

Social media has revolutionized the way we connect, communicate, and share information. It refers to online platforms and applications that enable users to create and share content, interact with others, and participate in virtual communities. Social media has become an integral part of our daily lives, shaping our relationships, and lifestyles, and even influencing social and political landscapes.

The advent of social media has facilitated instant communication and global connectivity. It has bridged geographical barriers, allowing individuals to connect with others from different parts of the world. Social media platforms have also provided a platform for individuals to express their opinions, share experiences, and raise awareness about various issues.

However, social media also comes with its challenges. It has been associated with issues such as cyberbullying, online harassment, privacy concerns, and the spread of misinformation. The addictive nature of social media can also negatively impact mental health and well-being.

Nonetheless, when used responsibly, social media can be a powerful tool for positive change. It has played a pivotal role in raising awareness about social causes, mobilizing communities, and facilitating meaningful conversations. Social media has empowered individuals and marginalized groups to have a voice, amplifying their perspectives and advocating for social justice.

In conclusion, social media has transformed the way we interact and communicate in the digital age. While it has its drawbacks, it also presents opportunities for connection, engagement, and advocacy. It is essential for users to be mindful of the impact of their online actions and strive for responsible use of social media platforms to foster meaningful connections, spread positivity, and promote social change.

Title: The Impact of Social Media – Connecting the World, Shaping Society

Introduction:

Social media has become an integral part of our lives, transforming the way we communicate, share information, and engage with the world. This essay explores the impact of social media on society, examining its advantages, challenges, and implications for individuals and communities. It delves into the ways social media has revolutionized communication, bridged geographical barriers, and facilitated the spread of information. Additionally, it discusses the challenges posed by social media, including privacy concerns, cyberbullying, and the proliferation of misinformation. Ultimately, social media has the potential to shape society, empower individuals, and foster social change.

Communication and Connectivity

Social media platforms have revolutionized communication, offering instant connectivity to individuals across the globe. It allows people to stay connected with friends, family, and acquaintances regardless of geographical distances. Social media provides a platform for real-time interaction, enabling individuals to share thoughts, ideas, and experiences in a seamless manner. It facilitates networking, allowing professionals to connect with colleagues, mentors, and industry experts, fostering collaboration and innovation.

Information Sharing and Awareness

Social media platforms serve as hubs of information, allowing users to access news, trends, and developments from around the world. It has democratized the spread of information, enabling individuals to share news, opinions, and insights. Social media has played a significant role in raising awareness about social causes, promoting activism, and mobilizing communities. Hashtags and viral campaigns have led to collective action, creating movements for social change.

Digital Communities and Identity

Social media platforms have given rise to digital communities, where individuals with shared interests, values, or experiences can connect and interact. These communities provide a sense of belonging and facilitate the exchange of knowledge and ideas. Social media has also contributed to the formation and expression of individual identities. Users can curate their profiles, express their passions and beliefs, and connect with like-minded individuals, fostering a sense of self-expression and empowerment.

Challenges and Concerns

Social media is not without its challenges. Privacy concerns arise as personal information becomes more accessible, raising questions about data security and online surveillance. Cyberbullying and online harassment have become prevalent issues, with harmful effects on individuals’ mental health and well-being. The spread of misinformation and fake news poses a significant challenge, as false information can quickly gain traction, leading to confusion and mistrust.

Influence on Society

Social media has a profound influence on society, shaping public opinion, consumer behavior, and even political landscapes. It has democratized the dissemination of information, allowing individuals to challenge established narratives and amplify marginalized voices. Social media provides a platform for public discourse, enabling individuals to participate in discussions on social, political, and environmental issues. Activism and advocacy have been facilitated through social media, leading to mobilization and social change.

The Power of Influence and Responsiveness

Social media platforms have become influential channels for businesses, celebrities, and public figures to connect with their audiences and shape public opinion. It has transformed marketing and advertising, allowing for targeted campaigns and personalized content. However, with this power comes the responsibility to use social media ethically and responsibly. Users and influencers must be aware of the impact their words and actions have on others, considering the potential consequences.

Social media has transformed the way we communicate, share information, and engage with the world. It has revolutionized communication and connectivity, bridging geographical distances and enabling real-time interaction. Social media has facilitated the spread of information and raised awareness about social causes. However, it also presents challenges, including privacy concerns, cyberbullying, and the spread of misinformation. The influence of social media on society is undeniable, shaping public opinion and fostering social change. To harness the positive potential of social media, users must be responsible, mindful of their impact, and promote ethical use. By leveraging the power of social media, we can create a more connected, informed, and inclusive society.

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Social Media and Mental Health: Benefits, Risks, and Opportunities for Research and Practice

John a. naslund.

a Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA

Ameya Bondre

b CareNX Innovations, Mumbai, India

John Torous

c Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA

Kelly A. Aschbrenner

d Department of Psychiatry, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Lebanon, NH

Social media platforms are popular venues for sharing personal experiences, seeking information, and offering peer-to-peer support among individuals living with mental illness. With significant shortfalls in the availability, quality, and reach of evidence-based mental health services across the United States and globally, social media platforms may afford new opportunities to bridge this gap. However, caution is warranted, as numerous studies highlight risks of social media use for mental health. In this commentary, we consider the role of social media as a potentially viable intervention platform for offering support to persons with mental disorders, promoting engagement and retention in care, and enhancing existing mental health services. Specifically, we summarize current research on the use of social media among mental health service users, and early efforts using social media for the delivery of evidence-based programs. We also review the risks, potential harms, and necessary safety precautions with using social media for mental health. To conclude, we explore opportunities using data science and machine learning, for example by leveraging social media for detecting mental disorders and developing predictive models aimed at characterizing the aetiology and progression of mental disorders. These various efforts using social media, as summarized in this commentary, hold promise for improving the lives of individuals living with mental disorders.

Social media has become a prominent fixture in the lives of many individuals facing the challenges of mental illness. Social media refers broadly to web and mobile platforms that allow individuals to connect with others within a virtual network (such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, or LinkedIn), where they can share, co-create, or exchange various forms of digital content, including information, messages, photos, or videos ( Ahmed, Ahmad, Ahmad, & Zakaria, 2019 ). Studies have reported that individuals living with a range of mental disorders, including depression, psychotic disorders, or other severe mental illnesses, use social media platforms at comparable rates as the general population, with use ranging from about 70% among middle-age and older individuals, to upwards of 97% among younger individuals ( Aschbrenner, Naslund, Grinley, et al., 2018 ; M. L. Birnbaum, Rizvi, Correll, Kane, & Confino, 2017 ; Brunette et al., 2019 ; Naslund, Aschbrenner, & Bartels, 2016 ). Other exploratory studies have found that many of these individuals with mental illness appear to turn to social media to share their personal experiences, seek information about their mental health and treatment options, and give and receive support from others facing similar mental health challenges ( Bucci, Schwannauer, & Berry, 2019 ; Naslund, Aschbrenner, Marsch, & Bartels, 2016b ).

Across the United States and globally, very few people living with mental illness have access to adequate mental health services ( Patel et al., 2018 ). The wide reach and near ubiquitous use of social media platforms may afford novel opportunities to address these shortfalls in existing mental health care, by enhancing the quality, availability, and reach of services. Recent studies have explored patterns of social media use, impact of social media use on mental health and wellbeing, and the potential to leverage the popularity and interactive features of social media to enhance the delivery of interventions. However, there remains uncertainty regarding the risks and potential harms of social media for mental health ( Orben & Przybylski, 2019 ), and how best to weigh these concerns against potential benefits.

In this commentary, we summarized current research on the use of social media among individuals with mental illness, with consideration of the impact of social media on mental wellbeing, as well as early efforts using social media for delivery of evidence-based programs for addressing mental health problems. We searched for recent peer reviewed publications in Medline and Google Scholar using the search terms “mental health” or “mental illness” and “social media”, and searched the reference lists of recent reviews and other relevant studies. We reviewed the risks, potential harms, and necessary safety precautions with using social media for mental health. Overall, our goal was to consider the role of social media as a potentially viable intervention platform for offering support to persons with mental disorders, promoting engagement and retention in care, and enhancing existing mental health services, while balancing the need for safety. Given this broad objective, we did not perform a systematic search of the literature and we did not apply specific inclusion criteria based on study design or type of mental disorder.

Social Media Use and Mental Health

In 2020, there are an estimated 3.8 billion social media users worldwide, representing half the global population ( We Are Social, 2020 ). Recent studies have shown that individuals with mental disorders are increasingly gaining access to and using mobile devices, such as smartphones ( Firth et al., 2015 ; Glick, Druss, Pina, Lally, & Conde, 2016 ; Torous, Chan, et al., 2014 ; Torous, Friedman, & Keshavan, 2014 ). Similarly, there is mounting evidence showing high rates of social media use among individuals with mental disorders, including studies looking at engagement with these popular platforms across diverse settings and disorder types. Initial studies from 2015 found that nearly half of a sample of psychiatric patients were social media users, with greater use among younger individuals ( Trefflich, Kalckreuth, Mergl, & Rummel-Kluge, 2015 ), while 47% of inpatients and outpatients with schizophrenia reported using social media, of which 79% reported at least once-a-week usage of social media websites ( Miller, Stewart, Schrimsher, Peeples, & Buckley, 2015 ). Rates of social media use among psychiatric populations have increased in recent years, as reflected in a study with data from 2017 showing comparable rates of social media use (approximately 70%) among individuals with serious mental illness in treatment as compared to low-income groups from the general population ( Brunette et al., 2019 ).

Similarly, among individuals with serious mental illness receiving community-based mental health services, a recent study found equivalent rates of social media use as the general population, even exceeding 70% of participants ( Naslund, Aschbrenner, & Bartels, 2016 ). Comparable findings were demonstrated among middle-age and older individuals with mental illness accessing services at peer support agencies, where 72% of respondents reported using social media ( Aschbrenner, Naslund, Grinley, et al., 2018 ). Similar results, with 68% of those with first episode psychosis using social media daily were reported in another study ( Abdel-Baki, Lal, D.-Charron, Stip, & Kara, 2017 ).

Individuals who self-identified as having a schizophrenia spectrum disorder responded to a survey shared through the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI), and reported that visiting social media sites was one of their most common activities when using digital devices, taking up roughly 2 hours each day ( Gay, Torous, Joseph, Pandya, & Duckworth, 2016 ). For adolescents and young adults ages 12 to 21 with psychotic disorders and mood disorders, over 97% reported using social media, with average use exceeding 2.5 hours per day ( M. L. Birnbaum et al., 2017 ). Similarly, in a sample of adolescents ages 13-18 recruited from community mental health centers, 98% reported using social media, with YouTube as the most popular platform, followed by Instagram and Snapchat ( Aschbrenner et al., 2019 ).

Research has also explored the motivations for using social media as well as the perceived benefits of interacting on these platforms among individuals with mental illness. In the sections that follow (see Table 1 for a summary), we consider three potentially unique features of interacting and connecting with others on social media that may offer benefits for individuals living with mental illness. These include: 1) Facilitate social interaction; 2) Access to a peer support network; and 3) Promote engagement and retention in services.

Summary of potential benefits and challenges with social media for mental health

Facilitate Social Interaction

Social media platforms offer near continuous opportunities to connect and interact with others, regardless of time of day or geographic location. This on demand ease of communication may be especially important for facilitating social interaction among individuals with mental disorders experiencing difficulties interacting in face-to-face settings. For example, impaired social functioning is a common deficit in schizophrenia spectrum disorders, and social media may facilitate communication and interacting with others for these individuals ( Torous & Keshavan, 2016 ). This was suggested in one study where participants with schizophrenia indicated that social media helped them to interact and socialize more easily ( Miller et al., 2015 ). Like other online communication, the ability to connect with others anonymously may be an important feature of social media, especially for individuals living with highly stigmatizing health conditions ( Berger, Wagner, & Baker, 2005 ), such as serious mental disorders ( Highton-Williamson, Priebe, & Giacco, 2015 ).

Studies have found that individuals with serious mental disorders ( Spinzy, Nitzan, Becker, Bloch, & Fennig, 2012 ) as well as young adults with mental illness ( Gowen, Deschaine, Gruttadara, & Markey, 2012 ) appear to form online relationships and connect with others on social media as often as social media users from the general population. This is an important observation because individuals living with serious mental disorders typically have few social contacts in the offline world, and also experience high rates of loneliness ( Badcock et al., 2015 ; Giacco, Palumbo, Strappelli, Catapano, & Priebe, 2016 ). Among individuals receiving publicly funded mental health services who use social media, nearly half (47%) reported using these platforms at least weekly to feel less alone ( Brusilovskiy, Townley, Snethen, & Salzer, 2016 ). In another study of young adults with serious mental illness, most indicated that they used social media to help feel less isolated ( Gowen et al., 2012 ). Interestingly, more frequent use of social media among a sample of individuals with serious mental illness was associated with greater community participation, measured as participation in shopping, work, religious activities or visiting friends and family, as well as greater civic engagement, reflected as voting in local elections ( Brusilovskiy et al., 2016 ).

Emerging research also shows that young people with moderate to severe depressive symptoms appear to prefer communicating on social media rather than in-person ( Rideout & Fox, 2018 ), while other studies have found that some individuals may prefer to seek help for mental health concerns online rather than through in-person encounters ( Batterham & Calear, 2017 ). In a qualitative study, participants with schizophrenia described greater anonymity, the ability to discover that other people have experienced similar health challenges, and reducing fears through greater access to information as important motivations for using the Internet to seek mental health information ( Schrank, Sibitz, Unger, & Amering, 2010 ). Because social media does not require the immediate responses necessary in face-to-face communication, it may overcome deficits with social interaction due to psychotic symptoms that typically adversely affect face-to-face conversations ( Docherty et al., 1996 ). Online social interactions may not require the use of non-verbal cues, particularly in the initial stages of interaction ( Kiesler, Siegel, & McGuire, 1984 ), with interactions being more fluid, and within the control of users, thereby overcoming possible social anxieties linked to in-person interaction ( Indian & Grieve, 2014 ). Furthermore, many individuals with serious mental disorders can experience symptoms including passive social withdrawal, blunted affect and attentional impairment, as well as active social avoidance due to hallucinations or other concerns ( Hansen, Torgalsbøen, Melle, & Bell, 2009 ); thus, potentially reinforcing the relative advantage, as perceived by users, of using social media over in person conversations.

Access to a Peer Support Network

There is growing recognition about the role that social media channels could play in enabling peer support ( Bucci et al., 2019 ; Naslund, Aschbrenner, et al., 2016b ), referred to as a system of mutual giving and receiving where individuals who have endured the difficulties of mental illness can offer hope, friendship, and support to others facing similar challenges ( Davidson, Chinman, Sells, & Rowe, 2006 ; Mead, Hilton, & Curtis, 2001 ). Initial studies exploring use of online self-help forums among individuals with serious mental illnesses have found that individuals with schizophrenia appeared to use these forums for self-disclosure, and sharing personal experiences, in addition to providing or requesting information, describing symptoms, or discussing medication ( Haker, Lauber, & Rössler, 2005 ), while users with bipolar disorder reported using these forums to ask for help from others about their illness ( Vayreda & Antaki, 2009 ). More recently, in a review of online social networking in people with psychosis, Highton-Williamson et al (2015) highlight that an important purpose of such online connections was to establish new friendships, pursue romantic relationships, maintain existing relationships or reconnect with people, and seek online peer support from others with lived experience ( Highton-Williamson et al., 2015 ).

Online peer support among individuals with mental illness has been further elaborated in various studies. In a content analysis of comments posted to YouTube by individuals who self-identified as having a serious mental illness, there appeared to be opportunities to feel less alone, provide hope, find support and learn through mutual reciprocity, and share coping strategies for day-to-day challenges of living with a mental illness ( Naslund, Grande, Aschbrenner, & Elwyn, 2014 ). In another study, Chang (2009) delineated various communication patterns in an online psychosis peer-support group ( Chang, 2009 ). Specifically, different forms of support emerged, including ‘informational support’ about medication use or contacting mental health providers, ‘esteem support’ involving positive comments for encouragement, ‘network support’ for sharing similar experiences, and ‘emotional support’ to express understanding of a peer’s situation and offer hope or confidence ( Chang, 2009 ). Bauer et al. (2013) reported that the main interest in online self-help forums for patients with bipolar disorder was to share emotions with others, allow exchange of information, and benefit by being part of an online social group ( Bauer, Bauer, Spiessl, & Kagerbauer, 2013 ).

For individuals who openly discuss mental health problems on Twitter, a study by Berry et al. (2017) found that this served as an important opportunity to seek support and to hear about the experiences of others ( Berry et al., 2017 ). In a survey of social media users with mental illness, respondents reported that sharing personal experiences about living with mental illness and opportunities to learn about strategies for coping with mental illness from others were important reasons for using social media ( Naslund et al., 2017 ). A computational study of mental health awareness campaigns on Twitter provides further support with inspirational posts and tips being the most shared ( Saha et al., 2019 ). Taken together, these studies offer insights about the potential for social media to facilitate access to an informal peer support network, though more research is necessary to examine how these online interactions may impact intentions to seek care, illness self-management, and clinically meaningful outcomes in offline contexts.

Promote Engagement and Retention in Services

Many individuals living with mental disorders have expressed interest in using social media platforms for seeking mental health information ( Lal, Nguyen, & Theriault, 2018 ), connecting with mental health providers ( M. L. Birnbaum et al., 2017 ), and accessing evidence-based mental health services delivered over social media specifically for coping with mental health symptoms or for promoting overall health and wellbeing ( Naslund et al., 2017 ). With the widespread use of social media among individuals living with mental illness combined with the potential to facilitate social interaction and connect with supportive peers, as summarized above, it may be possible to leverage the popular features of social media to enhance existing mental health programs and services. A recent review by Biagianti et al (2018) found that peer-to-peer support appeared to offer feasible and acceptable ways to augment digital mental health interventions for individuals with psychotic disorders by specifically improving engagement, compliance, and adherence to the interventions, and may also improve perceived social support ( Biagianti, Quraishi, & Schlosser, 2018 ).

Among digital programs that have incorporated peer-to-peer social networking consistent with popular features on social media platforms, a pilot study of the HORYZONS online psychosocial intervention demonstrated significant reductions in depression among patients with first episode psychosis ( Alvarez-Jimenez et al., 2013 ). Importantly, the majority of participants (95%) in this study engaged with the peer-to-peer networking feature of the program, with many reporting increases in perceived social connectedness and empowerment in their recovery process ( Alvarez-Jimenez et al., 2013 ). This moderated online social therapy program is now being evaluated as part of a large randomized controlled trial for maintaining treatment effects from first episode psychosis services ( Alvarez-Jimenez et al., 2019 ).

Other early efforts have demonstrated that use of digital environments with the interactive peer-to-peer features of social media can enhance social functioning and wellbeing in young people at high risk of psychosis ( Alvarez-Jimenez et al., 2018 ). There has also been a recent emergence of several mobile apps to support symptom monitoring and relapse prevention in psychotic disorders. Among these apps, the development of PRIME (Personalized Real-time Intervention for Motivational Enhancement) has involved working closely with young people with schizophrenia to ensure that the design of the app has the look and feel of mainstream social media platforms, as opposed to existing clinical tools ( Schlosser et al., 2016 ). This unique approach to the design of the app is aimed at promoting engagement, and ensuring that the app can effectively improve motivation and functioning through goal setting and promoting better quality of life of users with schizophrenia ( Schlosser et al., 2018 ).

Social media platforms could also be used to promote engagement and participation in in-person services delivered through community mental health settings. For example, the peer-based lifestyle intervention called PeerFIT targets weight loss and improved fitness among individuals living with serious mental illness through a combination of in-person lifestyle classes, exercise groups, and use of digital technologies ( Aschbrenner, Naslund, Shevenell, Kinney, & Bartels, 2016 ; Aschbrenner, Naslund, Shevenell, Mueser, & Bartels, 2016 ). The intervention holds tremendous promise as lack of support is one of the largest barriers toward exercise in patients with serious mental illness ( Firth et al., 2016 ) and it is now possible to use social media to counter such. Specifically, in PeerFIT, a private Facebook group is closely integrated into the program to offer a closed platform where participants can connect with the lifestyle coaches, access intervention content, and support or encourage each other as they work towards their lifestyle goals ( Aschbrenner, Naslund, & Bartels, 2016 ; Naslund, Aschbrenner, Marsch, & Bartels, 2016a ). To date, this program has demonstrate preliminary effectiveness for meaningfully reducing cardiovascular risk factors that contribute to early mortality in this patient group ( Aschbrenner, Naslund, Shevenell, Kinney, et al., 2016 ), while the Facebook component appears to have increased engagement in the program, while allowing participants who were unable to attend in-person sessions due to other health concerns or competing demands to remain connected with the program ( Naslund, Aschbrenner, Marsch, McHugo, & Bartels, 2018 ). This lifestyle intervention is currently being evaluated in a randomized controlled trial enrolling young adults with serious mental illness from a variety of real world community mental health services settings ( Aschbrenner, Naslund, Gorin, et al., 2018 ).

These examples highlight the promise of incorporating the features of popular social media into existing programs, which may offer opportunities to safely promote engagement and program retention, while achieving improved clinical outcomes. This is an emerging area of research, as evidenced by several important effectiveness trials underway ( Alvarez-Jimenez et al., 2019 ; Aschbrenner, Naslund, Gorin, et al., 2018 ), including efforts to leverage online social networking to support family caregivers of individuals receiving first episode psychosis services ( Gleeson et al., 2017 ).

Challenges with Social Media for Mental Health

The science on the role of social media for engaging persons with mental disorders needs a cautionary note on the effects of social media usage on mental health and well being, particularly in adolescents and young adults. While the risks and harms of social media are frequently covered in the popular press and mainstream news reports, careful consideration of the research in this area is necessary. In a review of 43 studies in young people, many benefits of social media were cited, including increased self-esteem, and opportunities for self-disclosure ( Best, Manktelow, & Taylor, 2014 ). Yet, reported negative effects were an increased exposure to harm, social isolation, depressive symptoms and bullying ( Best et al., 2014 ). In the sections that follow (see Table 1 for a summary), we consider three major categories of risk related to use of social media and mental health. These include: 1) Impact on symptoms; 2) Facing hostile interactions; and 3) Consequences for daily life.

Impact on Symptoms

Studies consistently highlight that use of social media, especially heavy use and prolonged time spent on social media platforms, appears to contribute to increased risk for a variety of mental health symptoms and poor wellbeing, especially among young people ( Andreassen et al., 2016 ; Kross et al., 2013 ; Woods & Scott, 2016 ). This may partly be driven by the detrimental effects of screen time on mental health, including increased severity of anxiety and depressive symptoms, which have been well documented ( Stiglic & Viner, 2019 ). Recent studies have reported negative effects of social media use on mental health of young people, including social comparison pressure with others and greater feeling of social isolation after being rejected by others on social media ( Rideout & Fox, 2018 ). In a study of young adults, it was found that negative comparisons with others on Facebook contributed to risk of rumination and subsequent increases in depression symptoms ( Feinstein et al., 2013 ). Still, the cross sectional nature of many screen time and mental health studies makes it challenging to reach causal inferences ( Orben & Przybylski, 2019 ).

Quantity of social media use is also an important factor, as highlighted in a survey of young adults ages 19 to 32, where more frequent visits to social media platforms each week were correlated with greater depressive symptoms ( Lin et al., 2016 ). More time spent using social media is also associated with greater symptoms of anxiety ( Vannucci, Flannery, & Ohannessian, 2017 ). The actual number of platforms accessed also appears to contribute to risk as reflected in another national survey of young adults where use of a large number of social media platforms was associated with negative impact on mental health ( Primack et al., 2017 ). Among survey respondents using between 7 and 11 different social media platforms compared to respondents using only 2 or fewer platforms, there was a 3 times greater odds of having high levels of depressive symptoms and a 3.2 times greater odds of having high levels of anxiety symptoms ( Primack et al., 2017 ).

Many researchers have postulated that worsening mental health attributed to social media use may be because social media replaces face-to-face interactions for young people ( Twenge & Campbell, 2018 ), and may contribute to greater loneliness ( Bucci et al., 2019 ), and negative effects on other aspects of health and wellbeing ( Woods & Scott, 2016 ). One nationally representative survey of US adolescents found that among respondents who reported more time accessing media such as social media platforms or smartphone devices, there was significantly greater depressive symptoms and increased risk of suicide when compared to adolescents who reported spending more time on non-screen activities, such as in-person social interaction or sports and recreation activities ( Twenge, Joiner, Rogers, & Martin, 2018 ). For individuals living with more severe mental illnesses, the effects of social media on psychiatric symptoms have received less attention. One study found that participation in chat rooms may contribute to worsening symptoms in young people with psychotic disorders ( Mittal, Tessner, & Walker, 2007 ), while another study of patients with psychosis found that social media use appeared to predict low mood ( Berry, Emsley, Lobban, & Bucci, 2018 ). These studies highlight a clear relationship between social media use and mental health that may not be present in general population studies ( Orben & Przybylski, 2019 ), and emphasize the need to explore how social media may contribute to symptom severity and whether protective factors may be identified to mitigate these risks.

Facing Hostile Interactions

Popular social media platforms can create potential situations where individuals may be victimized by negative comments or posts. Cyberbullying represents a form of online aggression directed towards specific individuals, such as peers or acquaintances, which is perceived to be most harmful when compared to random hostile comments posted online ( Hamm et al., 2015 ). Importantly, cyberbullying on social media consistently shows harmful impact on mental health in the form of increased depressive symptoms as well as worsening of anxiety symptoms, as evidenced in a review of 36 studies among children and young people ( Hamm et al., 2015 ). Furthermore, cyberbullying disproportionately impacts females as reflected in a national survey of adolescents in the United States, where females were twice as likely to be victims of cyberbullying compared to males ( Alhajji, Bass, & Dai, 2019 ). Most studies report cross-sectional associations between cyberbullying and symptoms of depression or anxiety ( Hamm et al., 2015 ), though one longitudinal study in Switzerland found that cyberbullying contributed to significantly greater depression over time ( Machmutow, Perren, Sticca, & Alsaker, 2012 ).

For youth ages 10 to 17 who reported major depressive symptomatology, there was over 3 times greater odds of facing online harassment in the last year compared to youth who reported mild or no depressive symptoms ( Ybarra, 2004 ). Similarly, in a 2018 national survey of young people, respondents ages 14 to 22 with moderate to severe depressive symptoms were more likely to have had negative experiences when using social media, and in particular, were more likely to report having faced hostile comments, or being “trolled”, from others when compared to respondents without depressive symptoms (31% vs. 14%) ( Rideout & Fox, 2018 ). As these studies depict risks for victimization on social media and the correlation with poor mental health, it is possible that individuals living with mental illness may also experience greater hostility online compared to individuals without mental illness. This would be consistent with research showing greater risk of hostility, including increased violence and discrimination, directed towards individuals living with mental illness in in-person contexts, especially targeted at those with severe mental illnesses ( Goodman et al., 1999 ).

A computational study of mental health awareness campaigns on Twitter reported that while stigmatizing content was rare, it was actually the most spread (re-tweeted) demonstrating that harmful content can travel quickly on social media ( Saha et al., 2019 ). Another study was able to map the spread of social media posts about the Blue Whale Challenge, an alleged game promoting suicide, over Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr and other forums across 127 countries ( Sumner et al., 2019 ). These findings show that it is critical to monitor the actual content of social media posts, such as determining whether content is hostile or promotes harm to self or others. This is pertinent because existing research looking at duration of exposure cannot account for the impact of specific types of content on mental health and is insufficient to fully understand the effects of using these platforms on mental health.

Consequences for Daily Life

The ways in which individuals use social media can also impact their offline relationships and everyday activities. To date, reports have described risks of social media use pertaining to privacy, confidentiality, and unintended consequences of disclosing personal health information online ( Torous & Keshavan, 2016 ). Additionally, concerns have been raised about poor quality or misleading health information shared on social media, and that social media users may not be aware of misleading information or conflicts of interest especially when the platforms promote popular content regardless of whether it is from a trustworthy source ( Moorhead et al., 2013 ; Ventola, 2014 ). For persons living with mental illness there may be additional risks from using social media. A recent study that specifically explored the perspectives of social media users with serious mental illnesses, including participants with schizophrenia spectrum disorders, bipolar disorder, or major depression, found that over one third of participants expressed concerns about privacy when using social media ( Naslund & Aschbrenner, 2019 ). The reported risks of social media use were directly related to many aspects of everyday life, including concerns about threats to employment, fear of stigma and being judged, impact on personal relationships, and facing hostility or being hurt ( Naslund & Aschbrenner, 2019 ). While few studies have specifically explored the dangers of social media use from the perspectives of individuals living with mental illness, it is important to recognize that use of these platforms may contribute to risks that extend beyond worsening symptoms and that can affect different aspects of daily life.

In this commentary we considered ways in which social media may yield benefits for individuals living with mental illness, while contrasting these with the possible harms. Studies reporting on the threats of social media for individuals with mental illness are mostly cross-sectional, making it difficult to draw conclusions about direction of causation. However, the risks are potentially serious. These risks should be carefully considered in discussions pertaining to use of social media and the broader use of digital mental health technologies, as avenues for mental health promotion, or for supporting access to evidence-based programs or mental health services. At this point, it would be premature to view the benefits of social media as outweighing the possible harms, when it is clear from the studies summarized here that social media use can have negative effects on mental health symptoms, can potentially expose individuals to hurtful content and hostile interactions, and can result in serious consequences for daily life, including threats to employment and personal relationships. Despite these risks, it is also necessary to recognize that individuals with mental illness will continue to use social media given the ease of accessing these platforms and the immense popularity of online social networking. With this in mind, it may be ideal to raise awareness about these possible risks so that individuals can implement necessary safeguards, while also highlighting that there could also be benefits. For individuals with mental illness who use social media, being aware of the risks is an essential first step, and then highlighting ways that use of these popular platforms could also contribute to some benefits, ranging from finding meaningful interactions with others, engaging with peer support networks, and accessing information and services.

To capitalize on the widespread use of social media, and to achieve the promise that these platforms may hold for supporting the delivery of targeted mental health interventions, there is need for continued research to better understand how individuals living with mental illness use social media. Such efforts could inform safety measures and also encourage use of social media in ways that maximize potential benefits while minimizing risk of harm. It will be important to recognize how gender and race contribute to differences in use of social media for seeking mental health information or accessing interventions, as well as differences in how social media might impact mental wellbeing. For example, a national survey of 14- to 22-year olds in the United States found that female respondents were more likely to search online for information about depression or anxiety, and to try to connect with other people online who share similar mental health concerns, when compared to male respondents ( Rideout & Fox, 2018 ). In the same survey, there did not appear to be any differences between racial or ethnic groups in social media use for seeking mental health information ( Rideout & Fox, 2018 ). Social media use also appears to have a differential impact on mental health and emotional wellbeing between females and males ( Booker, Kelly, & Sacker, 2018 ), highlighting the need to explore unique experiences between gender groups to inform tailored programs and services. Research shows that lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender individuals frequently use social media for searching for health information and may be more likely compared to heterosexual individuals to share their own personal health experiences with others online ( Rideout & Fox, 2018 ). Less is known about use of social media for seeking support for mental health concerns among gender minorities, though this is an important area for further investigation as these individuals are more likely to experience mental health problems and more likely to experience online victimization when compared to heterosexual individuals ( Mereish, Sheskier, Hawthorne, & Goldbach, 2019 ).

Similarly, efforts are needed to explore the relationship between social media use and mental health among ethnic and racial minorities. A recent study found that exposure to traumatic online content on social media showing violence or hateful posts directed at racial minorities contributed to increases in psychological distress, PTSD symptoms, and depression among African American and Latinx adolescents in the United States ( Tynes, Willis, Stewart, & Hamilton, 2019 ). These concerns are contrasted by growing interest in the potential for new technologies including social media to expand the reach of services to underrepresented minority groups ( Schueller, Hunter, Figueroa, & Aguilera, 2019 ). Therefore, greater attention is needed to understanding the perspectives of ethnic and racial minorities to inform effective and safe use of social media for mental health promotion efforts.

Research has found that individuals living with mental illness have expressed interest in accessing mental health services through social media platforms. A survey of social media users with mental illness found that most respondents were interested in accessing programs for mental health on social media targeting symptom management, health promotion, and support for communicating with health care providers and interacting with the health system ( Naslund et al., 2017 ). Importantly, individuals with serious mental illness have also emphasized that any mental health intervention on social media would need to be moderated by someone with adequate training and credentials, would need to have ground rules and ways to promote safety and minimize risks, and importantly, would need to be free and easy to access.

An important strength with this commentary is that it combines a range of studies broadly covering the topic of social media and mental health. We have provided a summary of recent evidence in a rapidly advancing field with the goal of presenting unique ways that social media could offer benefits for individuals with mental illness, while also acknowledging the potentially serious risks and the need for further investigation. There are also several limitations with this commentary that warrant consideration. Importantly, as we aimed to address this broad objective, we did not conduct a systematic review of the literature. Therefore, the studies reported here are not exhaustive, and there may be additional relevant studies that were not included. Additionally, we only summarized published studies, and as a result, any reports from the private sector or websites from different organizations using social media or other apps containing social media-like features would have been omitted. Though it is difficult to rigorously summarize work from the private sector, sometimes referred to as “gray literature”, because many of these projects are unpublished and are likely selective in their reporting of findings given the target audience may be shareholders or consumers.

Another notable limitation is that we did not assess risk of bias in the studies summarized in this commentary. We found many studies that highlighted risks associated with social media use for individuals living with mental illness; however, few studies of programs or interventions reported negative findings, suggesting the possibility that negative findings may go unpublished. This concern highlights the need for a future more rigorous review of the literature with careful consideration of bias and an accompanying quality assessment. Most of the studies that we described were from the United States, as well as from other higher income settings such as Australia or the United Kingdom. Despite the global reach of social media platforms, there is a dearth of research on the impact of these platforms on the mental health of individuals in diverse settings, as well as the ways in which social media could support mental health services in lower income countries where there is virtually no access to mental health providers. Future research is necessary to explore the opportunities and risks for social media to support mental health promotion in low-income and middle-income countries, especially as these countries face a disproportionate share of the global burden of mental disorders, yet account for the majority of social media users worldwide ( Naslund et al., 2019 ).

Future Directions for Social Media and Mental Health

As we consider future research directions, the near ubiquitous social media use also yields new opportunities to study the onset and manifestation of mental health symptoms and illness severity earlier than traditional clinical assessments. There is an emerging field of research referred to as ‘digital phenotyping’ aimed at capturing how individuals interact with their digital devices, including social media platforms, in order to study patterns of illness and identify optimal time points for intervention ( Jain, Powers, Hawkins, & Brownstein, 2015 ; Onnela & Rauch, 2016 ). Given that most people access social media via mobile devices, digital phenotyping and social media are closely related ( Torous et al., 2019 ). To date, the emergence of machine learning, a powerful computational method involving statistical and mathematical algorithms ( Shatte, Hutchinson, & Teague, 2019 ), has made it possible to study large quantities of data captured from popular social media platforms such as Twitter or Instagram to illuminate various features of mental health ( Manikonda & De Choudhury, 2017 ; Reece et al., 2017 ). Specifically, conversations on Twitter have been analyzed to characterize the onset of depression ( De Choudhury, Gamon, Counts, & Horvitz, 2013 ) as well as detecting users’ mood and affective states ( De Choudhury, Gamon, & Counts, 2012 ), while photos posted to Instagram can yield insights for predicting depression ( Reece & Danforth, 2017 ). The intersection of social media and digital phenotyping will likely add new levels of context to social media use in the near future.

Several studies have also demonstrated that when compared to a control group, Twitter users with a self-disclosed diagnosis of schizophrenia show unique online communication patterns ( Michael L Birnbaum, Ernala, Rizvi, De Choudhury, & Kane, 2017 ), including more frequent discussion of tobacco use ( Hswen et al., 2017 ), symptoms of depression and anxiety ( Hswen, Naslund, Brownstein, & Hawkins, 2018b ), and suicide ( Hswen, Naslund, Brownstein, & Hawkins, 2018a ). Another study found that online disclosures about mental illness appeared beneficial as reflected by fewer posts about symptoms following self-disclosure (Ernala, Rizvi, Birnbaum, Kane, & De Choudhury, 2017). Each of these examples offers early insights into the potential to leverage widely available online data for better understanding the onset and course of mental illness. It is possible that social media data could be used to supplement additional digital data, such as continuous monitoring using smartphone apps or smart watches, to generate a more comprehensive ‘digital phenotype’ to predict relapse and identify high-risk health behaviors among individuals living with mental illness ( Torous et al., 2019 ).

With research increasingly showing the valuable insights that social media data can yield about mental health states, greater attention to the ethical concerns with using individual data in this way is necessary ( Chancellor, Birnbaum, Caine, Silenzio, & De Choudhury, 2019 ). For instance, data is typically captured from social media platforms without the consent or awareness of users ( Bidargaddi et al., 2017 ), which is especially crucial when the data relates to a socially stigmatizing health condition such as mental illness ( Guntuku, Yaden, Kern, Ungar, & Eichstaedt, 2017 ). Precautions are needed to ensure that data is not made identifiable in ways that were not originally intended by the user who posted the content, as this could place an individual at risk of harm or divulge sensitive health information ( Webb et al., 2017 ; Williams, Burnap, & Sloan, 2017 ). Promising approaches for minimizing these risks include supporting the participation of individuals with expertise in privacy, clinicians, as well as the target individuals with mental illness throughout the collection of data, development of predictive algorithms, and interpretation of findings ( Chancellor et al., 2019 ).

In recognizing that many individuals living with mental illness use social media to search for information about their mental health, it is possible that they may also want to ask their clinicians about what they find online to check if the information is reliable and trustworthy. Alternatively, many individuals may feel embarrassed or reluctant to talk to their clinicians about using social media to find mental health information out of concerns of being judged or dismissed. Therefore, mental health clinicians may be ideally positioned to talk with their patients about using social media, and offer recommendations to promote safe use of these sites, while also respecting their patients’ autonomy and personal motivations for using these popular platforms. Given the gap in clinical knowledge about the impact of social media on mental health, clinicians should be aware of the many potential risks so that they can inform their patients, while remaining open to the possibility that their patients may also experience benefits through use of these platforms. As awareness of these risks grows, it may be possible that new protections will be put in place by industry or through new policies that will make the social media environment safer. It is hard to estimate a number needed to treat or harm today given the nascent state of research, which means the patient and clinician need to weigh the choice on a personal level. Thus offering education and information is an important first step in that process. As patients increasingly show interest in accessing mental health information or services through social media, it will be necessary for health systems to recognize social media as a potential avenue for reaching or offering support to patients. This aligns with growing emphasis on the need for greater integration of digital psychiatry, including apps, smartphones, or wearable devices, into patient care and clinical services through institution-wide initiatives and training clinical providers ( Hilty, Chan, Torous, Luo, & Boland, 2019 ). Within a learning healthcare environment where research and care are tightly intertwined and feedback between both is rapid, the integration of digital technologies into services may create new opportunities for advancing use of social media for mental health.

As highlighted in this commentary, social media has become an important part of the lives of many individuals living with mental disorders. Many of these individuals use social media to share their lived experiences with mental illness, to seek support from others, and to search for information about treatment recommendations, accessing mental health services, and coping with symptoms ( Bucci et al., 2019 ; Highton-Williamson et al., 2015 ; Naslund, Aschbrenner, et al., 2016b ). As the field of digital mental health advances, the wide reach, ease of access, and popularity of social media platforms could be used to allow individuals in need of mental health services or facing challenges of mental illness to access evidence-based treatment and support. To achieve this end and to explore whether social media platforms can advance efforts to close the gap in available mental health services in the United States and globally, it will be essential for researchers to work closely with clinicians and with those affected by mental illness to ensure that possible benefits of using social media are carefully weighed against anticipated risks.

Acknowledgements

Dr. Naslund is supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (U19MH113211). Dr. Aschbrenner is supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (1R01MH110965-01).

Publisher's Disclaimer: This Author Accepted Manuscript is a PDF file of a an unedited peer-reviewed manuscript that has been accepted for publication but has not been copyedited or corrected. The official version of record that is published in the journal is kept up to date and so may therefore differ from this version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors have nothing to disclose.

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Open access
Published: 06 July 2023

Pros & cons: impacts of social media on mental health

Ágnes Zsila 1 , 2 &
Marc Eric S. Reyes ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5280-1315 3

BMC Psychology volume 11 , Article number: 201 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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The use of social media significantly impacts mental health. It can enhance connection, increase self-esteem, and improve a sense of belonging. But it can also lead to tremendous stress, pressure to compare oneself to others, and increased sadness and isolation. Mindful use is essential to social media consumption.

Social media has become integral to our daily routines: we interact with family members and friends, accept invitations to public events, and join online communities to meet people who share similar preferences using these platforms. Social media has opened a new avenue for social experiences since the early 2000s, extending the possibilities for communication. According to recent research [ 1 ], people spend 2.3 h daily on social media. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat have become increasingly popular among youth in 2022, and one-third think they spend too much time on these platforms [ 2 ]. The considerable time people spend on social media worldwide has directed researchers’ attention toward the potential benefits and risks. Research shows excessive use is mainly associated with lower psychological well-being [ 3 ]. However, findings also suggest that the quality rather than the quantity of social media use can determine whether the experience will enhance or deteriorate the user’s mental health [ 4 ]. In this collection, we will explore the impact of social media use on mental health by providing comprehensive research perspectives on positive and negative effects.

Social media can provide opportunities to enhance the mental health of users by facilitating social connections and peer support [ 5 ]. Indeed, online communities can provide a space for discussions regarding health conditions, adverse life events, or everyday challenges, which may decrease the sense of stigmatization and increase belongingness and perceived emotional support. Mutual friendships, rewarding social interactions, and humor on social media also reduced stress during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 4 ].

On the other hand, several studies have pointed out the potentially detrimental effects of social media use on mental health. Concerns have been raised that social media may lead to body image dissatisfaction [ 6 ], increase the risk of addiction and cyberbullying involvement [ 5 ], contribute to phubbing behaviors [ 7 ], and negatively affects mood [ 8 ]. Excessive use has increased loneliness, fear of missing out, and decreased subjective well-being and life satisfaction [ 8 ]. Users at risk of social media addiction often report depressive symptoms and lower self-esteem [ 9 ].

Overall, findings regarding the impact of social media on mental health pointed out some essential resources for psychological well-being through rewarding online social interactions. However, there is a need to raise awareness about the possible risks associated with excessive use, which can negatively affect mental health and everyday functioning [ 9 ]. There is neither a negative nor positive consensus regarding the effects of social media on people. However, by teaching people social media literacy, we can maximize their chances of having balanced, safe, and meaningful experiences on these platforms [ 10 ].

We encourage researchers to submit their research articles and contribute to a more differentiated overview of the impact of social media on mental health. BMC Psychology welcomes submissions to its new collection, which promises to present the latest findings in the emerging field of social media research. We seek research papers using qualitative and quantitative methods, focusing on social media users’ positive and negative aspects. We believe this collection will provide a more comprehensive picture of social media’s positive and negative effects on users’ mental health.

Data Availability

Not applicable.

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Ágnes Zsila was supported by the ÚNKP-22-4 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Culture and Innovation from the source of the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund.

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Ágnes Zsila

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Zsila, Á., Reyes, M.E.S. Pros & cons: impacts of social media on mental health. BMC Psychol 11 , 201 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-023-01243-x

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Essay on Social Media for School Students and Children

500+ words essay on social media.

Social media is a tool that is becoming quite popular these days because of its user-friendly features. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more are giving people a chance to connect with each other across distances. In other words, the whole world is at our fingertips all thanks to social media. The youth is especially one of the most dominant users of social media. All this makes you wonder that something so powerful and with such a massive reach cannot be all good. Like how there are always two sides to a coin, the same goes for social media. Subsequently, different people have different opinions on this debatable topic. So, in this essay on Social Media, we will see the advantages and disadvantages of social media.

Advantages of Social Media

When we look at the positive aspect of social media, we find numerous advantages. The most important being a great device for education . All the information one requires is just a click away. Students can educate themselves on various topics using social media.

Moreover, live lectures are now possible because of social media. You can attend a lecture happening in America while sitting in India.

Furthermore, as more and more people are distancing themselves from newspapers, they are depending on social media for news. You are always updated on the latest happenings of the world through it. A person becomes more socially aware of the issues of the world.

In addition, it strengthens bonds with your loved ones. Distance is not a barrier anymore because of social media. For instance, you can easily communicate with your friends and relatives overseas.

Most importantly, it also provides a great platform for young budding artists to showcase their talent for free. You can get great opportunities for employment through social media too.

Another advantage definitely benefits companies who wish to promote their brands. Social media has become a hub for advertising and offers you great opportunities for connecting with the customer.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Disadvantages of Social Media

Despite having such unique advantages, social media is considered to be one of the most harmful elements of society. If the use of social media is not monitored, it can lead to grave consequences.

Thus, the sharing on social media especially by children must be monitored at all times. Next up is the addition of social media which is quite common amongst the youth.

This addiction hampers with the academic performance of a student as they waste their time on social media instead of studying. Social media also creates communal rifts. Fake news is spread with the use of it, which poisons the mind of peace-loving citizens.

In short, surely social media has both advantages and disadvantages. But, it all depends on the user at the end. The youth must particularly create a balance between their academic performances, physical activities, and social media. Excess use of anything is harmful and the same thing applies to social media. Therefore, we must strive to live a satisfying life with the right balance.

FAQs on Social Media

Q.1 Is social media beneficial? If yes, then how?

A.1 Social media is quite beneficial. Social Media offers information, news, educational material, a platform for talented youth and brands.

Q.2 What is a disadvantage of Social Media?

A.2 Social media invades your privacy. It makes you addicted and causes health problems. It also results in cyberbullying and scams as well as communal hatred.

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How Harmful Is Social Media?

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he sought to explain, as the piece’s title had it, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anyone familiar with Haidt’s work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media. Although Haidt concedes that political polarization and factional enmity long predate the rise of the platforms, and that there are plenty of other factors involved, he believes that the tools of virality—Facebook’s Like and Share buttons, Twitter’s Retweet function—have algorithmically and irrevocably corroded public life. He has determined that a great historical discontinuity can be dated with some precision to the period between 2010 and 2014, when these features became widely available on phones.

“What changed in the 2010s?” Haidt asks, reminding his audience that a former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision of a four-year-old with a loaded weapon. “A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.” While the right has thrived on conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, the left has turned punitive: “When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And, unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.” Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: the rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”

These are, needless to say, common concerns. Chief among Haidt’s worries is that use of social media has left us particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias, or the propensity to fix upon evidence that shores up our prior beliefs. Haidt acknowledges that the extant literature on social media’s effects is large and complex, and that there is something in it for everyone. On January 6, 2021, he was on the phone with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke and the author of the recent book “ Breaking the Social Media Prism ,” when Bail urged him to turn on the television. Two weeks later, Haidt wrote to Bail, expressing his frustration at the way Facebook officials consistently cited the same handful of studies in their defense. He suggested that the two of them collaborate on a comprehensive literature review that they could share, as a Google Doc, with other researchers. (Haidt had experimented with such a model before.) Bail was cautious. He told me, “What I said to him was, ‘Well, you know, I’m not sure the research is going to bear out your version of the story,’ and he said, ‘Why don’t we see?’ ”

Bail emphasized that he is not a “platform-basher.” He added, “In my book, my main take is, Yes, the platforms play a role, but we are greatly exaggerating what it’s possible for them to do—how much they could change things no matter who’s at the helm at these companies—and we’re profoundly underestimating the human element, the motivation of users.” He found Haidt’s idea of a Google Doc appealing, in the way that it would produce a kind of living document that existed “somewhere between scholarship and public writing.” Haidt was eager for a forum to test his ideas. “I decided that if I was going to be writing about this—what changed in the universe, around 2014, when things got weird on campus and elsewhere—once again, I’d better be confident I’m right,” he said. “I can’t just go off my feelings and my readings of the biased literature. We all suffer from confirmation bias, and the only cure is other people who don’t share your own.”

Haidt and Bail, along with a research assistant, populated the document over the course of several weeks last year, and in November they invited about two dozen scholars to contribute. Haidt told me, of the difficulties of social-scientific methodology, “When you first approach a question, you don’t even know what it is. ‘Is social media destroying democracy, yes or no?’ That’s not a good question. You can’t answer that question. So what can you ask and answer?” As the document took on a life of its own, tractable rubrics emerged—Does social media make people angrier or more affectively polarized? Does it create political echo chambers? Does it increase the probability of violence? Does it enable foreign governments to increase political dysfunction in the United States and other democracies? Haidt continued, “It’s only after you break it up into lots of answerable questions that you see where the complexity lies.”

Haidt came away with the sense, on balance, that social media was in fact pretty bad. He was disappointed, but not surprised, that Facebook’s response to his article relied on the same three studies they’ve been reciting for years. “This is something you see with breakfast cereals,” he said, noting that a cereal company “might say, ‘Did you know we have twenty-five per cent more riboflavin than the leading brand?’ They’ll point to features where the evidence is in their favor, which distracts you from the over-all fact that your cereal tastes worse and is less healthy.”

After Haidt’s piece was published, the Google Doc—“Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review”—was made available to the public . Comments piled up, and a new section was added, at the end, to include a miscellany of Twitter threads and Substack essays that appeared in response to Haidt’s interpretation of the evidence. Some colleagues and kibbitzers agreed with Haidt. But others, though they might have shared his basic intuition that something in our experience of social media was amiss, drew upon the same data set to reach less definitive conclusions, or even mildly contradictory ones. Even after the initial flurry of responses to Haidt’s article disappeared into social-media memory, the document, insofar as it captured the state of the social-media debate, remained a lively artifact.

Near the end of the collaborative project’s introduction, the authors warn, “We caution readers not to simply add up the number of studies on each side and declare one side the winner.” The document runs to more than a hundred and fifty pages, and for each question there are affirmative and dissenting studies, as well as some that indicate mixed results. According to one paper, “Political expressions on social media and the online forum were found to (a) reinforce the expressers’ partisan thought process and (b) harden their pre-existing political preferences,” but, according to another, which used data collected during the 2016 election, “Over the course of the campaign, we found media use and attitudes remained relatively stable. Our results also showed that Facebook news use was related to modest over-time spiral of depolarization. Furthermore, we found that people who use Facebook for news were more likely to view both pro- and counter-attitudinal news in each wave. Our results indicated that counter-attitudinal exposure increased over time, which resulted in depolarization.” If results like these seem incompatible, a perplexed reader is given recourse to a study that says, “Our findings indicate that political polarization on social media cannot be conceptualized as a unified phenomenon, as there are significant cross-platform differences.”

Interested in echo chambers? “Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter,” which seems convincing—except that, as another team has it, “We do not find evidence supporting a strong characterization of ‘echo chambers’ in which the majority of people’s sources of news are mutually exclusive and from opposite poles.” By the end of the file, the vaguely patronizing top-line recommendation against simple summation begins to make more sense. A document that originated as a bulwark against confirmation bias could, as it turned out, just as easily function as a kind of generative device to support anybody’s pet conviction. The only sane response, it seemed, was simply to throw one’s hands in the air.

When I spoke to some of the researchers whose work had been included, I found a combination of broad, visceral unease with the current situation—with the banefulness of harassment and trolling; with the opacity of the platforms; with, well, the widespread presentiment that of course social media is in many ways bad—and a contrastive sense that it might not be catastrophically bad in some of the specific ways that many of us have come to take for granted as true. This was not mere contrarianism, and there was no trace of gleeful mythbusting; the issue was important enough to get right. When I told Bail that the upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear, he suggested that there was at least some firm ground. He sounded a bit less apocalyptic than Haidt.

“A lot of the stories out there are just wrong,” he told me. “The political echo chamber has been massively overstated. Maybe it’s three to five per cent of people who are properly in an echo chamber.” Echo chambers, as hotboxes of confirmation bias, are counterproductive for democracy. But research indicates that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life, where our social networks—in the original use of the term—are rarely heterogeneous. (Haidt told me that this was an issue on which the Google Doc changed his mind; he became convinced that echo chambers probably aren’t as widespread a problem as he’d once imagined.) And too much of a focus on our intuitions about social media’s echo-chamber effect could obscure the relevant counterfactual: a conservative might abandon Twitter only to watch more Fox News. “Stepping outside your echo chamber is supposed to make you moderate, but maybe it makes you more extreme,” Bail said. The research is inchoate and ongoing, and it’s difficult to say anything on the topic with absolute certainty. But this was, in part, Bail’s point: we ought to be less sure about the particular impacts of social media.

Bail went on, “The second story is foreign misinformation.” It’s not that misinformation doesn’t exist, or that it hasn’t had indirect effects, especially when it creates perverse incentives for the mainstream media to cover stories circulating online. Haidt also draws convincingly upon the work of Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, to sketch out a potential future in which the work of shitposting has been outsourced to artificial intelligence, further polluting the informational environment. But, at least so far, very few Americans seem to suffer from consistent exposure to fake news—“probably less than two per cent of Twitter users, maybe fewer now, and for those who were it didn’t change their opinions,” Bail said. This was probably because the people likeliest to consume such spectacles were the sort of people primed to believe them in the first place. “In fact,” he said, “echo chambers might have done something to quarantine that misinformation.”

The final story that Bail wanted to discuss was the “proverbial rabbit hole, the path to algorithmic radicalization,” by which YouTube might serve a viewer increasingly extreme videos. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this does happen, at least on occasion, and such anecdotes are alarming to hear. But a new working paper led by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, found that almost all extremist content is either consumed by subscribers to the relevant channels—a sign of actual demand rather than manipulation or preference falsification—or encountered via links from external sites. It’s easy to see why we might prefer if this were not the case: algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. “These are the three stories—echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms—but, when you look at the literature, they’ve all been overstated.” He thought that these findings were crucial for us to assimilate, if only to help us understand that our problems may lie beyond technocratic tinkering. He explained, “Part of my interest in getting this research out there is to demonstrate that everybody is waiting for an Elon Musk to ride in and save us with an algorithm”—or, presumably, the reverse—“and it’s just not going to happen.”

When I spoke with Nyhan, he told me much the same thing: “The most credible research is way out of line with the takes.” He noted, of extremist content and misinformation, that reliable research that “measures exposure to these things finds that the people consuming this content are small minorities who have extreme views already.” The problem with the bulk of the earlier research, Nyhan told me, is that it’s almost all correlational. “Many of these studies will find polarization on social media,” he said. “But that might just be the society we live in reflected on social media!” He hastened to add, “Not that this is untroubling, and none of this is to let these companies, which are exercising a lot of power with very little scrutiny, off the hook. But a lot of the criticisms of them are very poorly founded. . . . The expansion of Internet access coincides with fifteen other trends over time, and separating them is very difficult. The lack of good data is a huge problem insofar as it lets people project their own fears into this area.” He told me, “It’s hard to weigh in on the side of ‘We don’t know, the evidence is weak,’ because those points are always going to be drowned out in our discourse. But these arguments are systematically underprovided in the public domain.”

In his Atlantic article, Haidt leans on a working paper by two social scientists, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, who took on a comprehensive meta-analysis of about five hundred papers and concluded that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” Haidt writes, “The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.” Nyhan was less convinced that the meta-analysis supported such categorical verdicts, especially once you bracketed the kinds of correlational findings that might simply mirror social and political dynamics. He told me, “If you look at their summary of studies that allow for causal inferences—it’s very mixed.”

As for the studies Nyhan considered most methodologically sound, he pointed to a 2020 article called “The Welfare Effects of Social Media,” by Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow. For four weeks prior to the 2018 midterm elections, the authors randomly divided a group of volunteers into two cohorts—one that continued to use Facebook as usual, and another that was paid to deactivate their accounts for that period. They found that deactivation “(i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use.” But Gentzkow reminded me that his conclusions, including that Facebook may slightly increase polarization, had to be heavily qualified: “From other kinds of evidence, I think there’s reason to think social media is not the main driver of increasing polarization over the long haul in the United States.”

In the book “ Why We’re Polarized ,” for example, Ezra Klein invokes the work of such scholars as Lilliana Mason to argue that the roots of polarization might be found in, among other factors, the political realignment and nationalization that began in the sixties, and were then sacralized, on the right, by the rise of talk radio and cable news. These dynamics have served to flatten our political identities, weakening our ability or inclination to find compromise. Insofar as some forms of social media encourage the hardening of connections between our identities and a narrow set of opinions, we might increasingly self-select into mutually incomprehensible and hostile groups; Haidt plausibly suggests that these processes are accelerated by the coalescence of social-media tribes around figures of fearful online charisma. “Social media might be more of an amplifier of other things going on rather than a major driver independently,” Gentzkow argued. “I think it takes some gymnastics to tell a story where it’s all primarily driven by social media, especially when you’re looking at different countries, and across different groups.”

Another study, led by Nejla Asimovic and Joshua Tucker, replicated Gentzkow’s approach in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they found almost precisely the opposite results: the people who stayed on Facebook were, by the end of the study, more positively disposed to their historic out-groups. The authors’ interpretation was that ethnic groups have so little contact in Bosnia that, for some people, social media is essentially the only place where they can form positive images of one another. “To have a replication and have the signs flip like that, it’s pretty stunning,” Bail told me. “It’s a different conversation in every part of the world.”

Nyhan argued that, at least in wealthy Western countries, we might be too heavily discounting the degree to which platforms have responded to criticism: “Everyone is still operating under the view that algorithms simply maximize engagement in a short-term way” with minimal attention to potential externalities. “That might’ve been true when Zuckerberg had seven people working for him, but there are a lot of considerations that go into these rankings now.” He added, “There’s some evidence that, with reverse-chronological feeds”—streams of unwashed content, which some critics argue are less manipulative than algorithmic curation—“people get exposed to more low-quality content, so it’s another case where a very simple notion of ‘algorithms are bad’ doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It doesn’t mean they’re good, it’s just that we don’t know.”

Bail told me that, over all, he was less confident than Haidt that the available evidence lines up clearly against the platforms. “Maybe there’s a slight majority of studies that say that social media is a net negative, at least in the West, and maybe it’s doing some good in the rest of the world.” But, he noted, “Jon will say that science has this expectation of rigor that can’t keep up with the need in the real world—that even if we don’t have the definitive study that creates the historical counterfactual that Facebook is largely responsible for polarization in the U.S., there’s still a lot pointing in that direction, and I think that’s a fair point.” He paused. “It can’t all be randomized control trials.”

Haidt comes across in conversation as searching and sincere, and, during our exchange, he paused several times to suggest that I include a quote from John Stuart Mill on the importance of good-faith debate to moral progress. In that spirit, I asked him what he thought of the argument, elaborated by some of Haidt’s critics, that the problems he described are fundamentally political, social, and economic, and that to blame social media is to search for lost keys under the streetlamp, where the light is better. He agreed that this was the steelman opponent: there were predecessors for cancel culture in de Tocqueville, and anxiety about new media that went back to the time of the printing press. “This is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, and it’s absolutely up to the prosecution—people like me—to argue that, no, this time it’s different. But it’s a civil case! The evidential standard is not ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ as in a criminal case. It’s just a preponderance of the evidence.”

The way scholars weigh the testimony is subject to their disciplinary orientations. Economists and political scientists tend to believe that you can’t even begin to talk about causal dynamics without a randomized controlled trial, whereas sociologists and psychologists are more comfortable drawing inferences on a correlational basis. Haidt believes that conditions are too dire to take the hardheaded, no-reasonable-doubt view. “The preponderance of the evidence is what we use in public health. If there’s an epidemic—when COVID started, suppose all the scientists had said, ‘No, we gotta be so certain before you do anything’? We have to think about what’s actually happening, what’s likeliest to pay off.” He continued, “We have the largest epidemic ever of teen mental health, and there is no other explanation,” he said. “It is a raging public-health epidemic, and the kids themselves say Instagram did it, and we have some evidence, so is it appropriate to say, ‘Nah, you haven’t proven it’?”

This was his attitude across the board. He argued that social media seemed to aggrandize inflammatory posts and to be correlated with a rise in violence; even if only small groups were exposed to fake news, such beliefs might still proliferate in ways that were hard to measure. “In the post-Babel era, what matters is not the average but the dynamics, the contagion, the exponential amplification,” he said. “Small things can grow very quickly, so arguments that Russian disinformation didn’t matter are like COVID arguments that people coming in from China didn’t have contact with a lot of people.” Given the transformative effects of social media, Haidt insisted, it was important to act now, even in the absence of dispositive evidence. “Academic debates play out over decades and are often never resolved, whereas the social-media environment changes year by year,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting around five or ten years for literature reviews.”

Haidt could be accused of question-begging—of assuming the existence of a crisis that the research might or might not ultimately underwrite. Still, the gap between the two sides in this case might not be quite as wide as Haidt thinks. Skeptics of his strongest claims are not saying that there’s no there there. Just because the average YouTube user is unlikely to be led to Stormfront videos, Nyhan told me, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry that some people are watching Stormfront videos; just because echo chambers and foreign misinformation seem to have had effects only at the margins, Gentzkow said, doesn’t mean they’re entirely irrelevant. “There are many questions here where the thing we as researchers are interested in is how social media affects the average person,” Gentzkow told me. “There’s a different set of questions where all you need is a small number of people to change—questions about ethnic violence in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, people on YouTube mobilized to do mass shootings. Much of the evidence broadly makes me skeptical that the average effects are as big as the public discussion thinks they are, but I also think there are cases where a small number of people with very extreme views are able to find each other and connect and act.” He added, “That’s where many of the things I’d be most concerned about lie.”

The same might be said about any phenomenon where the base rate is very low but the stakes are very high, such as teen suicide. “It’s another case where those rare edge cases in terms of total social harm may be enormous. You don’t need many teen-age kids to decide to kill themselves or have serious mental-health outcomes in order for the social harm to be really big.” He added, “Almost none of this work is able to get at those edge-case effects, and we have to be careful that if we do establish that the average effect of something is zero, or small, that it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about it—because we might be missing those extremes.” Jaime Settle, a scholar of political behavior at the College of William & Mary and the author of the book “ Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America ,” noted that Haidt is “farther along the spectrum of what most academics who study this stuff are going to say we have strong evidence for.” But she understood his impulse: “We do have serious problems, and I’m glad Jon wrote the piece, and down the road I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a fuller handle on the role of social media in all of this—there are definitely ways in which social media has changed our politics for the worse.”

It’s tempting to sidestep the question of diagnosis entirely, and to evaluate Haidt’s essay not on the basis of predictive accuracy—whether social media will lead to the destruction of American democracy—but as a set of proposals for what we might do better. If he is wrong, how much damage are his prescriptions likely to do? Haidt, to his great credit, does not indulge in any wishful thinking, and if his diagnosis is largely technological his prescriptions are sociopolitical. Two of his three major suggestions seem useful and have nothing to do with social media: he thinks that we should end closed primaries and that children should be given wide latitude for unsupervised play. His recommendations for social-media reform are, for the most part, uncontroversial: he believes that preteens shouldn’t be on Instagram and that platforms should share their data with outside researchers—proposals that are both likely to be beneficial and not very costly.

It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. “But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it—a broader impact on trust,” he said. “Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can’t trust anything, and other people are being misled about it—well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself.” Nyhan had a similar reaction. “There are genuine questions that are really important, but there’s a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There’s so much focus on sweeping claims that aren’t actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better.” He added, “We’re years into this, and we’re still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It’s totally wild.”

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Tween and teen health

Teens and social media use: What's the impact?

Social media is a term for internet sites and apps that you can use to share content you've created. Social media also lets you respond to content that others post. That can include pictures, text, reactions or comments on posts by others, and links to information.

Online sharing within social media sites helps many people stay in touch with friends or connect with new ones. And that may be more important for teenagers than other age groups. Friendships help teens feel supported and play a role in forming their identities. So, it's only natural to wonder how social media use might affect teens.

Social media is a big part of daily life for lots of teenagers.

How big? A 2022 survey of 13- to 17-year-olds offers a clue. Based on about 1,300 responses, the survey found that 35% of teens use at least one of five social media platforms more than several times a day. The five social media platforms are: YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

Social media doesn't affect all teens the same way. Use of social media is linked with healthy and unhealthy effects on mental health. These effects vary from one teenager to another. Social media effects on mental health depend on things such as:

What a teen sees and does online.
The amount of time spent online.
Psychological factors, such as maturity level and any preexisting mental health conditions.
Personal life circumstances, including cultural, social and economic factors.

Here are the general pros and cons of teen social media use, along with tips for parents.

Healthy social media

Social media lets teens create online identities, chat with others and build social networks. These networks can provide teens with support from other people who have hobbies or experiences in common. This type of support especially may help teens who:

Lack social support offline or are lonely.
Are going through a stressful time.
Belong to groups that often get marginalized, such as racial minorities, the LGBTQ community and those who are differently abled.
Have long-term medical conditions.

Sometimes, social media platforms help teens:

Express themselves.
Connect with other teens locally and across long distances.
Learn how other teens cope with challenging life situations and mental health conditions.
View or take part in moderated chat forums that encourage talking openly about topics such as mental health.
Ask for help or seek healthcare for symptoms of mental health conditions.

These healthy effects of social media can help teens in general. They also may help teens who are prone to depression stay connected to others. And social media that's humorous or distracting may help a struggling teen cope with a challenging day.

Unhealthy social media

Social media use may have negative effects on some teens. It might:

Distract from homework, exercise and family activities.
Disrupt sleep.
Lead to information that is biased or not correct.
Become a means to spread rumors or share too much personal information.
Lead some teens to form views about other people's lives or bodies that aren't realistic.
Expose some teens to online predators, who might try to exploit or extort them.
Expose some teens to cyberbullying, which can raise the risk of mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression.

What's more, certain content related to risk-taking, and negative posts or interactions on social media, have been linked with self-harm and rarely, death.

The risks of social media use are linked with various factors. One may be how much time teens spend on these platforms.

In a study focusing on 12- to 15-year-olds in the United States, spending three hours a day using social media was linked to a higher risk of mental health concerns. That study was based on data collected in 2013 and 2014 from more than 6,500 participants.

Another study looked at data on more than 12,000 teens in England between the ages of 13 to 16. The researchers found that using social media more than three times a day predicted poor mental health and well-being in teens.

But not all research has found a link between time spent on social media and mental health risks in teens.

How teens use social media also might determine its impact. For instance, viewing certain types of content may raise some teens' mental health risks. This could include content that depicts:

Illegal acts.
Self-harm or harm to other people.
Encouragement of habits tied to eating disorders, such as purging or restrictive eating.

These types of content may be even more risky for teens who already have a mental health condition. Being exposed to discrimination, hate or cyberbullying on social media also can raise the risk of anxiety or depression.

What teens share about themselves on social media also matters.

With the teenage brain, it's common to make a choice before thinking it through. So, teens might post something when they're angry or upset, and regret it later. That's known as stress posting.

Teens who post content also are at risk of sharing sexual photos or highly personal stories. This can lead to teens being bullied, harassed or even blackmailed.

Protecting your teen

You can take steps to help your teens use social media responsibly and limit some of the possible negative effects.

Use these tips:

Set rules and limits as needed. This helps prevent social media from getting in the way of activities, sleep, meals or homework.

For example, you could make a rule about not using social media until homework is done. Or you could set a daily time limit for social media use.

You also could choose to keep social media off-limits during certain times. These times might include during family meals and an hour before bed.

Set an example by following these rules yourself. And let your teen know what the consequences will be if your rules aren't followed.

Manage any challenging behaviors. If your teen's social media use starts to challenge your rules or your sense of what's appropriate, talk with your teen about it. You also could connect with parents of your teen's friends or take a look at your teen's internet history.
Turn on privacy settings. This can help keep your teen from sharing personal information or data that your teen didn't mean to share. Each of your teen's social media accounts likely has privacy setting that can be changed.

Monitor your teen's accounts. The American Psychological Association recommends you regularly review your child's social media use during the early teen years.

One way to monitor is to follow or "friend" your child's social accounts. As your teen gets older, you can choose to monitor your teen's social media less. Your teen's maturity level can help guide your decision.

Have regular talks with your teen about social media. These talks give you chances to ask how social media has been making your teen feel. Encourage your teen to let you know if something online worries or bothers your teen.

Regular talks offer you chances to give your child advice about social media too. For example, you can teach your teen to question whether content is accurate. You also can explain that social media is full of images about beauty and lifestyle that are not realistic.

Be a role model for your teen. You might want to tell your child about your own social media habits. That can help you set a good example and keep your regular talks from being one-sided.

Explain what's not OK. Remind your teen that it's hurtful to gossip, spread rumors, bully or harm someone's reputation — online or otherwise.

Also remind your teen not to share personal information with strangers online. This includes people's addresses, telephone numbers, passwords, and bank or credit card numbers.

Encourage face-to-face contact with friends. This is even more important for teens prone to social anxiety.

Talk to your child's healthcare professional if you think your teen has symptoms of anxiety, depression or other mental health concerns related to social media use. Also talk with your child's care professional if your teen has any of the following symptoms:

Uses social media even when wanting to stop.
Uses it so much that school, sleep, activities or relationships suffer.
Often spends more time on social platforms than you intended.
Lies in order to use social media.

Your teen might be referred to a mental healthcare professional who can help.

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Hagan JF, et al., eds. Promoting the healthy and safe use of social media. In: Bright Futures: Guidelines for Health Supervision of Infants, Children, and Adolescents. 4th ed. https://publications.aap.org/pediatriccare. American Academy of Pediatrics; 2017. Accessed Oct. 3, 2023.
Social media can help connect: Research-based tips from pediatricians for families. Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health. https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-children/center-of-excellence-on-social-media-and-youth-mental-health/. Accessed Oct. 3, 2023.
Health advisory on social media use in adolescence. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advisory-adolescent-social-media-use. Accessed Oct. 3, 2023.
Social media and teens. American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Families/FFF-Guide/Social-Media-and-Teens-100.aspx. Accessed Oct. 3, 2023.
Social media and youth mental health: The U.S. surgeon general's advisory. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/youth-mental-health/social-media/index.html. Accessed Oct. 3, 2023.
Teens, social media and technology 2022. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology-2022/. Accessed Oct. 3, 2023.
Popat A, et al. Exploring adolescents' perspectives on social media and mental health and well-being — A qualitative literature review. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 2023; doi:10.1177/13591045221092884.
Valkenburg PM, et al. Social media use and its impact on adolescent mental health: An umbrella review of the evidence. Current Opinion in Psychology. 2022; doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.08.017.
Berger MN, et al. Social media use and health and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth: Systematic Review. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2022; doi:10.2196/38449.
Self-Harm. Pediatric Patient Education. https://publications.aap.org/patiented. Accessed Oct. 3, 2023.
Liu M, et al. Time spent on social media and risk of depression in adolescents: A dose-response meta-analysis. 2022; doi:10.3390/ijerph19095164.
Coyne SM, et al. Does time spent using social media impact mental health? An eight year longitudinal study. Computers in Human Behavior. 2020; doi:10.1016/j.chb.2019.106160.
Viner RM, et al. Roles of cyberbullying, sleep, and physical activity in mediating the effects of social media use on mental health and wellbeing among young people in England: A secondary analysis of longitudinal data. The Lancet. Child & Adolescent Health. 2019; doi:10.1016/S2352-4642(19)30186-5.
Riehm KE, et al. Associations between time spent using social media and internalizing and externalizing problems among US youth. JAMA Psychiatry. 2019; doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.2325.
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student opinion

How Does Social Media Affect Your Mental Health?

Facebook has delayed the development of an Instagram app for children amid questions about its harmful effects on young people’s mental health. Does social media have an impact on your well-being?

By Nicole Daniels

What is your relationship with social media like? Which platforms do you spend the most time on? Which do you stay away from? How often do you log on?

What do you notice about your mental health and well-being when spending time on social networks?

In “ Facebook Delays Instagram App for Users 13 and Younger ,” Adam Satariano and Ryan Mac write about the findings of an internal study conducted by Facebook and what they mean for the Instagram Kids app that the company was developing:

Facebook said on Monday that it had paused development of an Instagram Kids service that would be tailored for children 13 years old or younger, as the social network increasingly faces questions about the app’s effect on young people’s mental health. The pullback preceded a congressional hearing this week about internal research conducted by Facebook , and reported in The Wall Street Journal , that showed the company knew of the harmful mental health effects that Instagram was having on teenage girls. The revelations have set off a public relations crisis for the Silicon Valley company and led to a fresh round of calls for new regulation. Facebook said it still wanted to build an Instagram product intended for children that would have a more “age appropriate experience,” but was postponing the plans in the face of criticism.

The article continues:

With Instagram Kids, Facebook had argued that young people were using the photo-sharing app anyway, despite age-requirement rules, so it would be better to develop a version more suitable for them. Facebook said the “kids” app was intended for ages 10 to 12 and would require parental permission to join, forgo ads and carry more age-appropriate content and features. Parents would be able to control what accounts their child followed. YouTube, which Google owns, has released a children’s version of its app. But since BuzzFeed broke the news this year that Facebook was working on the app, the company has faced scrutiny. Policymakers, regulators, child safety groups and consumer rights groups have argued that it hooks children on the app at a younger age rather than protecting them from problems with the service, including child predatory grooming, bullying and body shaming.

The article goes on to quote Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram:

Mr. Mosseri said on Monday that the “the project leaked way before we knew what it would be” and that the company had “few answers” for the public at the time. Opposition to Facebook’s plans gained momentum this month when The Journal published articles based on leaked internal documents that showed Facebook knew about many of the harms it was causing. Facebook’s internal research showed that Instagram, in particular, had caused teen girls to feel worse about their bodies and led to increased rates of anxiety and depression, even while company executives publicly tried to minimize the app’s downsides.

But concerns about the effect of social media on young people go beyond Instagram Kids, the article notes:

A children’s version of Instagram would not fix more systemic problems, said Al Mik, a spokesman for 5Rights Foundation, a London group focused on digital rights issues for children. The group published a report in July showing that children as young as 13 were targeted within 24 hours of creating an account with harmful content, including material related to eating disorders, extreme diets, sexualized imagery, body shaming, self-harm and suicide. “Big Tobacco understood that the younger you got to someone, the easier you could get them addicted to become a lifelong user,” Doug Peterson, Nebraska’s attorney general, said in an interview. “I see some comparisons to social media platforms.” In May, attorneys general from 44 states and jurisdictions had signed a letter to Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, asking him to end plans for building an Instagram app for children. American policymakers should pass tougher laws to restrict how tech platforms target children, said Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a Boston-based group that was part of an international coalition of children’s and consumer groups opposed to the new app. Last year, Britain adopted an Age Appropriate Design Code , which requires added privacy protections for digital services used by people under the age of 18.

Students, read the entire article , then tell us:

Do you think Facebook made the right decision in halting the development of the Instagram Kids app? Do you think there should be social media apps for children 13 and younger? Why or why not?

What is your reaction to the research that found that Instagram can have harmful mental health effects on teenagers, particularly teenage girls? Have you experienced body image issues, anxiety or depression tied to your use of the app? How do you think social media affects your mental health?

What has your experience been on different social media apps? Are there apps that have a more positive or negative effect on your well-being? What do you think could explain these differences?

Have you ever been targeted with inappropriate or harmful content on Instagram or other social media apps? What responsibility do you think social media companies have to address these issues? Do you think there should be more protections in place for users under 18? Why or why not?

What does healthy social media engagement look like for you? What habits do you have around social media that you feel proud of? What behaviors would you like to change? How involved are your parents in your social media use? How involved do you think they should be?

If you were in charge of making Instagram, or another social media app, safer for teenagers, what changes would you make?

Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column . Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Nicole Daniels joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2019 after working in museum education, curriculum writing and bilingual education. More about Nicole Daniels

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Science News

Social media harms teens’ mental health, mounting evidence shows. what now.

Understanding what is going on in teens’ minds is necessary for targeted policy suggestions

A teen scrolls through social media alone on her phone.

Most teens use social media, often for hours on end. Some social scientists are confident that such use is harming their mental health. Now they want to pinpoint what explains the link.

Carol Yepes/Getty Images

Increasing rigor

Concerns over the effects of social media use in children have been circulating for years, resulting in a massive body of scientific literature. But those mostly correlational studies could not show if teen social media use was harming mental health or if teens with mental health problems were using more social media.

Moreover, the findings from such studies were often inconclusive, or the effects on mental health so small as to be inconsequential. In one study that received considerable media attention, psychologists Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski combined data from three surveys to see if they could find a link between technology use, including social media, and reduced well-being. The duo gauged the well-being of over 355,000 teenagers by focusing on questions around depression, suicidal thinking and self-esteem.

Digital technology use was associated with a slight decrease in adolescent well-being , Orben, now of the University of Cambridge, and Przybylski, of the University of Oxford, reported in 2019 in Nature Human Behaviour . But the duo downplayed that finding, noting that researchers have observed similar drops in adolescent well-being associated with drinking milk, going to the movies or eating potatoes.

Holes have begun to appear in that narrative thanks to newer, more rigorous studies.

In one longitudinal study, researchers — including Orben and Przybylski — used survey data on social media use and well-being from over 17,400 teens and young adults to look at how individuals’ responses to a question gauging life satisfaction changed between 2011 and 2018. And they dug into how the responses varied by gender, age and time spent on social media.

Social media use was associated with a drop in well-being among teens during certain developmental periods, chiefly puberty and young adulthood, the team reported in 2022 in Nature Communications . That translated to lower well-being scores around ages 11 to 13 for girls and ages 14 to 15 for boys. Both groups also reported a drop in well-being around age 19. Moreover, among the older teens, the team found evidence for the Goldilocks Hypothesis: the idea that both too much and too little time spent on social media can harm mental health.

“There’s hardly any effect if you look over everybody. But if you look at specific age groups, at particularly what [Orben] calls ‘windows of sensitivity’ … you see these clear effects,” says L.J. Shrum, a consumer psychologist at HEC Paris who was not involved with this research. His review of studies related to teen social media use and mental health is forthcoming in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

Cause and effect

That longitudinal study hints at causation, researchers say. But one of the clearest ways to pin down cause and effect is through natural or quasi-experiments. For these in-the-wild experiments, researchers must identify situations where the rollout of a societal “treatment” is staggered across space and time. They can then compare outcomes among members of the group who received the treatment to those still in the queue — the control group.

That was the approach Makarin and his team used in their study of Facebook. The researchers homed in on the staggered rollout of Facebook across 775 college campuses from 2004 to 2006. They combined that rollout data with student responses to the National College Health Assessment, a widely used survey of college students’ mental and physical health.

The team then sought to understand if those survey questions captured diagnosable mental health problems. Specifically, they had roughly 500 undergraduate students respond to questions both in the National College Health Assessment and in validated screening tools for depression and anxiety. They found that mental health scores on the assessment predicted scores on the screenings. That suggested that a drop in well-being on the college survey was a good proxy for a corresponding increase in diagnosable mental health disorders.

Compared with campuses that had not yet gained access to Facebook, college campuses with Facebook experienced a 2 percentage point increase in the number of students who met the diagnostic criteria for anxiety or depression, the team found.

When it comes to showing a causal link between social media use in teens and worse mental health, “that study really is the crown jewel right now,” says Cunningham, who was not involved in that research.

A need for nuance

The social media landscape today is vastly different than the landscape of 20 years ago. Facebook is now optimized for maximum addiction, Shrum says, and other newer platforms, such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, have since copied and built on those features. Paired with the ubiquity of social media in general, the negative effects on mental health may well be larger now.

Moreover, social media research tends to focus on young adults — an easier cohort to study than minors. That needs to change, Cunningham says. “Most of us are worried about our high school kids and younger.”

And so, researchers must pivot accordingly. Crucially, simple comparisons of social media users and nonusers no longer make sense. As Orben and Przybylski’s 2022 work suggested, a teen not on social media might well feel worse than one who briefly logs on.

Researchers must also dig into why, and under what circumstances, social media use can harm mental health, Cunningham says. Explanations for this link abound. For instance, social media is thought to crowd out other activities or increase people’s likelihood of comparing themselves unfavorably with others. But big data studies, with their reliance on existing surveys and statistical analyses, cannot address those deeper questions. “These kinds of papers, there’s nothing you can really ask … to find these plausible mechanisms,” Cunningham says.

One ongoing effort to understand social media use from this more nuanced vantage point is the SMART Schools project out of the University of Birmingham in England. Pedagogical expert Victoria Goodyear and her team are comparing mental and physical health outcomes among children who attend schools that have restricted cell phone use to those attending schools without such a policy. The researchers described the protocol of that study of 30 schools and over 1,000 students in the July BMJ Open.

Goodyear and colleagues are also combining that natural experiment with qualitative research. They met with 36 five-person focus groups each consisting of all students, all parents or all educators at six of those schools. The team hopes to learn how students use their phones during the day, how usage practices make students feel, and what the various parties think of restrictions on cell phone use during the school day.

Talking to teens and those in their orbit is the best way to get at the mechanisms by which social media influences well-being — for better or worse, Goodyear says. Moving beyond big data to this more personal approach, however, takes considerable time and effort. “Social media has increased in pace and momentum very, very quickly,” she says. “And research takes a long time to catch up with that process.”

Until that catch-up occurs, though, researchers cannot dole out much advice. “What guidance could we provide to young people, parents and schools to help maintain the positives of social media use?” Goodyear asks. “There’s not concrete evidence yet.”

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Systematic review
Published: 19 February 2024

‘It depends’: what 86 systematic reviews tell us about what strategies to use to support the use of research in clinical practice

Annette Boaz ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0557-1294 1 ,
Juan Baeza 2 ,
Alec Fraser ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1121-1551 2 &
Erik Persson 3

Implementation Science volume 19 , Article number: 15 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

1940 Accesses

70 Altmetric

The gap between research findings and clinical practice is well documented and a range of strategies have been developed to support the implementation of research into clinical practice. The objective of this study was to update and extend two previous reviews of systematic reviews of strategies designed to implement research evidence into clinical practice.

We developed a comprehensive systematic literature search strategy based on the terms used in the previous reviews to identify studies that looked explicitly at interventions designed to turn research evidence into practice. The search was performed in June 2022 in four electronic databases: Medline, Embase, Cochrane and Epistemonikos. We searched from January 2010 up to June 2022 and applied no language restrictions. Two independent reviewers appraised the quality of included studies using a quality assessment checklist. To reduce the risk of bias, papers were excluded following discussion between all members of the team. Data were synthesised using descriptive and narrative techniques to identify themes and patterns linked to intervention strategies, targeted behaviours, study settings and study outcomes.

We identified 32 reviews conducted between 2010 and 2022. The reviews are mainly of multi-faceted interventions ( n = 20) although there are reviews focusing on single strategies (ICT, educational, reminders, local opinion leaders, audit and feedback, social media and toolkits). The majority of reviews report strategies achieving small impacts (normally on processes of care). There is much less evidence that these strategies have shifted patient outcomes. Furthermore, a lot of nuance lies behind these headline findings, and this is increasingly commented upon in the reviews themselves.

Combined with the two previous reviews, 86 systematic reviews of strategies to increase the implementation of research into clinical practice have been identified. We need to shift the emphasis away from isolating individual and multi-faceted interventions to better understanding and building more situated, relational and organisational capability to support the use of research in clinical practice. This will involve drawing on a wider range of research perspectives (including social science) in primary studies and diversifying the types of synthesis undertaken to include approaches such as realist synthesis which facilitate exploration of the context in which strategies are employed.

Peer Review reports

Contribution to the literature

Considerable time and money is invested in implementing and evaluating strategies to increase the implementation of research into clinical practice.

The growing body of evidence is not providing the anticipated clear lessons to support improved implementation.

Instead what is needed is better understanding and building more situated, relational and organisational capability to support the use of research in clinical practice.

This would involve a more central role in implementation science for a wider range of perspectives, especially from the social, economic, political and behavioural sciences and for greater use of different types of synthesis, such as realist synthesis.

The gap between research findings and clinical practice is well documented and a range of interventions has been developed to increase the implementation of research into clinical practice [ 1 , 2 ]. In recent years researchers have worked to improve the consistency in the ways in which these interventions (often called strategies) are described to support their evaluation. One notable development has been the emergence of Implementation Science as a field focusing explicitly on “the scientific study of methods to promote the systematic uptake of research findings and other evidence-based practices into routine practice” ([ 3 ] p. 1). The work of implementation science focuses on closing, or at least narrowing, the gap between research and practice. One contribution has been to map existing interventions, identifying 73 discreet strategies to support research implementation [ 4 ] which have been grouped into 9 clusters [ 5 ]. The authors note that they have not considered the evidence of effectiveness of the individual strategies and that a next step is to understand better which strategies perform best in which combinations and for what purposes [ 4 ]. Other authors have noted that there is also scope to learn more from other related fields of study such as policy implementation [ 6 ] and to draw on methods designed to support the evaluation of complex interventions [ 7 ].

The increase in activity designed to support the implementation of research into practice and improvements in reporting provided the impetus for an update of a review of systematic reviews of the effectiveness of interventions designed to support the use of research in clinical practice [ 8 ] which was itself an update of the review conducted by Grimshaw and colleagues in 2001. The 2001 review [ 9 ] identified 41 reviews considering a range of strategies including educational interventions, audit and feedback, computerised decision support to financial incentives and combined interventions. The authors concluded that all the interventions had the potential to promote the uptake of evidence in practice, although no one intervention seemed to be more effective than the others in all settings. They concluded that combined interventions were more likely to be effective than single interventions. The 2011 review identified a further 13 systematic reviews containing 313 discrete primary studies. Consistent with the previous review, four main strategy types were identified: audit and feedback; computerised decision support; opinion leaders; and multi-faceted interventions (MFIs). Nine of the reviews reported on MFIs. The review highlighted the small effects of single interventions such as audit and feedback, computerised decision support and opinion leaders. MFIs claimed an improvement in effectiveness over single interventions, although effect sizes remained small to moderate and this improvement in effectiveness relating to MFIs has been questioned in a subsequent review [ 10 ]. In updating the review, we anticipated a larger pool of reviews and an opportunity to consolidate learning from more recent systematic reviews of interventions.

This review updates and extends our previous review of systematic reviews of interventions designed to implement research evidence into clinical practice. To identify potentially relevant peer-reviewed research papers, we developed a comprehensive systematic literature search strategy based on the terms used in the Grimshaw et al. [ 9 ] and Boaz, Baeza and Fraser [ 8 ] overview articles. To ensure optimal retrieval, our search strategy was refined with support from an expert university librarian, considering the ongoing improvements in the development of search filters for systematic reviews since our first review [ 11 ]. We also wanted to include technology-related terms (e.g. apps, algorithms, machine learning, artificial intelligence) to find studies that explored interventions based on the use of technological innovations as mechanistic tools for increasing the use of evidence into practice (see Additional file 1 : Appendix A for full search strategy).

The search was performed in June 2022 in the following electronic databases: Medline, Embase, Cochrane and Epistemonikos. We searched for articles published since the 2011 review. We searched from January 2010 up to June 2022 and applied no language restrictions. Reference lists of relevant papers were also examined.

We uploaded the results using EPPI-Reviewer, a web-based tool that facilitated semi-automation of the screening process and removal of duplicate studies. We made particular use of a priority screening function to reduce screening workload and avoid ‘data deluge’ [ 12 ]. Through machine learning, one reviewer screened a smaller number of records ( n = 1200) to train the software to predict whether a given record was more likely to be relevant or irrelevant, thus pulling the relevant studies towards the beginning of the screening process. This automation did not replace manual work but helped the reviewer to identify eligible studies more quickly. During the selection process, we included studies that looked explicitly at interventions designed to turn research evidence into practice. Studies were included if they met the following pre-determined inclusion criteria:

The study was a systematic review

Search terms were included

Focused on the implementation of research evidence into practice

The methodological quality of the included studies was assessed as part of the review

Study populations included healthcare providers and patients. The EPOC taxonomy [ 13 ] was used to categorise the strategies. The EPOC taxonomy has four domains: delivery arrangements, financial arrangements, governance arrangements and implementation strategies. The implementation strategies domain includes 20 strategies targeted at healthcare workers. Numerous EPOC strategies were assessed in the review including educational strategies, local opinion leaders, reminders, ICT-focused approaches and audit and feedback. Some strategies that did not fit easily within the EPOC categories were also included. These were social media strategies and toolkits, and multi-faceted interventions (MFIs) (see Table 2 ). Some systematic reviews included comparisons of different interventions while other reviews compared one type of intervention against a control group. Outcomes related to improvements in health care processes or patient well-being. Numerous individual study types (RCT, CCT, BA, ITS) were included within the systematic reviews.

We excluded papers that:

Focused on changing patient rather than provider behaviour

Had no demonstrable outcomes

Made unclear or no reference to research evidence

The last of these criteria was sometimes difficult to judge, and there was considerable discussion amongst the research team as to whether the link between research evidence and practice was sufficiently explicit in the interventions analysed. As we discussed in the previous review [ 8 ] in the field of healthcare, the principle of evidence-based practice is widely acknowledged and tools to change behaviour such as guidelines are often seen to be an implicit codification of evidence, despite the fact that this is not always the case.

Reviewers employed a two-stage process to select papers for inclusion. First, all titles and abstracts were screened by one reviewer to determine whether the study met the inclusion criteria. Two papers [ 14 , 15 ] were identified that fell just before the 2010 cut-off. As they were not identified in the searches for the first review [ 8 ] they were included and progressed to assessment. Each paper was rated as include, exclude or maybe. The full texts of 111 relevant papers were assessed independently by at least two authors. To reduce the risk of bias, papers were excluded following discussion between all members of the team. 32 papers met the inclusion criteria and proceeded to data extraction. The study selection procedure is documented in a PRISMA literature flow diagram (see Fig. 1 ). We were able to include French, Spanish and Portuguese papers in the selection reflecting the language skills in the study team, but none of the papers identified met the inclusion criteria. Other non- English language papers were excluded.

PRISMA flow diagram. Source: authors

One reviewer extracted data on strategy type, number of included studies, local, target population, effectiveness and scope of impact from the included studies. Two reviewers then independently read each paper and noted key findings and broad themes of interest which were then discussed amongst the wider authorial team. Two independent reviewers appraised the quality of included studies using a Quality Assessment Checklist based on Oxman and Guyatt [ 16 ] and Francke et al. [ 17 ]. Each study was rated a quality score ranging from 1 (extensive flaws) to 7 (minimal flaws) (see Additional file 2 : Appendix B). All disagreements were resolved through discussion. Studies were not excluded in this updated overview based on methodological quality as we aimed to reflect the full extent of current research into this topic.

The extracted data were synthesised using descriptive and narrative techniques to identify themes and patterns in the data linked to intervention strategies, targeted behaviours, study settings and study outcomes.

Thirty-two studies were included in the systematic review. Table 1. provides a detailed overview of the included systematic reviews comprising reference, strategy type, quality score, number of included studies, local, target population, effectiveness and scope of impact (see Table 1. at the end of the manuscript). Overall, the quality of the studies was high. Twenty-three studies scored 7, six studies scored 6, one study scored 5, one study scored 4 and one study scored 3. The primary focus of the review was on reviews of effectiveness studies, but a small number of reviews did include data from a wider range of methods including qualitative studies which added to the analysis in the papers [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ]. The majority of reviews report strategies achieving small impacts (normally on processes of care). There is much less evidence that these strategies have shifted patient outcomes. In this section, we discuss the different EPOC-defined implementation strategies in turn. Interestingly, we found only two ‘new’ approaches in this review that did not fit into the existing EPOC approaches. These are a review focused on the use of social media and a review considering toolkits. In addition to single interventions, we also discuss multi-faceted interventions. These were the most common intervention approach overall. A summary is provided in Table 2 .

Educational strategies

The overview identified three systematic reviews focusing on educational strategies. Grudniewicz et al. [ 22 ] explored the effectiveness of printed educational materials on primary care physician knowledge, behaviour and patient outcomes and concluded they were not effective in any of these aspects. Koota, Kääriäinen and Melender [ 23 ] focused on educational interventions promoting evidence-based practice among emergency room/accident and emergency nurses and found that interventions involving face-to-face contact led to significant or highly significant effects on patient benefits and emergency nurses’ knowledge, skills and behaviour. Interventions using written self-directed learning materials also led to significant improvements in nurses’ knowledge of evidence-based practice. Although the quality of the studies was high, the review primarily included small studies with low response rates, and many of them relied on self-assessed outcomes; consequently, the strength of the evidence for these outcomes is modest. Wu et al. [ 20 ] questioned if educational interventions aimed at nurses to support the implementation of evidence-based practice improve patient outcomes. Although based on evaluation projects and qualitative data, their results also suggest that positive changes on patient outcomes can be made following the implementation of specific evidence-based approaches (or projects). The differing positive outcomes for educational strategies aimed at nurses might indicate that the target audience is important.

Local opinion leaders

Flodgren et al. [ 24 ] was the only systemic review focusing solely on opinion leaders. The review found that local opinion leaders alone, or in combination with other interventions, can be effective in promoting evidence‐based practice, but this varies both within and between studies and the effect on patient outcomes is uncertain. The review found that, overall, any intervention involving opinion leaders probably improves healthcare professionals’ compliance with evidence-based practice but varies within and across studies. However, how opinion leaders had an impact could not be determined because of insufficient details were provided, illustrating that reporting specific details in published studies is important if diffusion of effective methods of increasing evidence-based practice is to be spread across a system. The usefulness of this review is questionable because it cannot provide evidence of what is an effective opinion leader, whether teams of opinion leaders or a single opinion leader are most effective, or the most effective methods used by opinion leaders.

Pantoja et al. [ 26 ] was the only systemic review focusing solely on manually generated reminders delivered on paper included in the overview. The review explored how these affected professional practice and patient outcomes. The review concluded that manually generated reminders delivered on paper as a single intervention probably led to small to moderate increases in adherence to clinical recommendations, and they could be used as a single quality improvement intervention. However, the authors indicated that this intervention would make little or no difference to patient outcomes. The authors state that such a low-tech intervention may be useful in low- and middle-income countries where paper records are more likely to be the norm.

ICT-focused approaches

The three ICT-focused reviews [ 14 , 27 , 28 ] showed mixed results. Jamal, McKenzie and Clark [ 14 ] explored the impact of health information technology on the quality of medical and health care. They examined the impact of electronic health record, computerised provider order-entry, or decision support system. This showed a positive improvement in adherence to evidence-based guidelines but not to patient outcomes. The number of studies included in the review was low and so a conclusive recommendation could not be reached based on this review. Similarly, Brown et al. [ 28 ] found that technology-enabled knowledge translation interventions may improve knowledge of health professionals, but all eight studies raised concerns of bias. The De Angelis et al. [ 27 ] review was more promising, reporting that ICT can be a good way of disseminating clinical practice guidelines but conclude that it is unclear which type of ICT method is the most effective.

Audit and feedback

Sykes, McAnuff and Kolehmainen [ 29 ] examined whether audit and feedback were effective in dementia care and concluded that it remains unclear which ingredients of audit and feedback are successful as the reviewed papers illustrated large variations in the effectiveness of interventions using audit and feedback.

Non-EPOC listed strategies: social media, toolkits

There were two new (non-EPOC listed) intervention types identified in this review compared to the 2011 review — fewer than anticipated. We categorised a third — ‘care bundles’ [ 36 ] as a multi-faceted intervention due to its description in practice and a fourth — ‘Technology Enhanced Knowledge Transfer’ [ 28 ] was classified as an ICT-focused approach. The first new strategy was identified in Bhatt et al.’s [ 30 ] systematic review of the use of social media for the dissemination of clinical practice guidelines. They reported that the use of social media resulted in a significant improvement in knowledge and compliance with evidence-based guidelines compared with more traditional methods. They noted that a wide selection of different healthcare professionals and patients engaged with this type of social media and its global reach may be significant for low- and middle-income countries. This review was also noteworthy for developing a simple stepwise method for using social media for the dissemination of clinical practice guidelines. However, it is debatable whether social media can be classified as an intervention or just a different way of delivering an intervention. For example, the review discussed involving opinion leaders and patient advocates through social media. However, this was a small review that included only five studies, so further research in this new area is needed. Yamada et al. [ 31 ] draw on 39 studies to explore the application of toolkits, 18 of which had toolkits embedded within larger KT interventions, and 21 of which evaluated toolkits as standalone interventions. The individual component strategies of the toolkits were highly variable though the authors suggest that they align most closely with educational strategies. The authors conclude that toolkits as either standalone strategies or as part of MFIs hold some promise for facilitating evidence use in practice but caution that the quality of many of the primary studies included is considered weak limiting these findings.

Multi-faceted interventions

The majority of the systematic reviews ( n = 20) reported on more than one intervention type. Some of these systematic reviews focus exclusively on multi-faceted interventions, whilst others compare different single or combined interventions aimed at achieving similar outcomes in particular settings. While these two approaches are often described in a similar way, they are actually quite distinct from each other as the former report how multiple strategies may be strategically combined in pursuance of an agreed goal, whilst the latter report how different strategies may be incidentally used in sometimes contrasting settings in the pursuance of similar goals. Ariyo et al. [ 35 ] helpfully summarise five key elements often found in effective MFI strategies in LMICs — but which may also be transferrable to HICs. First, effective MFIs encourage a multi-disciplinary approach acknowledging the roles played by different professional groups to collectively incorporate evidence-informed practice. Second, they utilise leadership drawing on a wide set of clinical and non-clinical actors including managers and even government officials. Third, multiple types of educational practices are utilised — including input from patients as stakeholders in some cases. Fourth, protocols, checklists and bundles are used — most effectively when local ownership is encouraged. Finally, most MFIs included an emphasis on monitoring and evaluation [ 35 ]. In contrast, other studies offer little information about the nature of the different MFI components of included studies which makes it difficult to extrapolate much learning from them in relation to why or how MFIs might affect practice (e.g. [ 28 , 38 ]). Ultimately, context matters, which some review authors argue makes it difficult to say with real certainty whether single or MFI strategies are superior (e.g. [ 21 , 27 ]). Taking all the systematic reviews together we may conclude that MFIs appear to be more likely to generate positive results than single interventions (e.g. [ 34 , 45 ]) though other reviews should make us cautious (e.g. [ 32 , 43 ]).

While multi-faceted interventions still seem to be more effective than single-strategy interventions, there were important distinctions between how the results of reviews of MFIs are interpreted in this review as compared to the previous reviews [ 8 , 9 ], reflecting greater nuance and debate in the literature. This was particularly noticeable where the effectiveness of MFIs was compared to single strategies, reflecting developments widely discussed in previous studies [ 10 ]. We found that most systematic reviews are bounded by their clinical, professional, spatial, system, or setting criteria and often seek to draw out implications for the implementation of evidence in their areas of specific interest (such as nursing or acute care). Frequently this means combining all relevant studies to explore the respective foci of each systematic review. Therefore, most reviews we categorised as MFIs actually include highly variable numbers and combinations of intervention strategies and highly heterogeneous original study designs. This makes statistical analyses of the type used by Squires et al. [ 10 ] on the three reviews in their paper not possible. Further, it also makes extrapolating findings and commenting on broad themes complex and difficult. This may suggest that future research should shift its focus from merely examining ‘what works’ to ‘what works where and what works for whom’ — perhaps pointing to the value of realist approaches to these complex review topics [ 48 , 49 ] and other more theory-informed approaches [ 50 ].

Some reviews have a relatively small number of studies (i.e. fewer than 10) and the authors are often understandably reluctant to engage with wider debates about the implications of their findings. Other larger studies do engage in deeper discussions about internal comparisons of findings across included studies and also contextualise these in wider debates. Some of the most informative studies (e.g. [ 35 , 40 ]) move beyond EPOC categories and contextualise MFIs within wider systems thinking and implementation theory. This distinction between MFIs and single interventions can actually be very useful as it offers lessons about the contexts in which individual interventions might have bounded effectiveness (i.e. educational interventions for individual change). Taken as a whole, this may also then help in terms of how and when to conjoin single interventions into effective MFIs.

In the two previous reviews, a consistent finding was that MFIs were more effective than single interventions [ 8 , 9 ]. However, like Squires et al. [ 10 ] this overview is more equivocal on this important issue. There are four points which may help account for the differences in findings in this regard. Firstly, the diversity of the systematic reviews in terms of clinical topic or setting is an important factor. Secondly, there is heterogeneity of the studies within the included systematic reviews themselves. Thirdly, there is a lack of consistency with regards to the definition and strategies included within of MFIs. Finally, there are epistemological differences across the papers and the reviews. This means that the results that are presented depend on the methods used to measure, report, and synthesise them. For instance, some reviews highlight that education strategies can be useful to improve provider understanding — but without wider organisational or system-level change, they may struggle to deliver sustained transformation [ 19 , 44 ].

It is also worth highlighting the importance of the theory of change underlying the different interventions. Where authors of the systematic reviews draw on theory, there is space to discuss/explain findings. We note a distinction between theoretical and atheoretical systematic review discussion sections. Atheoretical reviews tend to present acontextual findings (for instance, one study found very positive results for one intervention, and this gets highlighted in the abstract) whilst theoretically informed reviews attempt to contextualise and explain patterns within the included studies. Theory-informed systematic reviews seem more likely to offer more profound and useful insights (see [ 19 , 35 , 40 , 43 , 45 ]). We find that the most insightful systematic reviews of MFIs engage in theoretical generalisation — they attempt to go beyond the data of individual studies and discuss the wider implications of the findings of the studies within their reviews drawing on implementation theory. At the same time, they highlight the active role of context and the wider relational and system-wide issues linked to implementation. It is these types of investigations that can help providers further develop evidence-based practice.

This overview has identified a small, but insightful set of papers that interrogate and help theorise why, how, for whom, and in which circumstances it might be the case that MFIs are superior (see [ 19 , 35 , 40 ] once more). At the level of this overview — and in most of the systematic reviews included — it appears to be the case that MFIs struggle with the question of attribution. In addition, there are other important elements that are often unmeasured, or unreported (e.g. costs of the intervention — see [ 40 ]). Finally, the stronger systematic reviews [ 19 , 35 , 40 , 43 , 45 ] engage with systems issues, human agency and context [ 18 ] in a way that was not evident in the systematic reviews identified in the previous reviews [ 8 , 9 ]. The earlier reviews lacked any theory of change that might explain why MFIs might be more effective than single ones — whereas now some systematic reviews do this, which enables them to conclude that sometimes single interventions can still be more effective.

As Nilsen et al. ([ 6 ] p. 7) note ‘Study findings concerning the effectiveness of various approaches are continuously synthesized and assembled in systematic reviews’. We may have gone as far as we can in understanding the implementation of evidence through systematic reviews of single and multi-faceted interventions and the next step would be to conduct more research exploring the complex and situated nature of evidence used in clinical practice and by particular professional groups. This would further build on the nuanced discussion and conclusion sections in a subset of the papers we reviewed. This might also support the field to move away from isolating individual implementation strategies [ 6 ] to explore the complex processes involving a range of actors with differing capacities [ 51 ] working in diverse organisational cultures. Taxonomies of implementation strategies do not fully account for the complex process of implementation, which involves a range of different actors with different capacities and skills across multiple system levels. There is plenty of work to build on, particularly in the social sciences, which currently sits at the margins of debates about evidence implementation (see for example, Normalisation Process Theory [ 52 ]).

There are several changes that we have identified in this overview of systematic reviews in comparison to the review we published in 2011 [ 8 ]. A consistent and welcome finding is that the overall quality of the systematic reviews themselves appears to have improved between the two reviews, although this is not reflected upon in the papers. This is exhibited through better, clearer reporting mechanisms in relation to the mechanics of the reviews, alongside a greater attention to, and deeper description of, how potential biases in included papers are discussed. Additionally, there is an increased, but still limited, inclusion of original studies conducted in low- and middle-income countries as opposed to just high-income countries. Importantly, we found that many of these systematic reviews are attuned to, and comment upon the contextual distinctions of pursuing evidence-informed interventions in health care settings in different economic settings. Furthermore, systematic reviews included in this updated article cover a wider set of clinical specialities (both within and beyond hospital settings) and have a focus on a wider set of healthcare professions — discussing both similarities, differences and inter-professional challenges faced therein, compared to the earlier reviews. These wider ranges of studies highlight that a particular intervention or group of interventions may work well for one professional group but be ineffective for another. This diversity of study settings allows us to consider the important role context (in its many forms) plays on implementing evidence into practice. Examining the complex and varied context of health care will help us address what Nilsen et al. ([ 6 ] p. 1) described as, ‘society’s health problems [that] require research-based knowledge acted on by healthcare practitioners together with implementation of political measures from governmental agencies’. This will help us shift implementation science to move, ‘beyond a success or failure perspective towards improved analysis of variables that could explain the impact of the implementation process’ ([ 6 ] p. 2).

This review brings together 32 papers considering individual and multi-faceted interventions designed to support the use of evidence in clinical practice. The majority of reviews report strategies achieving small impacts (normally on processes of care). There is much less evidence that these strategies have shifted patient outcomes. Combined with the two previous reviews, 86 systematic reviews of strategies to increase the implementation of research into clinical practice have been conducted. As a whole, this substantial body of knowledge struggles to tell us more about the use of individual and MFIs than: ‘it depends’. To really move forwards in addressing the gap between research evidence and practice, we may need to shift the emphasis away from isolating individual and multi-faceted interventions to better understanding and building more situated, relational and organisational capability to support the use of research in clinical practice. This will involve drawing on a wider range of perspectives, especially from the social, economic, political and behavioural sciences in primary studies and diversifying the types of synthesis undertaken to include approaches such as realist synthesis which facilitate exploration of the context in which strategies are employed. Harvey et al. [ 53 ] suggest that when context is likely to be critical to implementation success there are a range of primary research approaches (participatory research, realist evaluation, developmental evaluation, ethnography, quality/ rapid cycle improvement) that are likely to be appropriate and insightful. While these approaches often form part of implementation studies in the form of process evaluations, they are usually relatively small scale in relation to implementation research as a whole. As a result, the findings often do not make it into the subsequent systematic reviews. This review provides further evidence that we need to bring qualitative approaches in from the periphery to play a central role in many implementation studies and subsequent evidence syntheses. It would be helpful for systematic reviews, at the very least, to include more detail about the interventions and their implementation in terms of how and why they worked.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Abbreviations

Before and after study

Controlled clinical trial

Effective Practice and Organisation of Care

High-income countries

Information and Communications Technology

Interrupted time series

Knowledge translation

Low- and middle-income countries

Randomised controlled trial

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Metz A, Jensen T, Farley A, Boaz A, et al. Is implementation research out of step with implementation practice? Pathways to effective implementation support over the last decade. Implement Res Pract. 2022;3:1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/26334895221105585 .

May CR, Finch TL, Cornford J, Exley C, et al. Integrating telecare for chronic disease management in the community: What needs to be done? BMC Health Serv Res. 2011;11:1–11. https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-11-131 .

Harvey G, Rycroft-Malone J, Seers K, Wilson P, et al. Connecting the science and practice of implementation – applying the lens of context to inform study design in implementation research. Front Health Serv. 2023;3:1–15. https://doi.org/10.3389/frhs.2023.1162762 .

The authors would like to thank Professor Kathryn Oliver for her support in the planning the review, Professor Steve Hanney for reading and commenting on the final manuscript and the staff at LSHTM library for their support in planning and conducting the literature search.

This study was supported by LSHTM’s Research England QR strategic priorities funding allocation and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Applied Research Collaboration South London (NIHR ARC South London) at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Grant number NIHR200152. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR, the Department of Health and Social Care or Research England.

Health and Social Care Workforce Research Unit, The Policy Institute, King’s College London, Virginia Woolf Building, 22 Kingsway, London, WC2B 6LE, UK

Annette Boaz

King’s Business School, King’s College London, 30 Aldwych, London, WC2B 4BG, UK

Juan Baeza & Alec Fraser

Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Campus Universitário Reitor João Davi Ferreira Lima, Florianópolis, SC, 88.040-900, Brazil

Erik Persson

AB led the conceptual development and structure of the manuscript. EP conducted the searches and data extraction. All authors contributed to screening and quality appraisal. EP and AF wrote the first draft of the methods section. AB, JB and AF performed result synthesis and contributed to the analyses. AB wrote the first draft of the manuscript and incorporated feedback and revisions from all other authors. All authors revised and approved the final manuscript.

Correspondence to Annette Boaz .

Ethics approval and consent to participate.

Consent for publication

Competing interests.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Supplementary Information

Additional file 1: appendix a., additional file 2: appendix b., rights and permissions.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Boaz, A., Baeza, J., Fraser, A. et al. ‘It depends’: what 86 systematic reviews tell us about what strategies to use to support the use of research in clinical practice. Implementation Sci 19 , 15 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-024-01337-z

Received : 01 November 2023

Accepted : 05 January 2024

Published : 19 February 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-024-01337-z

Implementation
Interventions
Clinical practice
Research evidence
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Implementation Science

ISSN: 1748-5908

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Will Smith — The Impact of Social Media on Celebrity Incidents

The Impact of Social Media on Celebrity Incidents

Categories: Famous Person Will Smith

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Published: Feb 22, 2024

Words: 686 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Introduction, the social media storm, social media and celebrity culture, the double-edged sword.

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A short answer essay (SAE) is an assessment given to students on topics within MLC to evaluate how the student is comprehending the information within each lesson. It provides an overview of selected topics within lessons through the lens of the students. SAEs vary in length, depending on what is within each topic. These tests will be administered via Blackboard.

The Master Leader Course (MLC) contains 27 lessons which total 112 academic hours during a continuous 14-day program of instruction. The MLC lessons are progressive and ... Short Answer Essay (1 of 2). (d) Exam - Short Answer Essay (2 of 2). (2) Oral Communication. (a) Group Project Presentation.

MLC CMP Ver. 10 June 2018 5 Chapter 1: Student Syllabus (Contains Individual Student Assessment Plan (ISAP) & Course Administrative Policy) 1-0. ... Short Answer Essay 0-100 30% 100 : 1009W - SAE : Short Answer Essay 0-100 30% 100 : Available GPA : 100% : Demonstrated Abilities for 1059 Contribution to Group Work

In order to graduate from MLC, students must: • Have not failed more than two initial assessments ... Short Answer Essay 0-100 30% . 1009W - SAE . Short Answer Essay 0-100 30% . 1-7. Individual Student Assessment Plan (ISAP) (Graduation/Academic Requirements and Assessments) a. Meet all course academic requirements (e.g., complete and submit ...

Further elaborated, Identified in servant leadership is a set of 10 characteristics of the servant leader that are of critical importance. They are listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of people, and building community. Servant Leadership - Provide Example.

leadership is. - an awesome responsibility. - a skill. - influence - process of influencing by providing purpose Direction and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization. - purpose give subordinates the reason to achieve a desired outcome. - providing clear Direction involves communicating what to do to accomplish the ...

COURSE TITLE: Master Leader Course (MLC) EFFECTIVE DATE: 01 November 2018 APPROVAL AUTHORITY: Commandant, NCO Academy Fort Dix, Joint Base M-D-L, NJ 08640 ... and the Short Answer Essays (SAEs)are each weighted at 30 percent each. Course Length and Structure . a. The MLC is a 14-academic-day course consisting of 112 academic hours. The course ...

Short Essay answer 1.docx. Short Essay answer 1 1. Define - To state the precise meaning of a word. Explain - To make understanding clear by providing detail. Elaborate - To put forth complex details. Provide examples of - To incorporate the explanation and elaboration with persona. Solutions available. MLC 2020. United States Military Academy.

MLC Prerequisite Reflective (descriptive) Essay (PRE) ... Essay type: The descriptive essay is a genre of essay that asks the student to describe something—object, person, place, experience, emotion, situation, etc. This genre encourages the student's ability to create a written account of a particular

The Prerequisite Expository Essay (PEE) is a course requirement; therefore, you must complete and submit the essay. Follow the instructions on the Blackboard.mil ... Note, this assignment is part of the MLC curriculum and will be due at the end of Week 1. If you decide to complete the assignment, you will upload a Microsoft Word

Simultaneous offensive, defensive and stability or defense support of civil authorities (DSCA) to seize, retain and exploit the initiative and consolidate gains to prevent conflict, shape the OE and win our nations war. Four Decisive Actions. Offensive, Defensive, Stability, DSCA. Master Leader Course.

The topics covered in this essay will pertain to command support, breakdown of the six-week curriculum, keys to successful completion, and conclusion. Command Support. Before students begin MLCNR, there must be a clear understanding between them and their chain of command regarding course demands and expectations. The level of support for ...

TLO: This lesson supports 400-MLC-0410, Generate professional communications to express tasks and purpose that accurately represent intent and support end state. ELO: 400-MLC-0410.05 . Action: Construct writing products that effectively communicate ideas, positions, research, and military correspondence.

• take short answer essay (sae) #1 pe . week 3 . m442 operational art and design m443 (jipoe) joint intelligence preparation of the operational environment m444 introduction to joint planning process (jpp) m445 operational and mission variables • m447 mission command m448 mission command: understand m449 mission command: visualize •

Essay Answer Envelope. Be sure to hand in all your answer sheets because they cannot be accept ed later. Seal the envelope and write your candidate number in the space provided on the outside of the envelope. Check the appropriate box to indicate Exam MLC. 6. Be sure your essay answer envelope is signed because if it is

transition from one topic to the next using the provided rubric as a general guideline. Your essay must be in Times New Roman, 12pt font, double-spaced, APA 6th edition format without an abstract, tables, charts, etc. The essay must be a minimum of three pages and no longer than five pages in length, not including the title and reference pages.

DAY 1 M400 MLC Overview M446 D.A.T.E. Caucuses Overview 1 ... EXSUM Practice Due (Not Graded - Peer Review Only). Expository Essay feedback. Assign students to white paper groups. ... DAY 10 Quiz 1 Short Answer Exam PE 1 1 DAY 11 M420 Effective Leadership M447 Mission Command: Command and Control of Army Forces 1 2 DAY 12 M448 Mission Command ...

You will have A 3-5 page paper on a subject area they give you, be sure to look over APA style of writing. Be sure to start on your paper as soon as you get the subject. You will have 2 SAE essays to do in the DEP format each essay is a hour and half.

(b) Prerequisite Expository Essay (PRE). (c) Submit to Blackboard any physical profiles, DA Form 705, DA Form 5500/5501 body fat worksheet (if required). c. Out-processing. (1) Out-processing will take place prior to the graduation ceremony on the final day of class. Students will not receive a signed DA 1059 until all MLC areas are

1. Listening - listening effectively to others. 2. Empathy - walk a mile in their boots. 3. Healing - fostering emotional and spiritual health / well-being4. Awareness - aware of subordinate issues/problems positive or negative. 5. Persuasion - influences others through persuasiveness.

Master Leaders Course (MLC) Experience the Ill-structured "Problem" Solve the "Problem" from a Management Perspective Target: Operations- Lessons Assessments capable MSG Goal - Target Master Sergeant: The MLC provides the Army with competent senior noncommissioned officers (NCOs) who maintain a positive presence and who are self-aware, adaptive, and able to shape

An essay is a short piece of writing about a particular topic.... View DEP example(2).docx from MATH MISC at Central Texas College. A short answer essay (SAE) is an assessment given to students on topics within MLC to... The academy Chief of. Training (or Senior MLC facilitator if the Chief of Training...

Effective leaders empower subordinates to enforce them. Honorable servants of the nation (Character), Army Experts (COmpetent), and stewardship to the profession (commitment). Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like Types of Briefs, Six Key Communication Factors:, Types of Discipline and more.

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DEP example 2 .docx
A short answer essay (SAE) is an assessment given to students on topics within MLC to evaluate how the student is comprehending the information within each lesson. It provides an overview of selected topics within lessons through the lens of the students. SAEs vary in length, depending on what is within each topic. These tests will be administered via Blackboard.
Chapter 1: Student Syllabus (Contains Individual Student Assessment
MLC CMP Ver. 10 June 2018 5 Chapter 1: Student Syllabus (Contains Individual Student Assessment Plan (ISAP) & Course Administrative Policy) 1-0. ... Short Answer Essay 0-100 30% 100 : 1009W - SAE : Short Answer Essay 0-100 30% 100 : Available GPA : 100% : Demonstrated Abilities for 1059 Contribution to Group Work
PDF 1-7. Individual Student Assessment Plan (ISAP) (Graduation/Academic
In order to graduate from MLC, students must: • Have not failed more than two initial assessments ... Short Answer Essay 0-100 30% . 1009W - SAE . Short Answer Essay 0-100 30% . 1-7. Individual Student Assessment Plan (ISAP) (Graduation/Academic Requirements and Assessments) a. Meet all course academic requirements (e.g., complete and submit ...
MLC SAE2 Flashcards
Further elaborated, Identified in servant leadership is a set of 10 characteristics of the servant leader that are of critical importance. They are listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of people, and building community. Servant Leadership - Provide Example.
PDF STUDENT EVALUATION PLAN
COURSE TITLE: Master Leader Course (MLC) EFFECTIVE DATE: 01 November 2018 APPROVAL AUTHORITY: Commandant, NCO Academy Fort Dix, Joint Base M-D-L, NJ 08640 ... and the Short Answer Essays (SAEs)are each weighted at 30 percent each. Course Length and Structure . a. The MLC is a 14-academic-day course consisting of 112 academic hours. The course ...
MLC EXAM 1 Flashcards
leadership is. - an awesome responsibility. - a skill. - influence - process of influencing by providing purpose Direction and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization. - purpose give subordinates the reason to achieve a desired outcome. - providing clear Direction involves communicating what to do to accomplish the ...
PDF MLC Prerequisite Reflective (descriptive) Essay (PRE)
MLC Prerequisite Reflective (descriptive) Essay (PRE) ... Essay type: The descriptive essay is a genre of essay that asks the student to describe something—object, person, place, experience, emotion, situation, etc. This genre encourages the student's ability to create a written account of a particular
1009W MLC Prerequisite Expository Essay
transition from one topic to the next using the provided rubric as a general guideline. Your essay must be in Times New Roman, 12pt font, double-spaced, APA 6th edition format without an abstract, tables, charts, etc. The essay must be a minimum of three pages and no longer than five pages in length, not including the title and reference pages.
SAE 1.docx
Short Essay answer 1.docx. United States Military Academy. MLC 2020. Natural environment. Commander. military operations. Short Essay answer 1.docx. View Short Essay answer 1.docx from MLC 2020 at United States Military Academy. Short E... ADMdocx (1).docx. American Military University. MILITARY MILS514. United States Army. Commander.
MLC EXAM 1
five fundamentals of organizational management. state of readiness. 20 of 20. Quiz yourself with questions and answers for MLC EXAM 1, so you can be ready for test day. Explore quizzes and practice tests created by teachers and students or create one from your course material.
PDF MEMORANDUM FOR MASTER LEADER COURSE LEARNERS SUBJECT: Welcome ...
The Prerequisite Expository Essay (PEE) is a course requirement; therefore, you must complete and submit the essay. Follow the instructions on the Blackboard.mil ... Note, this assignment is part of the MLC curriculum and will be due at the end of Week 1. If you decide to complete the assignment, you will upload a Microsoft Word
PDF MASTER LEADER COURSE (DL) TRAINING SCHEDULE / SYLLABUS (42 DAY ...
DAY 1 M400 MLC Overview M446 D.A.T.E. Caucuses Overview 1 ... EXSUM Practice Due (Not Graded - Peer Review Only). Expository Essay feedback. Assign students to white paper groups. ... DAY 10 Quiz 1 Short Answer Exam PE 1 1 DAY 11 M420 Effective Leadership M447 Mission Command: Command and Control of Army Forces 1 2 DAY 12 M448 Mission Command ...
PDF Master Leader Course (DL) Syllabus
• take short answer essay (sae) #1 pe . week 3 . m442 operational art and design m443 (jipoe) joint intelligence preparation of the operational environment m444 introduction to joint planning process (jpp) m445 operational and mission variables • m447 mission command m448 mission command: understand m449 mission command: visualize •
PDF Exam MLC Models for Life MLC
Essay Answer Envelope. Be sure to hand in all your answer sheets because they cannot be accept ed later. Seal the envelope and write your candidate number in the space provided on the outside of the envelope. Check the appropriate box to indicate Exam MLC. 6. Be sure your essay answer envelope is signed because if it is
M404: English Writing Overview Advance Sheet
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: TLO: This lesson supports 400-MLC-0410, Generate communications as an organizational leader. ELO: 400-MLC-0410.01. Action: Construct writing products that effectively communicate ideas, positions, research, and military correspondence. Conditions: As a learner and senior leader attending face-to-face or virtual environments ...
Master Leader Course SAE 1 Flashcards
1. Listening - listening effectively to others. 2. Empathy - walk a mile in their boots. 3. Healing - fostering emotional and spiritual health / well-being4. Awareness - aware of subordinate issues/problems positive or negative. 5. Persuasion - influences others through persuasiveness.
Do any graduates of Master Leader Course (MLC) have ...
You will have A 3-5 page paper on a subject area they give you, be sure to look over APA style of writing. Be sure to start on your paper as soon as you get the subject. You will have 2 SAE essays to do in the DEP format each essay is a hour and half.
PDF THE NCO LEADERSHIP CENTER of EXCELLENCE Master Leader Course (MLC
TLO: This lesson supports 400-MLC-0410, Generate professional communications to express tasks and purpose that accurately represent intent and support end state. ELO: 400-MLC-0410.05 . Action: Construct writing products that effectively communicate ideas, positions, research, and military correspondence.
MLC Exam 3 (final) Flashcards
dynamic interpretation of modeling. coordination and timing of limbs; what is commonly observed; looking at segments of body that allows you to create the movement cognitively. Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like hands on instruction, hands off instruction, learner preparation and more.
short answer essay mlc
An essay is a short piece of writing about a particular topic.... View DEP example(2).docx from MATH MISC at Central Texas College. A short answer essay (SAE) is an assessment given to students on topics within MLC to... The academy Chief of. Training (or Senior MLC facilitator if the Chief of Training...
PDF Master Leaders Course (MLC) Goal Target Master Sergeant: The MLC ...
Master Leaders Course (MLC) Experience the Ill-structured "Problem" Solve the "Problem" from a Management Perspective Target: Operations- Lessons Assessments capable MSG Goal - Target Master Sergeant: The MLC provides the Army with competent senior noncommissioned officers (NCOs) who maintain a positive presence and who are self-aware, adaptive, and able to shape
ALC Short Answer Essay Subjects Flashcards
Distinctive Roles of the Trusted Army Professionals. Honorable servants of the nation (Character), Army Experts (COmpetent), and stewardship to the profession (commitment). Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like Types of Briefs, Six Key Communication Factors:, Types of Discipline and more.

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short answer essay mlc

Do any graduates of Master Leader Course (MLC) have insights or lessons learned they can share?

Join nearly 2 million former and current members of the US military, just like you.

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