Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube are all apps that a student may scroll through during their day.
However, these forms of entertainment can have some negative side effects.
Cyberbullying is the first one that comes to mind.
According to DataProt, 59% of U.S. teenagers have experienced some sort of online harassment or bullying.
On top of that, 37% of cyberbully victims end up developing social anxiety.
Because there is no face-to-face interaction when having a conversation online, people tend to feel that they can get away with saying hurtful things or being disrespectful without any consequences.
When you’re talking to a screen, there’s just too little of an emotional connection established for people to feel the need to treat others with respect and kindness.
But cyberbullying is just the first thing on a very long list of why social media is bad for students.
USNews reports that researchers have linked a trend of depression in young people to the use of social media and the amount of time spent online.
The use of social media can fuel one’s feelings of anxiety, depression and loneliness.
When all you see is people being successful in their profession, happy in their relationship or just having the time of their lives at an event or party, one can also start to feel that their life isn’t as good as others.
Basically, social media portrays people’s lives as “perfect” since they get to pick and choose which moments of their life they share online. In reality, that is far from the case but if that’s all you’re seeing on these platforms, you might not know any better.
When you add that, according to SocialBuddy, teens between the ages of 13-18 spend about nine hours daily on these social media platforms, this all becomes extremely alarming.
If teens are being exposed to this online world early, they could end up developing mental issues before they’re even ready to face the real world.
Social media overall can also just be an unnecessary distraction.
Instead of a student doing their work, they can lose focus and start messaging friends or scrolling through posts especially since it’s so easy to access.
This can lead to a student building bad habits and being unproductive, which can then lead to poor grades on assignments and tests.
What you do in your daily life is your business, but in the world we live in today, anything and everything can and will be posted online.
This has led to some very unfortunate situations where the personal life of a college student gets exposed for many to see.
NFL Offensive Lineman Laremy Tunsil is a perfect example of this.
Tunsil was a football player at the University of Mississippi, getting prepared for the 2016 NFL Draft.
He was one of the most talented players in the draft at his position and was expected to be selected by a team very early in the first round.
However, on the day of the draft, Tunsil’s Twitter account was hacked and a video of him smoking marijuana was released.
Teams who had an eye on the gifted prospect quickly scrambled looking for options other than Tunsil due to this video.
Tunsil would see himself fall from a top five draft pick to being selected 13th by the Miami Dolphins.
Though his career has been a good one and many have moved on from this incident it did almost cost Tunsil a successful football career and definitely stained his reputation for quite a bit.
While Tunsil’s circumstances stemmed from a hacked account, there have been instances of students putting themselves in a bad situation too.
K’Vaughn Pope, a football player for Ohio State University, tweeted out a vulgar statement of his own school during halftime of his own game.
He did not return to the game after halftime and it looked like he left the team for good.
While Pope deleted the tweet very soon after, it was too late, as it was already seen by a large number of people.
There have been no further developments on this story, but if Pope is looking to keep playing division one football, this recent tweet of his will certainly play a role in whether or not a program wants to bring him in.
Pope has no one to blame other than himself, but the fact that social media can be so damaging to one’s life, makes it hard to see why students would want to use it in the first place.
