Impact of Social Media on Society

Written by: Kriti Nepal - 24010, Grade X

Posted on: 29 September, 2021

Social media refers to those websites and applications that enable the users to share content, get information, ideas, career interests etc. In the present context social media has huge roles or impacts in the people or today’s society. Like every other thing, social media too has both positive and negative impacts. The question is whether it has more of a positive impact or negative one. 

The positive impact of social are:

1. Helps in uniting people: The people from all over the world can instantly come in touch with the help of social media like facebook and viber. They can talk face to face everyday and improve their relationships with people.
2. Inspires mass movement: Social media has one huge influence in mass movements. People come together and help to address a topic and make it trending worldwide so that many people get to know what’s happening and how to overcome the problems being created.
3. Helps people for income: Social media is also one of the means that help in earning money. We can find many social media influencers who earn money by various social media sites like making vlogs on youtube, posting pictures on instagram etc. Also various online sites are earning money by selling goods, clothes etc.
4. Helps in display of talent: Social medias are one of the major factors that help the people in showcase of talent. For instance, people who are good at singing can open a youtube channel and post videos of them singing which can be seen by people from all around the world and can give their opinions to it.
5. Helps in finding people with similar interests: Social media can also be used in finding people or rather making friends online who share similar interests with us. We can use various online websites like omegle to find people with similar interests and have a talk with them.

Likewise social media has various other negative impacts as well. Some of them can be:

1. Cyber bullying: Social media is a place for people to share their photos, their talent and many more however there are some toxic people who bully people online by various methods like commenting bad things, photoshopping people into funny things etc. 
2. Hacking: Social media has a lot of information about people’s personal things. There are some people who are misusing these websites and social media to hack into peoples accounts, talk to people using others accounts etc.
3. FOMO(Fear of missing out): Since we see many people posting various things like going out, having fun with friends and many more. This can make us feel as if we are not having fun or being left out. It may also trigger anxiety and depression.
4. Inadequacy about life or appearance: Even if we know the images we see on social media can be photoshopped or fake it can still make us feel insecure about how we are living our life, how we appear, our body size etc. This makes us feel low and not so good about ourselves.
   After this we can know that social media has both positive and negative impacts, however the negative impacts it is causing is mainly because of our own activities. If we stop doing activities like cyber bullying, hacking it’ll reduce the negative impacts that social media is causing in society by half.