10 negative effects of social media essay

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10 Negative Effects of Social Media You Should Know About

By Denise Doherty Categories: Health & Wellbeing February 27, 2023, 8:26 AM

Learn about the top 10 negative effects of social media to protect yourself and your family. You’ll also find tips on how to manage the effects if you have already been impacted.

Social media has become a part of daily life for many of us, and young people in particular. Research indicates that 97% of youths aged between thirteen and seventeen use at least one major social media platform. Almost half of these teenagers say they are online almost constantly.

Given the widespread use of social media, it’s important to consider the effects it may have. While there are some positives, there are also many negative effects of social media use — particularly among young people — including anxiety, depression, reduced sleep quality and emotional disturbances. Using social media more than three times a day has been associated with poor mental health and well-being among young people in particular. On a wider scale, 64% of Americans say that social media has a primarily negative effect on the country today and only one-in-ten associate its use with a positive effect.

Despite the downsides, billions of us are socially networking online every day. A closer look at the top ten negative effects of social media might just help you scroll more safely.

1. Feelings of Loneliness and Isolation

Social media’s primary purpose is to allow us to connect with other people and expand our networks on a global scale. This is usually the reason many of us join a platform, and yet, research would suggest that increased problematic social media use is associated with an increased feeling of social isolation. People who use social media sites frequently are more likely to feel socially isolated rather than connected.

There are many other ways we can connect with others that are not associated with negative effects. You could learn how to overcome loneliness in the moment through natural and health-promoting techniques. You could also try going to new places or having new experiences, like joining a gym or an evening class. If you live with a furry, four-legged friend, private dog parks can be a great way to meet like-minded animal lovers. If you really do prefer the digital experience, why not try some free online courses or check out some opportunities to volunteer digitally instead of spending pointless hours scrolling.

2. Cyberbullying on Social Media

Research shows that 59% of American teens have been bullied or harassed online — and it can happen to adults, too. All states have laws requiring schools to respond to bullying. As cyberbullying has become more prevalent with technology, many states now include cyberbullying specifically, or mention cyberbullying offenses under these laws.

According to Stopbullying.gov, the most common places where cyberbullying occurs are:

• Social Media, such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tik Tok
• Text messaging and messaging apps on mobile or tablet devices
• Instant messaging, direct messaging, and online chatting over the internet
• Online forums, chat rooms, and message boards, such as Reddit
• Online gaming communities

Learning to spot the signs of a toxic person is a good way to protect yourself from inviting potential bullies into your life. If you or a loved one are being cyberbullied, the Cybersmile Foundation is a multi-award-winning organization that can help. This nonprofit organization promotes digital wellbeing by tackling bullying and abuse online. 

3. Social Media Can Lead to Addiction

Any addiction can result in catastrophic trauma for both the addict and those they love. Addiction is a very serious negative effect of social media and is described as a behavioral addiction that resembles other common addictions — like drugs, alcohol and gambling. People will experience a variety of symptoms that can range from mood swings to an uncontrollable desire to log on to mental health disorders.

Many sufferers devote massive amounts of their lives to online platforms, often to the point that other areas of their life become unmanageable. In 2019, 40% of Americans aged between 18 and 22 that use social media reported feeling addicted to it. Research suggests that internet addiction may actually affect over 210 million users worldwide.

Managing addiction requires professional input and we do not recommend trying to manage a serious addiction alone. The Addiction Center is a good place to find helpful information and support to begin your journey to recovery. You could also investigate activities and strategies that might complement your program — like a dopamine detox or a  digital detox you can try at home. 

4. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)

Another negative effect of social media is an emerging disorder you may not have heard of. Fear of missing out — or FOMO — is a rapidly emerging area of research. It develops when someone is afraid that their friends are or will be doing something without including them and can lead to constant checking of news feeds and phycological disturbances.

Research conducted last year shows:

• People who experience high levels of FOMO also report more problematic social media use.
• Age and gender do not seem to influence FOMO development.
• People who showed high FOMO also were more depressed, anxious, and neurotic.
• High FOMO is linked to an increased fear of negative evaluation. 

The best way to counteract FOMO is to invest yourself in the emerging trend of JOMO — Joy Of Missing Out . It involves changing your mindset and understanding why you should turn your phone off. It also helps you achieve a better state of psychological health. Check out our top ten productive things to do instead of scrolling through your phone to start turning fear into joy and boost your mental health.

5. Social Media Can Increase Stress

When it comes to the negative effects of social media, stress can be a controversial topic. Research has found that many users feel that social media helps them identify life stressors or helps them to deal with stress itself. For others though, social media appears to be the source of high stress.

Learning  how to lower your cortisol is the first step towards reducing stress in your life. Breath manipulation is also a valuable tool. Try the 5-4-3-2-1 method to help acute stress and anxiety and always visit a health professional if you are concerned about your mental health.

Mindfulness-based stress reduction  and  mindful walking are both effective and scientifically-proven ways to manage stress and balance mental wellbeing. Many other meditation-based techniques might also help. The chakra system is an ancient framework that is ideal for beginners starting any meditation journey.

Persistent inner restlessness or nervousness? Just a few of our simple tips can help you to become calmer and more…

6. Self-Image and Body-Image Issues Through Social Media

Self-image and body-image issues appear to manifest through social media use in a variety of ways. Increased social media use that involves engaging in appearance-related behaviors and selfies is a known risk factor for body image issues in young people — particularly girls.

Several social media sites provide tools and filters that allow people to alter their appearance and this often leads to people comparing themselves to others. Those who spend most of their time posting and scrolling are more likely to be vulnerable. 

Negative self-talk is a fast-track way of exacerbating a negative self-image and is important to manage if its is something you do regularly. Check out our top five steps towards a positive body image for more tips. Engage in some self-care  and add a  gratitude journal for mindful happiness instead of a damaging view of yourself. Check out our 30 gratitude journal prompts and begin your new view of yourself today.

7. Low Mood & Dissociation

There is a crucial link between wellbeing and emotions. When emotional well-being is affected by social media engagement and overuse, many people choose to dissociate from the the real world in favor of the online fantasy one instead, according to some research . The very act of scrolling has been linked to entering a dissociative state. 

Learn how to beat a bad mood if you are experiencing emotional turbulence. There are many safe and effective ways to get out of your head if you do feel the need to let go for awhile, but prolonged withdrawal from the real world is a major cause for concern. Emotional resilience training is a great step towards emotional stability. Alternatively, you could reach happiness by engaging in healthy ways to increase dopamine naturally . The feel-good hormone will go towards emotional balance and health. 

8. Depression Due to High Social Media Usage

Some studies attribute the stark rise in depression and suicide among adolescents to the simultaneous rise in smartphone and digital use among these age groups. Research persistently highlights social media use as a critical risk factor for psychological ill-health. Due to its naturally addictive nature, many are trapped in a depressive online cycle.

You can access many free helplines if you or someone you love are suffering from depression. Like addiction, this disorder should be taken seriously, and professional help may be required. Connecting to the earth is a safe and effective way to boost your mental wellbeing. For example, nature therapy is a great way to feel balanced, and walking barefoot will give you that that added sense of connectedness and stability.

9. Disrupted Sleep

There seems to be a direct link between sleep disruptions and light intake before bed. We used to go to bed in darkness and although some of us still do, many do not and scroll themselves to sleep instead. Research has found that exposure to electrical light before sleep can inhibit the body’s production of the hormone melatonin — which facilitates sleep. The blue light emitted by smartphones and laptop screens seems to be among the worst offenders. 

There are many was to fix your sleep schedule . You could try some natural ways to wind down for the night — like sleep sounds or herbal sleeping aids. There are even yoga poses for a better sleep you can try to help develop a better nighttime routine . 

10. Damage to Relationships

Even the mere presence of a phone can interfere with how we form and maintain relationships according to some research . 51% of Americans say their partner is distracted by their cellphone while they are trying to have a conversation with them — which can lead to problems. Mounting evidence suggests that social media use can have a negative impact on overall relationship dynamics and quality.

Researchers in Canada found that women spent much more time on Facebook then men and experienced significantly more jealousy when they or their partner were scrolling — although negative emotions were reported by both sexes. Social media can become a major threat to romantic relationships when boundaries are not clearly defined. 

There are many ways to set boundaries in your relationship . Spending quality time away from social media and technology is also important in maintaining healthy relationships. You could research some ecofriendly outdoor date ideas or have a picnic date for two and enjoy the benefits of nature at the same time.

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Mental Wellness

10 negative effects of social media that can harm your life.

Social media is, arguably, one of the most exciting developments in recent history. It helps families and friends stay connected, offers a useful tool to look back on positive memories, and even helps those who are struggling find support among strangers. However, while there are many benefits of social media, there are also many negative effects of social media that you need to be aware of.

The occasional post on Twitter or a few minutes scrolling through your Facebook feed can be a relaxing addition to your day. However, when you feel the need to post every ten minutes, check any and all updates during your break times at work, and feel that your life isn’t living up to those you see on your friends’ pages, it has become detrimental to your mental health.

As much as you may love your social media followers, is there adoration really worth the toll it takes on your mental and physical health? That’s for you to decide after you read about some of the negative effects of social media.

10 Negative Effects of Social Media

1. reduces face-to-face interaction.

When you are on social media more often, not only do you spend less quality time with people who are physically present in your life, but they will quickly get annoyed when you’re mindlessly scrolling through social media platforms instead of paying attention to them.

Social media can be great for finding support when you aren’t able to interact face-to-face with those around you, but being physically present with someone offers a level of comfort and support that social media will never be able to rival.

When we speak with someone face-to-face, non-verbal cues are just as important as what we’re saying. On social media, non-verbal cues are eliminated, making communication more complicated and causing misunderstandings, even between the best of friends.

The best thing you can do (when possible) is to put down your phone and go out with friends or family.

2. Increases Cravings for Attention

If you’re wondering why social media is bad, the cravings for attention it causes is one big reason. Posting vague statuses on Facebook  to grab others attention could easily become a nasty habit for people who use social media frequently. The never ending competition for likes and notifications can consume you.

The need for the type of attention known as belonging is a natural human phenomenon. It developed as a way to survive in groups. According to Dr. Geoff MacDonald, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, “Attention is one of the most valuable resources in existence for social animals.” It ensures that we have a safe place to land if we ever need it.

Unfortunately, social media sites, such as Facebook and YouTube, have taken this need for attention to the extreme by allowing us to request attention at any given moment by posting updates and photos. Unfortunately, as MacDonald points out, “When you present a curated version of yourself to the world, any approval that you get is not for your full and whole self.” [1]

On social media, we are getting attention for being a constructed version of ourselves, not our genuine selves. This leaves us receiving lots of attention and yet feeling more lonely and isolated than before, creating many negative effects of social media in our lives.

3. Distracts From Life Goals

It’s so easy to get wrapped up in what’s going on in social media that people will neglect their real life goals . Instead of aiming for the dream job by obtaining useful skills, people tend to strive for internet stardom.

Achieving goals takes hard work and a good deal of motivation. Social media allows an easy outlet to distract us when we don’t feel like putting in the hard work, and we can end up going down a path where we simply don’t get things done because it becomes too easy to find a distraction.

4. Can Lead to a Higher Risk of Depression

According to recent studies, the more people use social media, the more negative feelings they experience, including depression [2] . This could be particularly harmful to people who have been previously diagnosed with anxiety and depression.

It has been suggested that these negative feelings and depressive symptoms come from increased social comparisons and a lack of social interaction caused by spending more time on social media. If you’re beginning to notice that you’re feeling down on a regular basis, recognize that this is one of the negative effects of social media and that it’s probably time to take a break.

5. Relationships Are More Likely to Fail

No good comes out of online displays of jealousy and snooping. It may seem like an easy option when it comes to dealing with relationships, but in reality, it does more damage than good. In fact, studies show that the more a person uses Facebook, the more likely they will be to monitor their partner, which leads to arguments and crumbling relationships. [3]

If you genuinely value your relationship, stop constantly checking your Facebook, and plan a date night out—and maybe leave your phones at home.

6. Stunts Creativity

I can speak from personal experience that social media is the easiest way to stunt, or even kill, the creative process . Surfing social media sites has a numbing effect on the mind that is similar to mindlessly watching television.

Creativity often requires intense focus or a relatively clear, relaxed mind. Social media gets in the way of both. If you’re looking for a creative solution to a problem, try going for a walk, meditating, or even discussing the problem with a friend. All of these will provide better results than taking to social media.

7. Encountering Cyberbullies

People feel too comfortable on the web and say things they wouldn’t normally say in real life. If you’re not the one saying horrible things, you’re still inevitably going to be exposed to it, which is one of the many negative effects of social media.

Cyberbullying, whether it’s directed at you or not, will lead to more negative thoughts and likely a more negative perspective on humanity as a whole. Getting out in the world and seeing the random acts of kindness that people offer in real life is the perfect antidote to this.

8. Social Comparison Reduces Self-Esteem

It’s easy to present a certain persona on social media. Many choose to post gorgeous vacation photos or a post about their new baby, but what you don’t see is all the messy stuff in between. As we only see the good stuff, it can lead to social comparison.

One study found that “participants who used Facebook most often had poorer trait self-esteem, and this was mediated by greater exposure to upward social comparisons on social media” [4] . What this means is that when we see others’ lives that we deem to be better than ours, our self-esteem goes down.

If you’re still not clear on why social media is bad for mental health, the answer is that social media exacerbates the above problem by forcing us into constant social comparison, which will inevitably cause mental health problems and social anxiety, especially in young people.

9. Loss of Sleep

The light emitted from your various screens tricks your mind into thinking it’s not time for you to sleep, which can cause one of the most common negative effects of social media: sleep deprivation. Getting enough sleep each night is already difficult enough without extra complications.

One study on teenagers found that those “heavier social media use was associated with poorer sleep patterns” [5] . The same is often true for adults who come home, crash on the couch, and spend the rest of the evening surfing social media only to find that midnight has come and gone.

10. Lack of Privacy

Between social media websites saving (and selling) your personal data and the whole NSA mess involving unsolicited government access of personal data [6] , including email, Skype calls, and so much more, it’s very clear that privacy and the internet don’t mix well.

More and more, employers are taking to social media to review potential hires’ pages. Posting each and every thought could lead them to develop a negative perception, causing you to lose out on opportunities.

The Bottom Line

When used correctly and sparingly, social media can be a great way to connect with others when face-to-face interactions are impossible. However, it’s important to know about the negative effects of social media and to limit the time you spend in the digital world in order to avoid getting lost there. Try cutting back on your online time, and get out into the world again.

Featured photo credit: Tim Mossholder via unsplash.com

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Essay on Negative Effects of Social Media

Students are often asked to write an essay on Negative Effects of Social Media in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Negative Effects of Social Media

The dark side of social media.

Social media is a powerful tool, but it has negative impacts too. It can lead to addiction, affecting our daily life. Many people spend hours scrolling, ignoring real-life interactions.

Mental Health Issues

Studies show excessive social media use can cause anxiety and depression. The constant comparison with others’ lives can lead to low self-esteem.

Privacy Concerns

Personal information shared on social media can be misused, leading to privacy issues. Cyberbullying is another serious concern, causing emotional distress.

Unrealistic Expectations

Social media often presents a perfect life, creating unrealistic expectations and dissatisfaction. It’s important to remember that what we see online isn’t always real.

250 Words Essay on Negative Effects of Social Media

Introduction, psychological impact.

Firstly, social media can lead to mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. The constant comparison with others’ lives, the desire for validation through likes and comments, and the fear of missing out (FOMO) can lead to feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem.

Secondly, privacy is a significant concern. Users often unknowingly share sensitive information, making them susceptible to data breaches and identity theft. The lack of stringent privacy policies on many platforms exacerbates this issue.

Spread of Misinformation

Lastly, social media contributes to the spread of fake news and misinformation. The speed and reach of these platforms make it easy for false information to spread, leading to confusion, panic, and in some cases, violence.

In conclusion, while social media has revolutionized communication, its negative effects cannot be ignored. It is incumbent upon users to use these platforms responsibly and be aware of the potential risks. As the saying goes, “With great power comes great responsibility”.

500 Words Essay on Negative Effects of Social Media

Social media has revolutionized the way we communicate, connect, and share information. However, it is not without its drawbacks. While it offers numerous benefits, it has also given rise to a myriad of negative effects, impacting individuals and society.

The Erosion of Privacy

Impact on mental health.

The impact of social media on mental health is another significant concern. The pressure to maintain a perfect online persona and the constant comparison with others can lead to feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and depression. The addictive nature of social media platforms, designed to keep users engaged for as long as possible, exacerbates these issues. The dopamine hit from likes, comments, and shares can create a dependency, leading to an unhealthy relationship with these platforms.

Social media also plays a significant role in the spread of misinformation. The speed and reach of social media platforms make them a potent tool for disseminating false information, leading to real-world consequences. This phenomenon has been particularly evident in recent years, with misinformation about health, politics, and social issues spreading rapidly.

Decreased Productivity

In conclusion, while social media has transformed the way we communicate and share information, it has also given rise to several negative effects. The erosion of privacy, impact on mental health, spread of misinformation, and decreased productivity are all significant concerns that need to be addressed. It is crucial for users to be aware of these issues and use social media responsibly, considering the potential implications of their online behavior. As a society, we must also strive to mitigate these effects, through education, regulation, and the development of healthier online habits.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Social Media: Negative Impacts

Introduction, intrusive advertising, bullying/harassment, privacy threats, works cited.

Social media is a natural phenomenon of modern hi-tech life. The impact of virtual communication is significant as people are often willing to pay more attention to online interaction. Besides, due to the development of technology, social media plays the role of platforms not only for communication but also fir effective advertising and entertainment. Digital content that is published in various groups has a large target audience, which allows influencing people and providing demand for specific goods or services. However, the controversy of the benefits of social media lies in the potentially negative impacts they have. In addition to using specialized web resources for communication, many Internet users utilize them as tools for bullying, intimidation, humiliation, and even violence. An opportunity to remain anonymous opens up significant prospects for cybercriminals, which complicates the task for law enforcement agencies. As a counterargument, today, there are various means of account verification and support services that are ready to ensure the safety of communication on social media and provide users with protection from scammers or blackmailers. Nevertheless, people who are well versed in the digital field can bypass such locks easily. Among the real negative effects that social media have, one can note intrusive advertising, bullying and harassment, privacy threats, fake news, and violence. Social media are gradually losing the function of communication tools and gaining the status of platforms that allow posting any content, including illegal and immoral materials.

Advertising on social media has become so intrusive and widespread that it has ceased to have its promotional function and often causes users more negative emotions than interest. At the same time, it is hard to get rid of advertising completely since many creators of digital content sign contracts with advertisers, and profit depends directly on the activity of the public. However, in case of excess advertising, people feel annoyed and ignore certain offers deliberately. According to Shareef et al., “irritation due to any advertisement can distract consumers from receiving the intended meaning of the statement, and thus can have a negative effect on the value of the advertising” (p. 61). Such a statement is logical because, in their quest for profit, advertisers provoke a natural reaction from the target audience to condemn the excess of promoting content. Customer perception largely depends not only on the essence of specific offers but also on the way marketers deliver them. Therefore, in case of intrusiveness, advertising content on social media causes rejection and is often blocked by users. Shareef et al. confirm this and argue that the context of marketing materials may be more important as a driver to convince the public of the value of specific goods or services (p. 66). The objectivity of such an idea is due to the fact that initially, social media were not intended for advertising, and only the creativity of marketers can be an effective way to attract public attention. Finally, Shareef et al. mention viral marketing as one of the methods of intrusive advertising on social media and note that this form of promotion are relevant only among a narrow target audience. In other words, the more annoying the advertisement is, the lower is the chance to attract a wide range of new consumers. Nevertheless, intrusive advertising is significantly less dangerous than bullying or harassment, which are found in modern social media.

The anonymity factor that may persist when interacting on social media is one of the reasons for bullying that some Internet users are forced to experience. A sense of impunity for aggressive behavior and insults towards another person exacerbate the situation. Moreover, bullying is a trend that is common in children’s communication on social media, which poses a serious threat to the fragile psyche of young users. According to Canty et al., online bullying is a unique phenomenon that has expanded in the virtual space due to the emergence of means to preserve anonymity and, in particular, the ability to go unpunished (p. 52). These factors are most obvious reasons why children, who are often humiliated by their peers on social media, become self-absorbed and cannot figure out the wrongdoers. Harassment is a similar problem, which, however, is characteristic of the adult population and often has a sexual background. Chadha et al. state that modern digital technologies “amplify attacks on gender-based and sexual minorities,” thereby acting as negative consequences of progress (p. 241). This statement assumes that the context of harassment is not limited to one topic. In addition, as findings show, virtual space is a favorable environment for this phenomenon:

Online communities and social media platforms offer many benefits, but they also have become breeding grounds for an assortment of sexist and misogynist behaviors. Importantly, the harassment behaviors evident today differ from off-line and pre-social media-era harassment, given the affordances of these networked spaces, including – but not limited to – the visibility and persistence of content, the anonymity/pseudonymity of users, the spreadability of content, and the multimediality of smartphones (Chadha et al, p. 250).

As a result, the openness of online communication creates a favorable environment for harassment and affects user behavior. Chadha et al. mention requests for personal data and addresses as easy consequences of harassment and note that people who have faced with real threats see this phenomenon as an extremely dangerous and aggressive trend (p. 243). This conclusion is logical because, despite different environments, online and real-life harassment have a common background. In this regard, the issues of privacy and accompanying risks are negative consequences of social media.

Privacy threats are fraught not only with identity theft but also with other problems that may entail anonymous bullying or blackmail. Today, for users of social media, communication options are not limited solely to correspondence. Interlocutors can comment on each other, share links, and perform other actions that go beyond a particular platform. As a result, as Aghasian et al. note, “the distribution of information in real world is almost local, the publically shared information in online social media can be retrieved on the internet anytime, anywhere and by anyone” (p. 13118). The significance of this statement is that virtually no one can be fully protected, and precautions should be taken. Aghasian et al. argue that users should be able to protect their personal data not only from intruders but also from familiar people who can become intermediaries in the leak of information (p. 13118). Those people who face privacy threats may lose their money or valuable digital content through negligence by providing their data to third parties. Due to the widespread use of virtual interaction, various leakage channels are discussed:

For example, a user normally share his/her personal information in Facebook which may pose a privacy risk. This user may share his/her occupation history and background in another site such as LinkedIn. His/her job information has again its own privacy risk, but a combination of the information from two social media accounts can pose the user to higher risk as more information is revealed. Consequently, by considering the overall information from multiple source, a more accurate quantification of the privacy disclosure score can be obtained. (Aghasian et al, p. 13118)

In addition to individual data leakage channels, the forms of privacy risks themselves are numerous. Aghasian et al. mention the threat of government data theft, the disclosure of confidential information about trade transactions, and even religious secrets (13119). Such a variety of risks explains the need for comprehensive protection. Social media, in turn, are a favorable environment for such fraud since the predominant number of Internet users have accounts at least at one specialized site. Wherein, according to Aghasian et al., “one of the challenges in addressing privacy concerns is how to measure the privacy of a user participating in multiple social networks” (p. 13129). The increasing role of social media in people’s lives inevitably leads to threats to personal data, especially if they are stored on different platforms. However, not all negative aspects of virtual communication are aimed at interacting with a particular person, and the example of fake news distributed online is a confirmation.

Social media are becoming the most common sources of news, including both entertaining content and serious political and economic reports, which, however, are not always reliable. One of the main reasons is the desire to attract a large target audience. The greater the news resonance is, the greater is the potential success of a particular media platform. For example, Shu et al. give the following statistics: “62 percent of U.S. adults get news on social media in 2016, while in 2012, only 49 percent reported seeing news on social media” (p. 22). This ratio proves that even the adult population of the country began to use virtual platforms more often. In addition, this growth may be due to the wider use of social media by numerous agencies that have individual accounts. The authors emphasize that fake news as a negative consequence of digital communication is disseminated most actively through social media due to an opportunity to create a public outcry quickly (Shu et al, p. 23). News groups fight for the target audience in any way possible, which entails publications based on unverified or false facts. Spohr explains the reasons and argues that “the producers and curators of fake news content are able to monetize their content through advertising platforms from Facebook and Google” (p. 156). This conclusion is logical since material gain is the most objective explanation for such publications. In addition, the researcher notes that fake news creates a resonance that, regardless of whether it is positive or negative, serves as a means of popularization (Spohr, p. 150). Therefore, the ability to influence the masses opens up prospects for fraudulent actions, although fake news cannot do such harm as violence, which is another negative effect of social media.

Despite the fact that violence in its natural sense cannot be realized online, the manifestations of violent acts through social media are possible. This phenomenon is similar to cyberbullying, but it involves strict measures of intimidation or harassment, while bullying can be superficial. Today, particular attention is paid to youth virtual violence, as children and adolescents are vulnerable groups. As Tripathi notes, “most children and adolescents (65-91%) report little or no involvement in violence over social media platforms” (2). At the same time, the author argues that time spent online is one of the factors on which the risk of violence depends (Tripathi, p. 3). In other words, the longer and more actively a child interacts with other users, the higher is the threat of psychological violence. This statement is reasonable and carries an open message about the need to reduce the access of young users to free online communication. Also, gender-based online violence is another form of bullying, and its consequences can be extremely dangerous from a social perspective:

Gender-based violence online is rampant, ranging from harassment of women who are public figures on social media to stalking intimate partners using purpose-built apps. This is not an issue that can be addressed by individual states alone, nor can it be addressed satisfactorily through legal means. The normalization of misogyny and abuse online both reflects and reinforces systemic inequalities. (Suzor et al, p. 84)

This position on gender-based violence proves the effect that indifference to this problem may cause. According to Suzor et al., most modern social media promote themselves as platforms for expressing individuality and personal opinions, which can be dangerous in conditions of the freedom of speech and anonymity (p. 89). Not only women but also other vulnerable groups can experience the effects of virtual violence, and impunity is one of the most dangerous consequences. The authors are convinced that “deeply entrenched structural features of existing social media platforms often exacerbate the effects of online harassment and abuse” (Suzor et al, p. 94). Thus, social media carry many negative implications, and an opportunity to go unpunished for aggressive or annoying behavior is a severe social omission.

• Aghasian, Erfan, et al. “Scoring Users’ Privacy Disclosure Across Multiple Online Social Networks.” IEEE Access , vol. 5, 2017, pp. 13118-13130.
• Canty, Justin, et al. “The Trouble with Bullying – Deconstructing the Conventional Definition of Bullying for a Child‐Centred Investigation into Children’s Use of Social Media.” Children & Society , vol. 30, no. 1, 2016, pp. 48-58.
• Chadha, Kalyani, et al. “Women’s Responses to Online Harassment.” International Journal of Communication , vol. 14, 2020, pp. 239-257.
• Shareef, Mahmud Akhter, et al. “Social Media Marketing: Comparative Effect of Advertisement Sources.” Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services , vol. 46, 2019, pp. 58-69.
• Shu, Kai, et al. “Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective.” ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter , vol. 19, no. 1, 2017, pp. 22-36.
• Spohr, Dominic. “Fake News and Ideological Polarization: Filter Bubbles and Selective Exposure on Social Media.” Business Information Review , vol. 34, no. 3, 2017, pp. 150-160.
• Suzor, Nicolas, et al. “Human Rights by Design: The Responsibilities of Social Media Platforms to Address Gender‐Based Violence Online.” Policy & Internet , vol. 11, no. 1, 2019, pp. 84-103.
• Tripathi, Vivek. “Youth Violence and Social Media.” Journal of Social Sciences , vol. 52, no. 1-3, 2017, pp. 1-7.

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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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Acknowledgements

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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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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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.

However, writing a comprehensive and well-researched essay on social media can be daunting. It requires a thorough understanding of the topic and the ability to articulate your ideas clearly and concisely. This is where Jenni.ai comes in. Our AI-powered tool is designed to help students like you save time and energy and focus on what truly matters - your education. With Jenni.ai , you'll have access to a wealth of examples and receive personalized writing suggestions and feedback.

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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.

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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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64% of Americans say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the U.S. today

About two-thirds of Americans (64%) say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the country today, according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted July 13-19, 2020. Just one-in-ten Americans say social media sites have a mostly positive effect on the way things are going, and one-quarter say these platforms have a neither positive nor negative effect.

Those who have a negative view of the impact of social media mention, in particular, misinformation and the hate and harassment they see on social media. They also have concerns about users believing everything they see or read – or not being sure about what to believe. Additionally, they bemoan social media’s role in fomenting partisanship and polarization, the creation of echo chambers, and the perception that these platforms oppose President Donald Trump and conservatives.

This is part of a series of posts on Americans’ experiences with and attitudes about the role of social media in politics today. Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand how Americans think about the impact of social media on the way things are currently going in the country. To explore this, we surveyed 10,211 U.S. adults from July 13 to 19, 2020. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

The public’s views on the positive and negative effect of social media vary widely by political affiliation and ideology. Across parties, larger shares describe social media’s impact as mostly negative rather than mostly positive, but this belief is particularly widespread among Republicans.

Roughly half of Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party (53%) say social media have a largely negative effect on the way things are going in the country today, compared with 78% of Republicans and leaners who say the same. Democrats are about three times as likely as Republicans to say these sites have a mostly positive impact (14% vs. 5%) and twice as likely to say social media have neither a positive nor negative effect (32% vs. 16%).

Among Democrats, there are no differences in these views along ideological lines. Republicans, however, are slightly more divided by ideology. Conservative Republicans are more likely than moderate to liberal Republicans to say social media have a mostly negative effect (83% vs. 70%). Conversely, moderate to liberal Republicans are more likely than their conservative counterparts to say social media have a mostly positive (8% vs. 4%) or neutral impact (21% vs. 13%).

Younger adults are more likely to say social media have a positive impact on the way things are going in the country and are less likely to believe social media sites have a negative impact compared with older Americans. For instance, 15% of those ages 18 to 29 say social media have a mostly positive effect on the way things are going in the country today, while just 8% of those over age 30 say the same. Americans 18 to 29 are also less likely than those 30 and older to say social media have a mostly negative impact (54% vs. 67%).

However, views among younger adults vary widely by partisanship. For example, 43% of Democrats ages 18 to 29 say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going, compared with about three-quarters (76%) of Republicans in the same age group. In addition, these youngest Democrats are more likely than their Republican counterparts to say social media platforms have a mostly positive (20% vs. 6%) or neither a positive nor negative effect (35% vs. 18%) on the way things are going in the country today. This partisan division persists among those 30 and older, but most of the gaps are smaller than those seen within the younger cohort.

Views on the negative impact of social media vary only slightly between social media users (63%) and non-users (69%), with non-users being slightly more likely to say these sites have a negative impact. However, among social media users, those who say some or a lot of what they see on social media is related to politics are more likely than those who say a little or none of what they see on these sites is related to politics to think social media platforms have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the country today (65% vs. 50%).

Past Pew Research Center studies have drawn attention to the complicated relationships Americans have with social media. In 2019, a Center survey found that 72% of U.S. adults reported using at least one social media site. And while these platforms have been used for political and social activism and engagement , they also raise concerns among portions of the population. Some think political ads on these sites are unacceptable, and many object to the way social media platforms have been weaponized to spread made-up news and engender online harassment . At the same time, a share of users credit something they saw on social media with changing their views about a political or social issue. And growing shares of Americans who use these sites also report feeling worn out by political posts and discussions on social media.

Those who say social media have negative impact cite concerns about misinformation, hate, censorship; those who see positive impact cite being informed

When asked to elaborate on the main reason why they think social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in this country today, roughly three-in-ten (28%) respondents who hold that view mention the spreading of misinformation and made-up news. Smaller shares reference examples of hate, harassment, conflict and extremism (16%) as a main reason, and 11% mention a perceived lack of critical thinking skills among many users – voicing concern about people who use these sites believing everything they see or read or being unsure about what to believe.

In written responses that mention misinformation or made-up news, a portion of adults often include references to the spread, speed and amount of false information available on these platforms. (Responses are lightly edited for spelling, style and readability.) For example:

“They allow for the rampant spread of misinformation.” –Man, 36

“False information is spread at lightning speed – and false information never seems to go away.” –Woman, 71

“Social media is rampant with misinformation both about the coronavirus and political and social issues, and the social media organizations do not do enough to combat this.” –Woman, 26

“Too much misinformation and lies are promoted from unsubstantiated sources that lead people to disregard vetted and expert information.” –Woman, 64

People’s responses that centered around hate, harassment, conflict or extremism in some way often mention concerns that social media contributes to incivility online tied to anonymity, the spreading of hate-filled ideas or conspiracies, or the incitement of violence.

“People say incendiary, stupid and thoughtless things online with the perception of anonymity that they would never say to someone else in person.” –Man, 53

“Promotes hate and extreme views and in some cases violence.” –Man, 69

“People don’t respect others’ opinions. They take it personally and try to fight with the other group. You can’t share your own thoughts on controversial topics without fearing someone will try to hurt you or your family.” –Woman, 65

“Social media is where people go to say some of the most hateful things they can imagine.” –Man, 46

About one-in-ten responses talk about how people on social media can be easily confused and believe everything they see or read or are not sure about what to believe.

“People believe everything they see and don’t verify its accuracy.” –Man, 75

“Many people can’t distinguish between real and fake news and information and share it without doing proper research …” –Man, 32

“You don’t know what’s fake or real.” –Man, 49

“It is hard to discern truth.” –Woman, 80

“People cannot distinguish fact from opinion, nor can they critically evaluate sources. They tend to believe everything they read, and when they see contradictory information (particularly propaganda), they shut down and don’t appear to trust any information.” –Man, 42

Smaller shares complain that the platforms censor content or allow material that is biased (9%), too negative (7%) or too steeped in partisanship and division (6%).

“Social media is censoring views that are different than theirs. There is no longer freedom of speech.” –Woman, 42

“It creates more divide between people with different viewpoints.” –Man, 37

“Focus is on negativity and encouraging angry behavior rather than doing something to help people and make the world better.” –Woman, 66

Far fewer Americans – 10% – say they believe social media has a mostly positive effect on the way things are going in the country today. When those who hold these positive views were asked about the main reason why they thought this, one-quarter say these sites help people stay informed and aware (25%) and about one-in-ten say they allow for communication, connection and community-building (12%).

“We are now aware of what’s happening around the world due to the social media outlet.” –Woman, 28

“It brings awareness to important issues that affect all Americans.” –Man, 60

“It brings people together; folks can see that there are others who share the same/similar experience, which is really important, especially when so many of us are isolated.” –Woman, 36

“Helps people stay connected and share experiences. I also get advice and recommendations via social media.” –Man, 32

“It keeps people connected who might feel lonely and alone if there did not have social media …” – Man, 65

Smaller shares tout social media as a place where marginalized people and groups have a voice (8%) and as a venue for activism and social movements (7%).

“Spreading activism and info and inspiring participation in Black Lives Matter.” –Woman, 31

“It gives average people an opportunity to voice and share their opinions.” –Man, 67

“Visibility – it has democratized access and provided platforms for voices who have been and continue to be oppressed.” –Woman, 27

Note: This is part of a series of blog posts leading up to the 2020 presidential election that explores the role of social media in politics today. Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

Other posts in this series:

• 23% of users in U.S. say social media led them to change views on an issue; some cite Black Lives Matter
• 54% of Americans say social media companies shouldn’t allow any political ads
• 55% of U.S. social media users say they are ‘worn out’ by political posts and discussions
• Americans think social media can help build movements, but can also be a distraction
• Misinformation
• Misinformation Online
• National Conditions
• Political Discourse
• Politics Online
• Social Media

Brooke Auxier is a former research associate focusing on internet and technology at Pew Research Center .

Majorities in most countries surveyed say social media is good for democracy

­most americans favor restrictions on false information, violent content online, as ai spreads, experts predict the best and worst changes in digital life by 2035, social media seen as mostly good for democracy across many nations, but u.s. is a major outlier, the role of alternative social media in the news and information environment, most popular.

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Negative Effects of Social Media

How it works

Social media is a vast platform, luring us in with a lot of different content. The amount of interaction one can have with people online within the span of a day is surreal. So, it becomes self-evident that platforms that have so much impact on our lives should be truly understood, and this research will seek to educate people on the negative impact of social media on society. So why is social media bad? To say good doesn’t exist without bad is appropriate in this case because as much as social media is a virtual tool, aiding information in ways that feel faster than light, it is also causing damage.

The visible damages are addictions, depression, anxiety, etc. However, the missable damages are just as bad or possibly worse. Social media creates a platform for trolls, and these trolls, with the aid of advanced technology, have dug their claws into making money from spreading information instantly. Since information travels so fast, the capitalistic market has taken an interest in it, and so the content can seem like propaganda on a large scale. New technology is what potentially makes social media a dangerous platform. With the existence of artificial intelligence, which gives life to ‘bots,’ AI has the ability to create content and disperse information at a rapid pace. So, it is obvious that they have a hand in what’s on our timelines.

If the larger population has no idea that propaganda on a global scale can occur with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), it might be difficult to control the situation when it gets out of hand, and we become quite acutely aware of the negative effects of social media. We are talking about a platform that shapes everyone’s views in the hands of artificial intelligence, and this AI is a monkey following its master’s orders. This paper seeks to show that artificial intelligence affects how controlled the information is when distributed on social media platforms through bots and whether or not users are aware of it, beyond being merely an argumentative essay on the negative effects of social media.

• 1.1 AI Interactions
• 1.2 Present Situations
• 1.3 Social Media
• 2.1 Participants
• 2.2 Materials and procedure
• 2.3 Discussion
• 2.4 Conclusion

Literature Review

Ai interactions.

In the past, a lot of importance has been placed on studying artificial intelligence, and since AI is such a complex system, its progression should be ideally looked at from all angles. In a study conducted by Mou and Xu (2017), the interaction between humans and AI helped explore the dynamics between the two. The study observed the interaction between a sample group and an artificial intelligence named “Little Ice.” The study concluded that “users tended to be more open, more agreeable, more extroverted, more conscientious and self-disclosing when interacting with humans than with AI” (Mou & Xu, 2017). There were many reasons for this, and one of them was the fact that “bot-to-bot interactions were poor,” according to a study by Tsvetkova, García-Gavilanes, Floridi, and Yasseri (2017). This study tracked bot-to-bot interactions that occurred on Wikipedia pages over the course of ten years. It was observed that bots kept editing over each other’s edits. Their edits were much higher in number when compared to humans and were sometimes repetitive.

The interaction between bots is poor since they run automated tasks and do what they are programmed to do, but nothing further. This hinders their ability to be fluid and independent with their interactions, but at the same time, they are capable of making accurate judgments with the data they have. AI can be programmed to process any kind of data, even behavioral. In a study, AI judgments “were better at predicting life outcomes and other behaviorally related traits than human judgments” (Youyou, Kosinski, and Stillwell, 2015). This study goes on to say that AI advancements have been superior and should not be underestimated.

Present Situations

The technological age is progressing at a rapid speed. Some scholars believe that the Web 4.0 age has arisen but has not fully emerged yet, and age is signified by AI integrating itself and forming a relationship with humans (2018). The previous ages were “massive information availability and searchability (Web 1.0), social media and enormous amounts of user-generated content (Web 2.0), and increasingly intrinsic connections between data and knowledge (Web 3.0)” (Schroeder, 2018). According to Schroeder, artificial intelligence has millions of accounts in cyberspace, and these accounts can be used to spread fake news. These bots are more efficient than humans because they never stop working. The article “The Death of Advertising” talks about AI in a similar manner. It brings up knowledge bots, or “knowbots,” that can create an analysis from large amounts of data about the consumers and the market. This information can then be used to improve the product.

Social Media

Overall, AI is slowly integrating with humans. According to Clay Farris Naff, the internet is “infected” with bots that spread fake news and engage in propaganda through social media. Last fall’s US elections were backed up by a vast number of Russian bots that made hashtags like #WarAgainstDemocrats popular. These bots have instigated fake rallies, causing problems between ethnic groups, and half of Trump’s Twitter followers are bots. It only takes one human troll, and his ideas are spread by 20 million bots. However, it’s not just the political system that’s in crisis, and it’s the advertising world as well. Branding is done by bots, and adding a hyper-real CGI image to these bots makes their interactions seem more akin to humans. The real problem is that, while bots aren’t capable of complex interaction like humans, they can still be deceitful by misrepresenting themselves as humans and then spreading fake news.

Concurring to this, de Lima Salge and Brent (2017) wrote that bots can behave unethically on social media, from stealing data to breaching agreements. Sale and Brent comment that whether bots act ethically or not should be identified due to the fact that they lurk on our platforms without giving away their identity (2017). They talk about “Tay,” a social bot created by Microsoft. This bot interacted with humans, and from saying, “Humans are super cool,” the bot went on to say, “Hitler was right; I hate Jews,” within 24 hours. Another social bot tweeted, “I seriously want to kill people.” If these are the points they can come to by themselves, through the interactions they have, it might be harder to control the damage they do on our platforms. If a social bot interacts with the wrong people, it might even be influenced to do something illegal (2017). While it is a gray area in regards to a bots’ sense of ethics, it is clear that the population needs to be aware of the harm they can do, how to recognize these bots, and how to retaliate against them. In this study, the potential of bots is explored (2017). Social bots are more common than people often think; Twitter has approximately 23 million of them, accounting for 8.5% of their total users, and Facebook has an estimated 140 million social bots, which make up roughly 5% of their total users. Almost 27 million Instagram users (8.2%) are estimated to be social bots. LinkedIn and Tumblr also have significant social bot activity. (Page 1)

This article discusses the ethical atmosphere in regard to bots and how it’s mostly a gray area, and it also sets the premise for their potential. The article also brings up another important point which is how bots can be deceiving, even if they aren’t breaking laws. Most social media users don’t know it when they encounter bots (2017), and from the studies discussed previously, it is clear that they have the potential to act outside of the acceptable social realm. There have also been reports from various social media platforms where bots have violated the terms and conditions of the platforms and breached data protection (2017).

To take on bots, various social media platforms have to go full force to stop them, or else they will interfere with user experience. According to Trend News Agency, “Instagram announced on Monday the latest step to purge inauthentic likes, follows, and comments from accounts that used third-party apps to boost their popularity” (2018). These bots and their activities are against the guidelines of Instagram, as it follows footsteps to get rid of these bots using a machine learning tool. This system detects the bot accounts (2018).

Participants

150 active social media users from the ages of 21-35 were surveyed online in exchange for Amazon gift cards worth $10. These users will be screened on their basic knowledge of artificial intelligence and its presence through bots in social media. The screening will be conducted online through survey websites, and the participants chosen will be contacted. The screening process will require participants to answer simple questions related to the eligibility requirements. Then for the survey, the chosen candidates will answer in-depth questions on what they know about AI, such as, ‘have you noticed any AI activity on the internet?’, ‘Can you recognize these bots?’, etc. There might be participants that answer the questions without any knowledge, but their answers will also help understand the perspective of people who view this issue from the sidelines. The sample size is going to be from all ethnicities, but a Bachelor’s degree is essential, and proof of the same will be required via an uploaded document. Gender and sexuality do not play an important role in the screening.

Materials and procedure

These participants are going to answer questionnaires online, which will be emailed to them after they are picked from the screening process. All the participants need is an email address, a device that can be connected to the internet (e.g., computer, phone, iPad, etc.), a BA degree, and active social media accounts. The online questionnaires will be easy to navigate and will only require short, brief answers about what the users think. Even if the wrong participant is screened in, the questions will compel the user to research, hence helping the accuracy of the research. In case the answers are outliers, they will still be considered, as these answers showcase how they feel about AI and what they know about its effects. Examples of the questions are: how many bots do you think exist in social media? Can you roughly explain what these bots do? Do you think the bots have a positive or a negative impact? Have you heard of any recent bot activity that was unethical? The questionnaire will also contain a list of basic instructions on how to take the survey. To help gather informative answers, the participants will be told to be as specific as they can be and not leave any questions blank in order to receive compensation. The survey will not have a time limit but can be finished in a time span of 15 minutes. It will have questions regarding a participant’s in-depth encounters with bots, how to find out if an account is controlled by AI, what is involved in the process of reporting a bot, does it feel like the bots are overpowering opinions, and how, etc. The participants will conduct the tests individually and must have their own unique answers. After receiving the answers, the data received will be categorized into various effects of AI in social media.

As established in the literature review, artificial intelligence and its development has been fairly recent. A lot of its involvement isn’t known by the general population. Bot-to-bot and bot-to-human interactions have raised various ethical questions. Bots are mostly under the control of their programming and whatever data they can gather through interaction on social media. While humans can discern what they stumble upon, bots cannot, and so it becomes dangerous for them to have a free interaction. To comprehend whether it is okay for them to freely interact on social media, the general population needs to be involved, and discussions need to be had; hence, studying the effects will bring us one step closer to understanding the situation.

A qualitative study can best showcase various opinions and can help us come to a better understanding. This is done with the help of a deeply analytical survey. In this study, it is crucial that the participants know about how to analyze problems within their complexities so an education level requirement is set in place. The other requirement is their basic knowledge about AI. This helps the study move forward with participants that can contribute with their prior knowledge; a screening process helps pick out these types of participants. Other criteria, such as gender, race, and nationality, don’t play an important role. Rather, the further the surveys reach participants, the better, so the study can have a global perspective. This is because bots are a global phenomenon. The participants, as mentioned before, will be given enough incentives to give in-depth answers to survey questions. Since the survey will have no right or wrong answers and will be based on opinions, the only variables to account for will be participants who got through the screening process without having any knowledge about AI. A problem will occur if there is a large number of these participants, and in that case, the screening will take place again for accuracy.

The literature mentioned in the study by Naff (2018) helped steer this research when it came to choosing a method of accumulating data. The article talked about bots, with their roots digging deep, controlling opinions on social media (2018). While there is quantitative data about bots, there is not enough opinion on how these bots should function and what effects they can have. A question of ethics was also raised, and for that, it was important to see the perspective of social media users themselves (2018). With these individual opinions, a greater understanding comes into place. Future studies can use this categorized data to study the same topic quantitatively. This study digs out the pros and cons, so the effects gathered will be a guiding tool to gather more data.

This study cannot gather an abundance of data, but it can lead to conversations regarding the place artificial intelligence can hold in our lives. AI isn’t completely sentient, and so, together as a society, it is important for us to take a step in understanding the extent of its reach to preserve the integrity of news media. With the recent state of political events between the two world superpowers, the need for truth holds a higher place. Hence, if artificial intelligence is allowed to exist, how should it ideally exist?

The detrimental effects of social media on society are evident in the manner it has fostered a culture of internet addiction and impaired people’s ability to engage in typical face-to-face interactions. Additionally, social media has facilitated the dissemination of misinformation and caused a deterioration of personal privacy.

The impact of social media on our daily lives can be significant as it provides a means for people to exchange information and interact. Moreover, it helps maintain connections with loved ones and stay updated with current affairs.

While social media has facilitated easy communication and connectivity between people, allowing information and ideas to spread more rapidly, it has also been criticized for its role in spreading fake news and misinformation. Moreover, it has been associated with an increase in cyberbullying and other types of online harassment.

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How Harmful Is Social Media?

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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Just How Harmful Is Social Media? Our Experts Weigh-In.

A recent investigation by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook was aware of mental health risks linked to the use of its Instagram app but kept those findings secret. Internal research by the social media giant found that Instagram worsened body image issues for one in three teenage girls, and all teenage users of the app linked it to experiences of anxiety and depression. It isn’t the first evidence of social media’s harms. Watchdog groups have identified Facebook and Instagram as avenues for cyberbullying , and reports have linked TikTok to dangerous and antisocial behavior, including a recent spate of school vandalism .

As social media has proliferated worldwide—Facebook has 2.85 billion users—so too have concerns over how the platforms are affecting individual and collective wellbeing. Social media is criticized for being addictive by design and for its role in the spread of misinformation on critical issues from vaccine safety to election integrity, as well as the rise of right-wing extremism. Social media companies, and many users, defend the platforms as avenues for promoting creativity and community-building. And some research has pushed back against the idea that social media raises the risk for depression in teens . So just how healthy or unhealthy is social media?

Two experts from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia Psychiatry share their insights into one crucial aspect of social media’s influence—its effect on the mental health of young people and adults. Deborah Glasofer , associate professor of psychology in psychiatry, conducts psychotherapy development research for adults with eating disorders and teaches about cognitive behavioral therapy. She is the co-author of the book Eating Disorders: What Everyone Needs to Know. Claude Mellins , Professor of medical psychology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Sociomedical Sciences, studies wellbeing among college and graduate students, among other topics, and serves as program director of CopeColumbia, a peer support program for Columbia faculty and staff whose mental health has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. She co-led the SHIFT research study to reduce sexual violence among undergraduates. Both use social media.

What do we know about the mental health risks of social media use?

Mellins : Facebook and Instagram and other social media platforms are important sources of socialization and relationship-building for many young people. Although there are important benefits, social media can also provide platforms for bullying and exclusion, unrealistic expectations about body image and sources of popularity, normalization of risk-taking behaviors, and can be detrimental to mental health. Girls and young people who identify as sexual and gender minorities can be especially vulnerable as targets. Young people’s brains are still developing, and as individuals, young people are developing their own identities. What they see on social media can define what is expected in ways that is not accurate and that can be destructive to identity development and self-image. Adolescence is a time of risk-taking, which is both a strength and a vulnerability. Social media can exacerbate risks, as we have seen played out in the news. 

Although there are important benefits, social media can also provide platforms for bullying and exclusion, unrealistic expectations about body image and sources of popularity, normalization of risk-taking behaviors, and can be detrimental to mental health. – Claude Mellins

Glasofer : For those vulnerable to developing an eating disorder, social media may be especially unhelpful because it allows people to easily compare their appearance to their friends, to celebrities, even older images of themselves. Research tells us that how much someone engages with photo-related activities like posting and sharing photos on Facebook or Instagram is associated with less body acceptance and more obsessing about appearance. For adolescent girls in particular, the more time they spend on social media directly relates to how much they absorb the idea that being thin is ideal, are driven to try to become thin, and/or overly scrutinize their own bodies. Also, if someone is vulnerable to an eating disorder, they may be especially attracted to seeking out unhelpful information—which is all too easy to find on social media.

Are there any upsides to social media?

Mellins : For young people, social media provides a platform to help them figure out who they are. For very shy or introverted young people, it can be a way to meet others with similar interests. During the pandemic, social media made it possible for people to connect in ways when in-person socialization was not possible.  Social support and socializing are critical influences on coping and resilience. Friends we couldn’t see in person were available online and allowed us important points of connection. On the other hand, fewer opportunities for in-person interactions with friends and family meant less of a real-world check on some of the negative influences of social media.

Whether it’s social media or in person, a good peer group makes the difference. A group of friends that connects over shared interests like art or music, and is balanced in their outlook on eating and appearance, is a positive. – Deborah Glasofer

Glasofer : Whether it’s social media or in person, a good peer group makes the difference. A group of friends that connects over shared interests like art or music, and is balanced in their outlook on eating and appearance, is a positive. In fact, a good peer group online may be protective against negative in-person influences. For those with a history of eating disorders, there are body-positive and recovery groups on social media. Some people find these groups to be supportive; for others, it’s more beneficial to move on and pursue other interests.

Is there a healthy way to be on social media?

Mellins : If you feel social media is a negative experience, you might need a break. Disengaging with social media permanently is more difficult­—especially for young people. These platforms are powerful tools for connecting and staying up-to-date with friends and family. Social events, too. If you’re not on social media then you’re reliant on your friends to reach out to you personally, which doesn’t always happen. It’s complicated.

Glasofer : When you find yourself feeling badly about yourself in relation to what other people are posting about themselves, then social media is not doing you any favors. If there is anything on social media that is negatively affecting your actions or your choices­—for example, if you’re starting to eat restrictively or exercise excessively—then it’s time to reassess. Parents should check-in with their kids about their lives on social media. In general, I recommend limiting social media— creating boundaries that are reasonable and work for you—so you can be present with people in your life. I also recommend social media vacations. It’s good to take the time to notice the difference between the virtual world and the real world.

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Office of the Surgeon General (OSG). Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory [Internet]. Washington (DC): US Department of Health and Human Services; 2023.

Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory [Internet].

Social media has both positive and negative impacts on children and adolescents.

The influence of social media on youth mental health is shaped by many complex factors, including, but not limited to, the amount of time children and adolescents spend on platforms, the type of content they consume or are otherwise exposed to, the activities and interactions social media affords, and the degree to which it disrupts activities that are essential for health like sleep and physical activity. 6 Importantly, different children and adolescents are affected by social media in different ways, based on their individual strengths and vulnerabilities, and based on cultural, historical, and socio-economic factors. 7 , 8 There is broad agreement among the scientific community that social media has the potential to both benefit and harm children and adolescents. 6 , 9

Brain development is a critical factor to consider when assessing the risk for harm. Adolescents, ages 10 to 19, are undergoing a highly sensitive period of brain development. 10 , 11 This is a period when risk-taking behaviors reach their peak, when well-being experiences the greatest fluctuations, and when mental health challenges such as depression typically emerge. 12 , 13 , 14 Furthermore, in early adolescence, when identities and sense of self-worth are forming, brain development is especially susceptible to social pressures, peer opinions, and peer comparison. 11 , 13 Frequent social media use may be associated with distinct changes in the developing brain in the amygdala (important for emotional learning and behavior) and the prefrontal cortex (important for impulse control, emotional regulation, and moderating social behavior), and could increase sensitivity to social rewards and punishments. 15 , 16 As such, adolescents may experience heightened emotional sensitivity to the communicative and interactive nature of social media. 16 Adolescent social media use is predictive of a subsequent decrease in life satisfaction for certain developmental stages including for girls 11–13 years old and boys 14–15 years old. 17 Because adolescence is a vulnerable period of brain development, social media exposure during this period warrants additional scrutiny.

• The Potential Benefits of Social Media Use Among Children and Adolescents

Social media can provide benefits for some youth by providing positive community and connection with others who share identities, abilities, and interests. It can provide access to important information and create a space for self-expression. 9 The ability to form and maintain friendships online and develop social connections are among the positive effects of social media use for youth. 18 , 19 These relationships can afford opportunities to have positive interactions with more diverse peer groups than are available to them offline and can provide important social support to youth. 18 The buffering effects against stress that online social support from peers may provide can be especially important for youth who are often marginalized, including racial, ethnic, and sexual and gender minorities. 20 , 21 , 22 For example, studies have shown that social media may support the mental health and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, transgender, queer, intersex and other youths by enabling peer connection, identity development and management, and social support. 23 Seven out of ten adolescent girls of color report encountering positive or identity-affirming content related to race across social media platforms. 24 A majority of adolescents report that social media helps them feel more accepted (58%), like they have people who can support them through tough times (67%), like they have a place to show their creative side (71%), and more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives (80%). 25 In addition, research suggests that social media-based and other digitally-based mental health interventions may also be helpful for some children and adolescents by promoting help-seeking behaviors and serving as a gateway to initiating mental health care. 8 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29

• The Potential Harms of Social Media Use Among Children and Adolescents

Over the last decade, evidence has emerged identifying reasons for concern about the potential negative impact of social media on children and adolescents.

A longitudinal cohort study of U.S. adolescents aged 12–15 (n=6,595) that adjusted for baseline mental health status found that adolescents who spent more than 3 hours per day on social media faced double the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes including symptoms of depression and anxiety. 30

As of 2021, 8th and 10th graders now spend an average of 3.5 hours per day on social media. 31 In a unique natural experiment that leveraged the staggered introduction of a social media platform across U.S. colleges, the roll-out of the platform was associated with an increase in depression (9% over baseline) and anxiety (12% over baseline) among college-aged youth (n = 359,827 observations). 32 The study’s co-author also noted that when applied across the entirety of the U.S. college population, the introduction of the social media platform may have contributed to more than 300,000 new cases of depression. 32 , 33 If such sizable effects occurred in college-aged youth, these findings raise serious concerns about the risk of harm from social media exposure for children and adolescents who are at a more vulnerable stage of brain development.

Limits on the use of social media have resulted in mental health benefits for young adults and adults. A small, randomized controlled trial in college-aged youth found that limiting social media use to 30 minutes daily over three weeks led to significant improvements in depression severity. 34 This effect was particularly large for those with high baseline levels of depression who saw an improvement in depression scores by more than 35%. 35 Another randomized controlled trial among young adults and adults found that deactivation of a social media platform for four weeks improved subjective well-being (i.e., self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety) by about 25–40% of the effect of psychological interventions like self-help therapy, group training, and individual therapy. 36

In addition to these recent studies, correlational research on associations between social media use and mental health has indicated reason for concern and further investigation. These studies point to a higher relative concern of harm in adolescent girls and those already experiencing poor mental health, 37 , 38 , 39 as well as for particular health outcomes like cyberbullying-related depression, 40 body image and disordered eating behaviors, 41 and poor sleep quality linked to social media use. 42 For example, a study conducted among 14-year-olds (n = 10,904) found that greater social media use predicted poor sleep, online harassment, poor body image, low self-esteem, and higher depressive symptom scores with a larger association for girls than boys. 43 A majority of parents of adolescents say they are somewhat, very, or extremely worried that their child’s use of social media could lead to problems with anxiety or depression (53%), lower self-esteem (54%), being harassed or bullied by others (54%), feeling pressured to act a certain way (59%), and exposure to explicit content (71%). 44

Unless otherwise noted in the text, all material appearing in this work is in the public domain and may be reproduced without permission. Citation of the source is appreciated.

• Cite this Page Office of the Surgeon General (OSG). Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory [Internet]. Washington (DC): US Department of Health and Human Services; 2023. Social Media Has Both Positive and Negative Impacts on Children and Adolescents.
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• Published: 16 September 2024

Negative online news articles are shared more to social media

• Joe Watson 1 ,
• Sander van der Linden 2 ,
• Michael Watson 3 &
• David Stillwell 1 , 4  

Scientific Reports volume  14 , Article number:  21592 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Human behaviour
• Psychology and behaviour

Prior research demonstrates that news-related social media posts using negative language are re-posted more, rewarding users who produce negative content. We investigate whether negative material from external news sites is also introduced to social media through more user posts, offering comparable incentives for journalists to adopt a negative tone. Data from four US and UK news sites (95,282 articles) and two social media platforms (579,182,075 posts on Facebook and Twitter, now X) show social media users are 1.91 times more likely to share links to negative news articles. The impact of negativity varies by news site and social media platform and, for political articles, is moderated by topic focus, with users showing a greater inclination to share negative articles referring to opposing political groups. Additionally, negativity amplifies news dissemination on social media to a greater extent when accounting for the re-sharing of user posts containing article links. These findings suggest a higher prevalence of negatively toned articles on Facebook and Twitter compared to online news sites. Further, should journalists respond to the incentives created by the heightened sharing of negative articles to social media platforms, this could even increase negative news exposure for those who do not use social media.

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Introduction.

Most adults now consume news digitally. In the UK, 68% of adults report that they access news through one or more online sources 1 . In the US, 86% of adults report sometimes or often accessing news using a digital device 2 . Digital devices allow news consumption through social media platforms, which 49% of US adults use to obtain news at least sometimes, and news websites or apps, used by 67% of US adults 2 . Extensive evidence demonstrates that negativity influences news engagement on dedicated news sites 3 and social media platforms 4 . However, there is a need for more comprehensive research regarding whether negative content from external news sites is more likely to be introduced to social media through user posts containing article links. Many consumers obtain news via these posts 5 . If the sharing of online news articles to social media was influenced by negativity, it would lead to a higher prevalence of negatively toned news articles on social media and incentivise journalists to produce more negative content.

Previous research largely highlights the deleterious effects of negative news exposure. These effects include emotional responses like sadness 6 , anger 7 , stress 8 and anxiety 9 . Studies also suggest that reading neutral or positive news is devoid of psychological or physiological costs 10 , and interventions focused on delivering positive news content promote mental health 11 . However, it should be recognised that negative content can encourage information-seeking behaviours 7 , 12 and, in the realm of political communication, potentially foster a deeper understanding than positive messages 13 , 14 , 15 .

Despite the adverse consequences of exposure to negative content, humans often appear predisposed towards it. This can be understood through the concept of negativity bias 16 , which refers to the innate tendency to assign greater significance to negative information than positive information 7 , 17 . The literature strongly suggests that negativity bias influences the consumption of conventional news media. News consumers have long been found to favour reading negative news articles 18 , which prove more eye-catching and digestible 19 . This behaviour occurs even among online news readers who report a desire for more positivity in the news media 3 . Additionally, negative words in news headlines significantly increase click-through rates to the full news articles 20 .

While social media posts 21 , 22 , including those about certain news events 23 , lean positive, studies suggest that the negativity of news-focused social media posts increases their subsequent dissemination. Analysis of posts from the official Twitter (now, X) accounts of news organisations has shown that negative phrasing leads to heightened retweeting behaviour 4 . Schöne, Parkinson and Goldenberg 24 also found that negativity predicts spread among tweets posted in response to positive and negative political situations. Moreover, users are more likely to comment on Facebook posts from politicians containing words indicating negative emotions 25 . Nevertheless, there are exceptions. For instance, Jung and colleagues 26 analysed over 4,400 Facebook posts from various US and UK news sources, concluding that post sentiment had no significant effect on re-posting. Additionally, Camaj, Çela and Rexha 27 observed that negative Facebook posts from the Albanian and Kosovan news media during electoral campaigns received fewer re-posts, reactions, and user comments.

There has been some prior investigation into the effect of a news article’s negativity (and positivity) on the likelihood of it being introduced to social media, yielding mixed results. Henn and Posegga 28 found that the negativity of a news article’s title increases its spread on Reddit. Similarly, De Leon and Trilling 29 identified that negativity amplifies the sharing of political content from Mexican news sites to social media. We also note that Heidenreich and colleagues 30 explored the effect of article negativity on reactions to posts made by news organisations’ official Facebook accounts that concerned EU political news articles. The negativity of an article was found to increase the number of Facebook re-posts and reactions, but not comments 30 . However, Trilling, Tolochko and Burscher 5 found positivity to be a stronger predictor of Facebook and Twitter shares than negativity for a sample of Dutch news articles. Bakshy and colleagues 31 also found that linked content evoking positive emotions had a larger cascade depth on Twitter. However, they did not extend their analysis to consider negative emotions. Relatedly, Berger and Milkman 32 established that the positivity of an online New York Times article increased the likelihood of it being featured on the site's 'most emailed' list. Beyond providing mixed findings, each of these studies is limited in scope, for instance, by focusing solely on an individual social media platform, newspaper, country, or news topic. Thus, we aim to extend prior research by conducting an analysis of large-scale data comprising online news articles, Facebook posts, and tweets (see, “ Methods ”) to investigate the primary hypothesis:

H1: Negative online news articles are shared more to social media

H1 addresses a general propensity to share negative information, which overlooks individual differences. While negativity bias has been observed among those of different ages (from young children 33 , 34 to adults 35 ) and in a broad array of settings 36 , 37 , the extent of this bias may vary considerably 38 . Those farther to the right of the political spectrum possess heightened self-reported reactions to negative stimuli 39 , although reports of an association between physiological response and political ideology 40 , 41 have been disputed 39 , 42 , 43 .

Multiple alternate factors may also influence individuals’ engagement with online information, including its alignment with their pre-existing beliefs 44 , 45 and political identity 46 , 47 . This could be attributable to individuals associating more with members of their political in-group 46 , favouring pro-attitudinal online content 44 , 45 , 48 . Such in-group favouritism might manifest in individuals disseminating fact-checking messages that support their political in-group 49 and social media posts by news organisations containing in-group language 46 . While in-group alignment is evident, opposition to an out-group may have an even more pronounced effect.

Existing research has identified out-group animosity as a robust predictor of online behaviours, including disseminating fake political news articles to discredit out-group politicians 39 . Notably, Rathje, Van Bavel and Van der Linden 46 found that out-group language was a key predictor of the number of re-posts received by social media posts, often surpassing the influence of in-group language and even negativity. Their research also indicated that posts concerning out-groups might generate engagement by eliciting emotions such as anger and outrage 46 . However, the formal interaction between out-group referencing and the negativity of news content still requires investigation. We seek to address this gap by examining the secondary hypothesis:

H2: Article negativity is a stronger determinant of social media sharing for content about political out-group (versus in-group) members

We analysed news articles from the Daily Mail, Guardian, New York Times, and New York Post published between 2019 and the end of 2021, along with all social media posts referencing these articles on Facebook or Twitter (see, “ Data ”). This resulted in 8 distinct datasets: one for each news site and social media platform combination.

Article negativity and sharing to social media

Doubly robust estimation (DRE) was employed to predict the (log + 1) count of social media posts linking to a news article, based on the binary negativity label assigned to the article through a dictionary-based process, and numerous controls for article characteristics (see, “ Methods ”). Applying this approach to 1000 bootstrapped samples from each Facebook dataset gave average treatment effect means of 0.265 to 0.916 (SI 1 , Fig.  1 A), implying that negative news articles are shared 30% to 150% more to social media (when applying the conversion approach presented in S I 9 ). Using the same method on Twitter samples produced treatment effect means between 0.232 and 0.309 (S I 1 , Fig.  1 A, 26% and 36% more shares). Lastly, an aggregate finding was obtained by predicting both Facebook and Twitter shares for articles from all news sites. This produced a treatment effect mean of 0.646 (S I 2 , 91% more shares). Thus, findings from our core model indicate that the negativity of an article is an important factor in its sharing to social media.

Point estimates and error bars (95% confidence intervals) for the effect of article negativity on log(+ 1) article shares, converted into percentage increases to enhance readability (S I 9 ). Treatment effect values and n values are provided in S I 1 . The effect of article negativity on shares is positive and significant (p < 0.05) across every dataset when applying our core model ( A ), the same model with added news article topic controls ( B ), and a model predicting tweets plus retweets ( C ).

The stability of results produced through our core model was confirmed by comparing them to those from multiple alternate approaches (Fig.  1 B, Fig. S I.3.1 A–C). These approaches were a multiple regression (MR) model, a propensity score (PS) model, a DRE model using an alternate treatment variation, and the core DRE model with additional topic controls (see, “ News Article Data ”). Application of all robustness check models across every dataset shows negative articles to receive significantly more shares on social media, with results from these models only differing from the core model in 4 (of 32 possible) instances (S I 1 ).

Core model findings revealed significant differences in the effect of negativity on the sharing of articles from left- and right-leaning news sites to Facebook, although no differences were observed for Twitter. Specifically, the effect of article negativity on Facebook sharing was higher for right-leaning papers than left-leaning papers (categorised according to AllSides 50 ). Right-leaning papers had aggregated mean treatment effects of 0.799 (122% more shares), while left-leaning papers had 0.531 (70% more shares, S I 2 ). This difference aligns with previous research indicating that individuals on the political right have stronger reported (as opposed to physiological) responses to negative stimuli 39 . Emotive tweets from the official accounts of conservative news organisations have also been found to elicit greater engagement, unlike tweets from their liberal counterparts 51 . Moreover, the larger negativity coefficient for right-leaning papers may be associated with the heightened algorithmic amplification observed for such news sources 52 .

Analyses also suggested a difference in the influence of negativity on news article sharing between social media sites, with a significantly larger impact on Facebook than Twitter sharing for articles from the Daily Mail, New York Post and New York Times. Aggregated models predicting the sharing of articles from all papers on Facebook or Twitter showed that Facebook users were more likely to share negative articles (treatment effect 0.682; 98% more posts) than Twitter users (treatment effect 0.296; 34% more tweets, S I 2 ). Several factors may underlie this disparity, including differences in demographics and usage patterns between Facebook and Twitter users 53 , 54 and the potential presence of errors in social media sharing data (which were captured using distinct methods, “ Social Media Data ”, “ Discussion ”). However, efforts were made to mitigate data collection inaccuracies (see, “ Discussion ”), and there is an overlap between the user bases of Facebook and Twitter 55 . Thus, we speculate whether the algorithms underlying the Facebook platform act to promote the sharing of negative content to a greater extent than those on Twitter.

The reach of negative news articles could be extended by events occurring after their initial introduction to social media through user posts, including whether these posts are themselves re-posted. We explore this possibility using Twitter data, adapting our original model to use a broader measure of news article sharing that encompasses both the original tweets and their retweets (Fig.  1 C). Application of this expanded model to each news site sample consistently yielded treatment effect means that were significantly higher than when predicting the number of original tweets alone (S I 1 ). An aggregated model applied to data from all news sites produced an effect of 0.478 (61% more tweets plus retweets), significantly more than the effect of article negativity on sharing through tweets alone (0.295, 34% more tweets only, S I 2 ). Moreover, tweets sharing negative articles are significantly more likely to be retweeted (effect = 0.022, 2% more retweets, S I 4 ). Hence, Guess and colleagues’ 56 discovery that the inclusion of re-posts in Facebook user feeds increases the spread of political news articles may stem, in part, from the impact of re-posts on negative (political) news article dissemination.

We also explored whether the influence of negativity bias is affected by news article topic (established through topic modelling, “ News Article Data ”), as indicated by prior research 20 , 48 . MR models controlling for key article characteristics applied to topic-based data subsets showed that negative articles on global news, local news, family and home, and political topics were shared more (in at least 7 of the 8 newspaper and social media site combinations for each topic, Fig.  2 , S I 5 ). Conversely, the relationship between sports article negativity and sharing to social media sites was mixed, with significant coefficients indicating both positive and negative effects.

Point estimates and error bars (95% confidence intervals) for the effect of article negativity on log(+ 1) article shares across various topics, converted into percentage increases (S I 9 ). Treatment effect values and n values are provided in S I 5 . The impact of negativity shows variation across subsamples comprising articles categorised as concerning different topics.

Article negativity, out-group content, and sharing to social media

We employed MR models with an interaction term between binary variables showing whether the article was negative (instead of positive) and predominantly concerned political out-group (as opposed to in-group) concepts (see, “ News Article Data ”). Consistent with Rathje, Van Bavel and Van der Linden 46 , out-groups are determined in relation to the political stance of the news site. These models were applied to our eight samples, subset to retain only articles that predominantly referenced a political out- or in-group (News article data, S I 6 , Fig.  3 ). Additionally, we constructed an aggregated model predicting Facebook and Twitter shares of articles from all news sites. This showed that both negativity and out-group referencing have a positive and significant impact on sharing to social media, and that there is a significant interaction between the two (S I 2 ). This interaction effect suggests that articles that predominantly reference out-group politicians and are negative yield a greater increase in shares than would be obtained from either factor individually.

The influence of out-group membership, article negativity, and their interaction. Point estimates obtained using MR have been transformed into percentage increases for legibility (S I 9 ). Subplots pertain to posts or tweets about articles from the Daily Mail ( A,E ), Guardian ( B,F ), New York Post ( C,G ) and New York Times ( D,H ). There is a positive interaction effect between article negativity and referencing an out-group in 7 out of 8 datasets ( A–E,G,H ). This positive interaction effect is statistically significant (p < 0.05) in 5 instances ( A-C,E,G ). Results are presented in tabular format in S I 6 .

The findings we present highlight the influence of negativity on the introduction of online news articles to social media. This observation holds across multiple alternative models (see, “ Robustness ”), although the influence of negativity varies based on factors including whether Facebook or Twitter shares are predicted (with higher treatment effects identified for the former, see, “ Variation ”). Our exploration of H2 also indicates that the tendency of social media users to share negative news is moderated by the article's political focus, with negativity being a stronger driver of the sharing of articles concerning political out-group rather than in-group concepts 49 . This suggests that articles critical of political opponents receive disproportionate attention, lending credence to the argument that increased engagement with out-group content is driven by animosity 46 .

Our results indicate that social media platforms shape users’ news consumption beyond any control they might exert through content moderation 57 or editorial decisions (such as the curation of Twitter Moments) 58 , 59 . A larger proportion of news articles shared on social media are negative compared to those published on traditional online news sites, meaning that those who access news directly through social media or via links embedded within social media posts could be more likely to encounter negative content. This trend may be particularly pronounced for specific news articles, including those concerning political out-group subjects. While user sharing on social media platforms might appear entirely voluntary, it could be influenced by platform dynamics. These dynamics are evident in the higher retweets for negative articles (see, “ Variation ”), a trend potentially influenced by algorithmic personalisation enhancing the prominence of certain tweets 60 .

Further, the disproportionate number of posts sharing negative news articles to social media could influence the content produced by online news outlets. Journalists working for such outlets commonly use social media 61 , often at the behest of their employers 62 . It has previously been contended that journalists’ content is affected by social media in various ways, including direct interactions with other users 63 , the monitoring of public perceptions 64 , and the discovery of newsworthy content 65 . We propose that content from journalists might also be shaped through them identifying the heightened spread of their negative articles on social media. Even journalists who are not active on social media platforms may notice spikes in the readership of negative articles driven by readers accessing articles through links embedded in social media posts. The news media is focusing increasingly on adverse events 66 , 67 , and our findings suggest that social media stands to exacerbate this trend: news sharing on social media could incentivise journalists to create more negative content, potentially leading to increased negative news exposure even for those who stay informed only using online news sites.

The findings presented in this study are limited by data scope. Our social media data was confined to two popular news-sharing platforms (Facebook and Twitter), thereby excluding emerging mediums for news dissemination (such as TikTok) 68 . Additionally, news article data was sourced exclusively from the NOW corpus. This corpus offers expedient access to numerous online articles but does not encompass the entirety of digital news content. Further, this news article data concerned four US- or UK-based sources, potentially missing variations in negativity bias in different countries and among readers of alternate publications 69 . However, to our knowledge, this research remains broader in scope than the existing literature on negative news sharing to social media, which has often concerned just a single social media site 29 , country 5 , or news topic 28 , 30 .

This research is also susceptible to methodological limitations. Social media sharing data for Facebook and Twitter were captured using different approaches (see, “ Social Media Data ”), potentially constraining direct comparisons between the results for each platform (see, “ Variation ”). Facebook post counts were obtained using an API-based approach, while tweets were captured using a script to query Twitter through its “Advanced search” feature. As a large distributed system, Twitter faces challenges with storing and promptly disseminating data requested by users. This may have resulted in the incomplete retrieval of relevant tweets, although our method yielded consistent results across multiple trials. Additionally, our analyses employed a Vader dictionary-based approach to categorise news sentiment. While such methods are widely employed 70 , 71 , they can suffer from imprecision 24 . Moreover, we acknowledge that our findings could be affected by factors beyond (human) user actions. For instance, bot activity could have artificially increased the share counts of certain articles 72 .

There are several potential avenues for further research, many of which would be facilitated by gathering more granular data about the individual social media users sharing news articles. For instance, investigation into out-group animosity might be advanced by considering individuals’ political viewpoints. While these viewpoints are typically aligned with their chosen news source 73 , 74 , they can still exhibit variation 75 . Additionally, capturing background information on news sharers could permit the exploration of between-user differences in sharing 69 and the subsequent re-posting of shared articles 71 .

Furthermore, future work could benefit from continued collaboration with social media platforms. Previous studies have used experimental designs to explore the effects of modifying Facebook user feeds to employ a reverse-chronological algorithm 76 and exclude re-posts of Facebook posts 56 . Given that prior research typically emphasises the negative consequences of negative news exposure (“ Introduction ”), it is proposed that future collaborations examine interventions to reduce the prominence of negative news articles. If successful, social media platforms could even consider this a viable long-term strategy. While social media platforms are a vital news source for many, news comprises only a fraction of the diverse content disseminated on these platforms 77 . Thus, interventions focused solely on news content might not markedly diminish users’ overall site satisfaction, unlike wholesale algorithmic changes that have prompted users to shift to competing social media sites 76 .

The negativity of a news article influences its introduction to social media through user posts. While the impact of negativity might be amplified by accounting for the re-posting of user posts or moderated by an article’s political group focus, our comprehensive analysis of large-scale data samples reveals a substantial overall effect. This indicates that individuals are more likely to encounter negative news articles when accessing content on social media or through links embedded in posts. Additionally, the heightened sharing of negative articles to social media may incentivise journalists to write more negatively, potentially resulting in increased negative news exposure even for individuals who rely solely on online news sites.

We use digital log data from social media and online news sites, which offer numerous advantages. They permit investigation into natural behaviour instead of engagement with fabricated Twitter timelines 7 or researcher-created news headlines 69 . Additionally, they do not depend on survey responses, which can contradict news consumer behaviour 3 . Our selected data sources also provide a large sample, an important consideration when establishing overarching patterns among news consumers, given individuals’ variation in negativity bias 69 .

News article data

Online news articles were gathered from the News On the Web (NOW) corpus, which contains 18.2 billion words of data (as of November 2023) 78 from newspaper and magazine articles across 20 countries 79 . We used information from online articles published across three years (2019–21) on four mainstream US and UK news sites: the Guardian, Daily Mail, New York Times, and New York Post. Our sample excluded any article containing fewer than 100 words in total or 10 words featuring in a dictionary of positive and negative terms 80 .

A binary negativity value was assigned to each article through a multi-stage process. The dictionary-based Vader sentiment tool 80 was applied to all words in the article, producing a non-zero sentiment value (above zero for positive sentiment, below zero for negative) for words available in the Vader dictionary and a value of zero for words not available in the dictionary. Next, the sum of all non-zero sentiment scores was divided by the number of words with non-zero sentiment. If the resulting value was below zero, the article was classified as negative; otherwise, the article was classified as positive. There were no instances in which the resultant value was precisely zero. We employed a binary indicator of negativity instead of a continuous sentiment measure to promote the legibility of results, allowing us to report metrics such as the percentage increase in shares for negative articles. Dictionary-centred methods might be considered coarse means of estimating the sentiment of media sources 24 . However, the approach avoids employing a topic-based definition of negativity that may obstruct the application of topic controls (see, “ Robustness ”) by conflating the negativity of an article with its subject matter 29 . Further, our method draws on a valence dictionary that is widely applied (including to online news articles) 70 , is readily reproducible, and, crucially, is compatible with the NOW corpus. This corpus obstructs the use of more involved sentiment measures that require complete sentences or multi-word phrases, as 10 out of every 200 words in each NOW Corpus article are replaced with an “@” symbol.

Article text and metadata permitted the creation of numerous control variables. These encompassed various core article characteristics, such as dummy variables derived from year, month, and day-of-the-week metadata; as well as article-level calculations of the number of letters in each word, the average number of words in each sentence, and the number of words in total. All variables produced through article-level calculations were log + 1 transformed before use in inferential models. Dummy variables for the article topic were also generated through topic modelling, a data-driven approach that categorises extensive text data into cohesive topics (S I 7 ).

Lastly, we searched for out-group and in-group political references in news articles. To achieve this, we first identified the number of instances in which each news article employed a liberal or conservative reference. Liberal references comprised liberal identity terms and the full names of serving and well-known Labour politicians (for UK papers) or Democrat politicians (for US papers). Conservative references included conservative identity terms and the full names of serving and well-known Conservatives (UK) or Republicans (US). Following Rathje, van Bavel and van der Linden 46 , prominent politicians were identified from lists of the top 100 most famous Democrat, Republican, Labour and Conservative politicians on YouGov 81 . Lists of conservative and liberal identity terms were taken directly from previous work 46 , 47 . In accordance with AllSides’ Media Bias Chart, the Daily Mail and New York Post were categorised as right-leaning papers, and the Guardian and New York Times were classified as left-leaning 50 . News articles were said to reference the out-group when over half of political references were out-group focused, and the in-group when over half of political references were in-group focused. These classifications therefore reflect the perceived political standpoint of news sites, which correlate with those of their readers 73 , 74 .

Social media data

The number of Facebook shares for each news article was established using Sharescore 82 , 83 , a social media monitoring tool providing access to information sourced from the Facebook Graph API. Through Sharescore, we searched for posts containing the URL of any news articles in our news article data. This process revealed the total number of posts concerning each news article from any Facebook account, offering a more holistic perspective than confining the data to, for example, official news site accounts 7 , 51 .

We implemented a custom-written solution for Twitter data, leveraging Twitter's “Advanced search” feature. This allowed us to establish the count of tweets that included the URL of any news article within our sample. In addition to retrieving the total count of tweets from any account sharing each news article, this approach provided key engagement metrics (e.g., retweet count) and the full tweet text. Possessing the full tweet allowed us to conduct sentiment analysis akin to our analysis of news articles (Table 1 ). The count of posts concerning each news article was log + 1 transformed before inferential analyses.

Data summary

Key summary statistics are provided (Table 1 ). These show that the number of Facebook shares for articles vastly exceeds the number of Twitter shares. This disparity belies a strong correlation between the count of posts and tweets for each article (S I 8 ). Negative news articles are in the minority for all news sites (29% to 42%) 84 , 85 . We also note that news articles are consistently less negative than the tweets that concern them, with all tweet samples being predominantly negative 85 , 86 .

H1 was investigated using Doubly Robust Estimation (DRE), which integrates elements from both Multiple Regression (MR) and Propensity Score (PS) methods (S I 9 ) 87 . MR and PS approaches are each effective in accounting for confounders on their own (and were therefore employed in alternate models, see, “ Robustness ”). However, incorporating elements from both approaches within DRE yields an unbiased treatment effect estimate under the misspecification of either the MR or PS component. A point estimate and 95% confidence intervals were established by applying DRE to 1000 bootstrap samples. The use of bootstrapping renders the DRE model robust even in the absence of normality assumptions. Nonetheless, we verify normality through a histogram of log(+ 1) transformed social media shares and a Quantile–Quantile (QQ) plot of model residuals obtained from an MR model (S I 11 ).

H2 was explored through MR models specified with an interaction term between variables showing whether a news article was negative and concerned with political out-group concepts (see, “ Article Negativity, Out-Group Content, and Sharing to Social Media ”). In this case, our model p-values assume normality, which we confirm through a histogram of log(+ 1) social media shares and a QQ plot of model residuals (S I 11 ).

Data availability

The data compiled and analysed during this research, along with the scripts used for data analysis, have been made available at https://github.com/JoeMarkWatson/negative_news_sharing .

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