Is Social Media Causing Trouble to Society?
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Today, social media is growing rapidly. By definition, social media is websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking. It seems so good that social media help people sharing their content with others. We know that everything in this world has pros and cons. This is the same as social media. Surely, it also affects social media users like teenagers. Social media have several bad impacts on society, like making people nowadays become anti-social, the inability to be an independent person, and worse again is bullying on social media.
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Sometimes, we can see a group of people or family gather together but barely talking with each other, or everyone is busy looking at their smartphone rather than speaking to their friends or family members who are in front of them. These are common scenarios that we can find everywhere we go and also known as plugged-in life. This is clearly proved that social media is gradually taking control of us. Nowadays, there is less face to face interaction between us rather than communicate through social media, such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. People used to get rid of their mess with social media. And because of that, we are giving up on the essential use of verbal and non-verbal communications that lead to anti-social individuals.
Social media robs people’s ability to find trust and comfort and to replace our need for warmth. Most people will depend on virtual friends on social media instead of sharing with friends who are always beside them. Hence, social media robs us from self-control and ability to think independently and instead makes us gullible to join any group that posts perverse messages that tickle our ear and amuse our senses without evaluating the consequences. Because of that, there are many problems followed, such as imitating behavior. No doubt, it will concern us if the behavior is bad or harming other people.
Through social media, we can express our recent feelings or share recent conditions by post pictures or words. Everyone has their freedom to comment on anyone's posts, and some of them misused social media by attacking other people with harsh comments. Definitely, it will lead to cyberbullying and cyber harassment. Cyberbullying is a form of bullying that is only done through the web and other technologies. Especially, children and teenagers are vulnerable to cyberbullying since the different social media platforms are easy to be accessed by anyone. With so many children and teenagers are using social media nowadays, they easily become the target of cyberbullying. Then, it seems that children need more attention to this issue so they wouldn’t get any bullying comments from their friends. When they get hurt by those comments, they might avoid facing or interacting with other people because they will care about how other people see them. This will indirectly reduce their confidence while communicating with other people.
Social media have several bad impacts on society. That makes us be more careful in using social media so we can use it in a good way, considering there are many negative sides of social media. We need to get out of our safe zone together with people among us. So we can make a better condition in our society without any harm to other people.