It’s 1997, and the world’s first social media site has just launched Six Degrees. Users can create profiles and find friends around the world. It seemed great in the beginning. Now unknown to us, we had just set up the most detrimental thing that would spiral into a monster. Today, we are bound to social media by our whims. We doom scroll through political videos or hate posts. It’s not just the fact that social media exists that is dangerous; it has also become another negative in the world at times.

  Now, I am not a certified psychologist or even out of high school, but I see the effects on my peers firsthand. At lunch, instead of leaving their phones in their lockers, they scroll through TikTok or send a snap to a boy. Out of school, they are seeing, sending, and receiving adult content on social media, and this isn’t limited to just pornographic material either. Teens my age are being exposed to negative press as well as people who are posting explicit self-harm videos. Not only is social media not always regulated properly, but the algorithm doesn’t filter the information seen by the teen.

  The statistics don’t look good for us as people. Social media has been linked to the rise of suicide among teens and early adults. One study conducted by Brigham Young University states that “… teenage girls who spent two to three hours daily on social media at age 13 were at a higher risk for suicide as young adults.” This means that using social media raises the stakes for poor mental health in teen girls. And that the chance of having suicidal thoughts or ideation has increased exponentially in both boys and girls. Also, the access to explicit adult content is more accessible. A website called Covenant Eyes stated that the normal age for a boy to first be exposed to pornography is the age of 12 on average.  It also noted that 9 out of 10 boys and 6 out of 10 girls are exposed to pornography online before age 18. These social media apps have regulations and rules against this stuff, but people find ways around these rules. Sometimes the clip will start innocent and then boom, explicit content. If we want to curb this, social media needs better protection against explicit content.

  Ludwig Feuerbach came up with the saying “We are what we eat,” and it seems he was correct. This philosophy has shown how the mind is like a stomach. When we ingest something, it feeds our bodies, or in this case, our minds. When you ingest “junk food,” the mind takes that and stores it in your gut. This can fester in unknown problems. See that negative media you just ingested by doom scrolling is now sitting in your mind creating a little deep dark forest of problems and addiction.

 This forest can not only cause a constant need to spend more time on social media but also build an unhealthy relationship with your phone. I was the first of all my friends and family to deactivate my social media, and I realized it was time to build a healthy relationship with my phone. When I scrolled through pictures and videos of people with everything that seems to be going for them, I got severe self-esteem issues and I also ended up with a worse attention span. It destroyed my mental health. I would sit for four hours and just scroll and scroll. I felt depressed because I wasn’t like this person or that person and it sucked. I tried to leave my phone at home and I got so anxious because I felt like I was missing something. I quit social media six months ago and it has truly changed me. At first, there were literal withdrawals. I didn’t know how badly my brain had been addicted to the doom scroll. It felt like I was missing something and it sucked for about a month. My mom noticed that the more I used social media the more I treated everyone terribly. She told me two months after I got rid of social media that I was so much happier and I had such a better attitude. I noticed that I had more energy and my mental health has improved.

  So, are you going to quit social media? I bet the answer is probably no and that is okay.  But if you got completely lost…please reread the article. There will be Part Two of this investigation published soon. In the next article, I will highlight the positives of social media. I hope you will let your mind ingest the next article just as well.