Toxicity in Social Media: It’s Not You, It’s Your Instagram Feed
Disclaimer: This article includes mentions of mental health issues, including body image issues. Additionally, this article has been…
Disclaimer: This article includes mentions of mental health issues, including body image issues. Additionally, this article has been written based on the opinion of the writer and does not in any way reflect the view of the organisation.
Thousands of notifications ring from your phone. Upon clicking on them, new reels, posts and selfies flow out like an endless stream, filling a bottomless well to its brim. Your mind ponders in its own void, overflowing itself with questions doubting your self-worth. ‘How can they be so pretty? Why can’t I be as perfect as them?’ An envious spice has been added, ruining the recipe of a whole day. You begin to fixate on your screen for hours, as the tags #Selfie #Instalife and #Weekend vibes drown your feed.
And it’s not just you — it’s pretty much the same for almost every other social media user as well. To find out why this is the case, read on for a look into how social media has been both built and consumed by us, the society.
The mechanisms of social media
You are a subset of your beliefs, values and emotions. They all have a weight on how you behave and act as a member of society, but now a new variable has been introduced into the mix — social media. In fact, a Canadian study has published that humans are naturally hard-wired for attention. This is why social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have been so successful. All those like and dislike buttons, follower counts and views attract their users in navigating them — and even more importantly — posting. This technique is undeniably always used to expand the market exposure. Additionally, with AR filters, story highlights and IGTV, the audience becomes trapped in a whirlpool of social media addiction.
In addition to motivation, feedback is necessary to pull us into the behavioural loop. Whether tapping a “like” or “share” button, the hurdle should be as low as possible. All actions take place depending on the trigger. It’s the trigger that pulls us into the app, like our phone vibrating or the screen lighting up with a new message.
Be that as it may, we are not saying that the extractive attention economy is completely wrong. In fact, it helps us become better leaders of our own lives and people we lead by learning to gain high attention and focus from others. But would this mechanism do more harm than good in the context of social media addiction?
Our attachment to social media
In recent years, the online realm has become fundamental to humanity. Online tools are essential in all kinds of tasks, from collecting resources to having group discussions. Almost every educational institute has started to employ an online delivery of communication due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But what does being online for an extended period of time mean for us all?
It means temptation. The internet gives you access to everything — at all times — and your attention is stolen by this torrent of new information as we are terrified of not being kept up to date on the latest news. This process is known as neuroplasticity. Nearly every element of social media has been honed in shifting our attention away from work towards our phones, and it’s been so effective. After all, it is human nature for us to seek favourable content rather than tend to our boring workload.
Neuroplasticity can be beneficial, but it may inversely lead us to social media procrastination. An all-too familiar saying usually echoes in our minds as we scroll through our phones or tablets: Ten minutes, just ten more minutes. Procrastination kicks in; ten minutes exponentially turn into 30 minutes, and so on and so forth. ‘I will do it later’ has become our narcotic, numbing ourselves from trivially dull tasks, only for the pain to be deferred. A junior Kyla Orthbandt commented, “Social media causes me to procrastinate on my schoolwork because it’s very addicting, and I don’t know when to settle down and do what needs to be done.”
In fact, this is a common thought shared by many of us — we’re aware of the fact that the extensive hours spent on social media drag us down and degrade our work quality, and yet we fail to find an exit route from this spiral that social media has pulled us into.
Social media and our mental health
Deputy Communications and Multimedia Minister Datuk Jailani Johari had reported that 80% of 24.1 million Malaysian internet users had an average social media usage of four hours a day. 76.1% of heavy internet users are youths between the ages of 20 and 49 years. In fact, many of them have mental issues such as depression and anxiety. 60% of the users showed elevated levels of anxiety, and 32% suffered from depression. Notably, a number of these issues have been shown to be linked to the unrealistic body expectations stemming from the use of social media.
In a survey of 227 female university students, women reported that they are inclined to compare their own appearance negatively with their peer group and with celebrities while browsing Facebook. The comparison group that had the strongest link to body image concerns was distant peers or acquaintances.
Body image has always decided how we determine our self-values. Body image is not only meant for physical traits like hair, skin tone, body weight and other attributes. It is both our mental picture and the way we feel about our body’s appearance, as well as how our perspective of our own body compares to societal standards. According to the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA), body image is greatly linked with our beliefs, experiences and generalisations. It has been found that we can be easily affected by who we compare ourselves to on social media, and it could even just be someone we don’t know at all such as a celebrity; this usually culminates in the development of a negative body image.
Thin, toned or even rawboned are popular figures in social media–so much so that it has become a norm pressuring an entire audience to fit in. For example, a model, Valeria Lukyanova, has spent enormous amounts on extreme cosmetic plastic surgeries and has been given the name of a ‘human Barbie’ due to her facial and bodily features. Notably, her waist is only 18 inches while a normal body figure measures 23 inches and above.
Valeria Lukyanova is merely just one person in a sea full of social media users who have made changes to their own body figures or edited their images using filters or Photoshop. The effects of clicking past such pictures can be overwhelming, with studies showing how the more people compared themselves to others on social media, the more dissatisfied they became with their bodies. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube have a large number of young consumers — just what kind of influence would these figures have on their audience?
Young people and social media
This brings me to my next point about social media — its impact on our adolescents of today. In fact, teens are constantly bombarded by the media’s ideal body, usually without the knowledge that most of the images are highly edited by computer softwares or applications. This has conveyed unrealistic ideas of what a teenage body should look like. Eventually, they struggle with how they look and may be influenced to source ways to gain the ‘ideal’ body. According to statistics from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), about 229,000 cosmetic procedures were performed on patients aged 13 to 19 years in 2017 alone.
Whilst exact figures are difficult to deduce, current statistics can show the sheer extent of how much adolescents interact with social media. The 2018 Pew Research Center conducted a survey and found that 97% of teens have smartphones and 45% are constantly online. Why is this such a concerning figure? Teenagers have been scientifically proven to be more impressionable than adults, thanks to their higher capacity to process information and greater tendency to think with their emotions. Thus, younger age groups are more susceptible to the harmful effects of social media, including but not limited to cyberbullying, depression, anxiety, peer pressure, low self-esteem and body image issues, the latter of which has been covered here already. They tend to make more impulsive decisions and take great risks, for example in trends or stunts in an attempt for momentary fame on social media.
A real life example of social media influence on young adolescents can be seen with an 18-year-old who landed in the ICU with a fractured skull after jumping out of a moving car to perform the “In My Feelings” or Kiki Challenge, a trend on social media at the time. Another case was from a YouTube couple, where a 22-year-old man, Ruiz, died after convincing his girlfriend to shoot him for a failed YouTube stunt. They filmed a YouTube video where Perez shot at a book which Ruiz was holding in front of his chest, falsely believing the book would stop the bullet. Eventually, his girlfriend was jailed and banned for life from owning firearms or collecting payments for her story.
Although teenagers are particularly vulnerable to the effects such as those mentioned above, all of us should be aware, too, of how to use social media responsibly in order to limit the negative influence it can have on our safety and mental health. Some steps include regulating how much time we spend on social media and maintaining face-to-face contact with both family and friends. By doing so, we are able to build healthier habits and manage the risks of social media use.
Conclusion
It is in the nature of socialisation that determines how we need attention starting from the earliest childhood experiences. Parents may positively praise their child for something, creating a correlation of receiving praise and feeling good; these behaviours grow and develop with us. Similarly, social media has utilized this chance to manipulate us to an unhealthy extent. Thus, the next time we feel inferior to an online photo of a “perfect” selfie, we should always keep in mind that these could just be another highly-edited image floating around on the Internet. While social media is a great place to build connections, shape your expertise and increase visibility, we should be always mindful of how we are using it, lest we become subjected to the detrimental effects of social media.
Until you realize how easy it is for your mind to be manipulated, you remain the puppet of someone else’s game.”
— Evita Ochel
[Written by: Samantha Yoong. Edited by: Teoh Jin]