Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families

The use of social media is the most rising trend among children and adolescents in recent days. Social media websites include social networking sites, gaming sites, and virtue worlds, and video sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These sites act as the youth's portal for communication and entertainment. Recently, social media has gained popularity and has grown exponentially. Their popularity is worrying for parents because not all social media websites offer a healthy environment for children and teenagers. Teenagers can now easily share information both with positive and negative impacts on the social media. The usage of these sites by teenagers has become a way of life where personal activities are easily made public. It is therefore important for parents to monitor for potential problems such as cyberbullying, social media depression, sexting and exposure to inappropriate media content.

Impact of social media of Children, Adolescents, and Families
Student Name, Name of the university
Abstract— The use of social media is the most
rising trend among children and adolescents in
recent days. Social media websites include social
networking sites, gaming sites, and virtue worlds,
and video sites like Facebook, Twitter and
YouTube. These sites act as the youth's portal for
communication and entertainment. Recently, social
media has gained popularity and has grown
exponentially. Their popularity is worrying for
parents because not all social media websites offer
a healthy environment for children and teenagers.
Teenagers can now easily share information both
with positive and negative impacts on the social
media. The usage of these sites by teenagers has
become a way of life where personal activities are
easily made public. It is therefore important for
parents to monitor for potential problems such as
cyberbullying, social media depression, sexting
and exposure to inappropriate media content.
Index terms— Cyberbullying, sexting, Social
media
I. INTRODUCTION
Social media is now contributing to the
infrastructure of our everyday activities. According
to Boyd & Ellison (2007), “social networking is
defined as web-based services that allow
individuals to construct a public or a semi-public
profile within a bounded system, articulate a list of
other users with whom they share a connection and
view and transverse their list of connection and
those made by others within the system” (pg. 211).
On the other hand, social media represents the
technologies or applications that people use in
developing and maintaining their social
networking websites. This involves the posting of
multimedia content, locations, and gaming.
Current commonly used social media sites include
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and
WhatsApp. Social media have changed how youth
socialize and learn, and this raises a new set of
issues that educators, parents, and policymakers
should consider (Ito et al, 2008).
Due to the limited capabilities of children and
adults for self-monitoring and regulation, some are
vulnerable to peer pressure. In addition, most
teenagers are at risk as they use and experiment
with social media. This includes negative
experiences such as online bullying, sexual
experimentation, privacy issues, and sexting and
internet addition (Patchin & Hinduja, 2006). In
contrast, social media activities can also improve
communication, social connection, and technical
skills among children and adolescents.
II. ADVANTAGES OF USING
SOCIAL MEDIA AMONG
TEENAGERS
There are several benefits of using social
media among children and adolescents. These
include improved socialization and communication
and improved learning opportunities.

Socialization and Communication
Most youths use online networks to extend
their friendships that they navigate in the familiar
contexts of school, religious organizations, sports,
and other local activities (Ito et al, 2007). This
result in the creation of new friendship beyond
what they access in a day to day life and
sometimes beyond their age limit. In addition,
social media allows children and adolescents to
stay in touch with friends and family through
messaging platforms and chats, sharing pictures
and exchanging ideas. This aspect of social media
can be used to strengthen friendship which is a key
component of teen life. According to Gordon,
(2019), having at least one solid friendship can go
a long way in preventing bullying.
Political and civic participations
According to Carpini et al (2006), political
participation is those activities whose aim is to
exert influence on, directly or indirectly in the
selection of political officials. In the recent days,
social media usage especially among teenagers has
proven to be a very strong political campaign tool.
Awareness campaigns are easily circulated among
the general populous within hours. This was the
case between 2010 and 2012 that saw protests and
demonstration in the Middle East and North
Africa. During this time social media played a
significant role in facilitating communication and
interaction among the protestors (Teti, Abbott &
Cavatorta, 2017).
Self-Directed and Peer-Based Learning
Youths create and go through new forms
of expression and rules for social behaviour.
Learning is accomplished through exploration and
play with various forms of emerging media
(Wankel, 2011). While employing tools such as
chat rooms, online forums, and social networks,
young people actively direct their own learning
paths and in the process develop important
technology and media skills. Moreover, these
media platforms allow teenagers to share and
discuss learning materials and share past
experiences.
Other positive effects if using social media
among teenagers include getting informed about
the current affairs. This includes finding out about
what is happening in their environs, school,
country, and even the world. This information can
be useful and can enable them to make informed
decisions based on what they know. The freedom
provided by social media sites allows teens to
freely express themselves. This can boost self-
esteem allowing the teens to reproduce their own
unique personality. Social media sites also provide
entertainment platforms. Children can watch
videos, view pictures and read blogs.
III. RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH
USING SOCIAL MEDIA SITES
With the recent exponential growth of social
media, there have been exponential risks to
adolescents and children. These risks mainly
include peer to peer threats like bullying and
harassment, inappropriate social content and
behaviours like sexting and pornography, online
privacy issues, decrease in productivity due to
online addiction, and outside influences of a third
party and advertising groups. In addition, posting

of irrelevant, racist, abusive, anti-cultural and
religious contents and links promotes hatred
among racial groups in the society. Among the
most pointed out issues are:
Cyberbullying
Cyberbullying is intentional acts of online
intimidation, humiliation, embarrassment or
harassment or threats towards another online user
(Mark & Ratliffe, 2011). These acts include
posting unwanted, derogatory, or threatening text
messages or comments, rumours, embarrassing and
offensive pictures or videos of another teenager or
implicating another teenager. This is mainly
experienced by school going children and
teenagers and is currently the highest risk of using
social media due to the social freedoms that the
sites allow people to have.
According to a survey by the National
Centre for Education Statistics and Bureau of
Justice Statistics (2015), 21% of students aged
between 12 years and 18 years experienced
bullying in the US. Cyberbullying on social media
is linked to depression, substance use and suicides
(Pappas, 2015). Cyberbullying leads to depression
and anxiety, increased feelings of sadness and
loneliness, changes in sleep and eating patterns,
and loss of interest in activities they used to enjoy,
decreased academic achievements and even
suicide. These issues may carry on into adulthood.
Sexting
Sexting is used to define the imposition of
criminal liability for sending or forwarding
sexually explicit photos, videos or messages on
social media outlets (Hendricks & Noor Al-Deen,
2012). Teens engage in sexting mainly due to
curiosity, peer pressure, love, and stress or just to
fit in a certain group by wanting to show others
that you can do it.
Sexting has negative consequences to
children and adolescents which include felony
charges or misdemeanours, suspension from
school, embarrassment and humiliation, emotional
distress and mental health condition like
depression for the victimized child. In addition,
sexting can lead to civil lawsuit for invasion of
privacy.
Privacy issue
Social media presents great worries about
unsafe issues on the subject of privacy leakages
and information sharing vulnerabilities. This is
partially due to the fact that many users either
knowingly or unknowingly share private
information. Sharing too much information or
posting false information about an individual or
others may lead to misuse by fraudsters, scammers
and online predators (Pentland et al, 2012).
Children may be tricked to share their private
information like their home location, where they
go to school and their parent details among others
which in turn can be used by bad people for the
wrong reasons. Sharing personal details may also
lead to identity theft among others. Another form
of privacy leakage is the current tagging of
pictures on media like Facebook, exposure of a
family lineage by showing whom one is related to.
Another privacy issue is the current usage
of social media data by government agencies.
While this is can be a good model for finding and

fighting crime, terrorism and other governance
decisions, it is an unwarranted invasion of
someone privacy.
Conclusion
Social media does not necessarily have to
be scary. Even though there exist many challenges
while using social media, encouraging decent
online etiquette and maintaining an open dialogue
about online protection can go a long way in
keeping teenager and children safe online. Parents
need to take up the role of administration on what
their children are doing on social media. They are
in a position to educate children about the
complexities of the digital world and the
challenging social and health issues they can face
online.
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