A Report on Social Networking's Effect on Emirati Youth Behavior

This report investigates the impact of social networking platforms on the behavior of Emirati youth in the UAE, focusing on individuals aged 13 to 30. It analyzes how social interaction via platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube influences their behavior, character, and social bearing. Employing quantitative statistical techniques, the research evaluates the popularity and impact of social media, revealing both positive and negative implications, including cyberbullying and social isolation. The findings indicate that social media significantly affects young people's engagement in productive activities, highlighting the need for awareness and responsible usage to mitigate potential adverse effects. The report also touches on the influence of social media on self-expression, viewpoints, and overall thinking patterns of the Emirati youth.

Running head: SOCIAL NETWORKING EFFECT ON THE EMIRATI YOUTH’S
BEHAVIOR
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Social Networking Effect on the Emirati Youth’s Behavior Paper
Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Affiliation
Date

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Social Networking Effect on the Emirati Youth’s Behavior
Abstract
This paper examines the effects of social networking platforms on the behavior of
Emirati youth either in a positive or negative manner. The aim of this paper is to investigate
the impact of social media on individuals aged between 13 years and 30 years. The
investigation will analysis how social interaction via popular online networking platforms
like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube influence the behavior, characters, and overall social
bearing of youths (Suren, 2017). The research methodology evaluated the popularity of social
media amongst youths and its overall pull on the behavior of an entire generation. In order to
achieve this, the methodology employed the use of quantitative statistical techniques to
analysis data relating to social media use, and misuse amongst Emirati youths. The results of
the analysis showed that there were both positive and negatives implications. In conclusion,
social media critically influences the willingness of young people to engage in productive
activities (Suren, 2017).
Key Words
Impact
Social networking
Different Types
Advantages
Disadvantages
Youth
UAE
Behavioral changes
Rumors

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Cyber-bullying
Fake identities
Terrorist organizations
Favorite type
Introduction
Social networking programs such as Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter,
became the overused Social Media in the whole world. It allows users to create blogs, chat,
send messages, share photos, videos and files, make it easier for users to post files, write
about specific topics that can be shared with others, and comment on them. Consider the
effects of social networking on the youth’s behavior, it is important because as the years
progress, the popularity of social networking sites among people is increasing (Hendricks,
2013). Social networks contain pros and cons depending on how they are used and the
awareness of these sites. Al-Sayegh (2013) states that “The social networking sites can be
influenced by national, social and religious events” (para 2). So, it can affect the behavior of
youth in several ways.
Of course, the social networking captured the minds and influenced the ideas and
concepts of the new generation, and it impacts all people of all ages. However, our research
type is analytical, we will focus especially on young Emirati segment because, we as young
Emiratis, we like to spend most of our time on computer screens or smartphones and surfing
between social networking sites. Furthermore, this category is an oversensitive group and is
easily affected by these sites, which lead to addiction and violation of privacy by the transfer
of personal information to other users, followed by instilling negative ideas in the minds of
those people. Al Bernard (2012) states, “Studying social media is central to increasing and
understanding global communication”. In other words, it is necessary to study the impact of
social communication so as not to turn into a complex crisis that cannot be solved easily.

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This research contains several sides from the positive and negative impacts of social
networking on the Emirati youth. In addition, how to avoid the rumors, cyber-bullying and
fake beauty.
Research Questions
This research will attempt to answer the following questions:
Research Question # 1: How does the social media affect youth behavior in UAE?
Research Question # 2: Could social media affect the UAE youth positively? How?
Does it help them to be innovative and have better perspective?
Research Question # 3: Could social media affect UAE youth negatively? How?
Does it lack their self-confidence and disconnect them from the real life?
Research Question # 4: Inside the Emirate youth community, the main factors that
influenced their viewpoints and self-expression?
How doe’s social media provide the clients the chance to express themselves in the network?
Research Question # 5: Does social media has the power to affect on youth and their way of
thinking? How?
Literature Review
The social network is an online community of people with a common interest who use
a website or other technologies to communicate with each other and share information,
resources, etc (Dictionary.com, 2018). Those collections of applications and websites help

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people to communicate with each other from anywhere in the word and in the real-time and it
becomes a part of each single person life.
The social network has become the most common part, especially of youth’s life.
They prefer to use this tool to interact with their friends, family, and people with shared
interests in the world. Nowadays it’s easier and cheaper to connect with people due to social
networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others. There are many kinds of social
networks sites and it depends on the choice and preference and interest.
Facebook is a site where the users have to create an account and each user will
have a separate profile, which the user to post pictures, send messages or write comments to
other’s post. NCBI Lib (2009) states that; “Facebook has evolved into the most visited social
networking site in the world with over 90 million active users”.
Instagram is all about sharing your daily moments and posting videos from your
smartphone. With this social network, people interact with others in different ways than they
do on Facebook. Actually, Facebook and Instagram are the trendy used and the favorite for
every age.
Twitter is a social network where people communicate with other in short words
that called tweet. Paul Gil (2018) notes, “Some people also use Twitter to discover interesting
people and companies online and to follow their tweets for as long as they are interesting”
(p.1).
In addition, Snapchat comes up with a new way to share photos or videos, which are
users, can send a message that disappears and something called story to upload videos in real
time or even from phone gallery. “Snapchat is unique in that it erases messages several
seconds after they have been sent, affording its users a higher level of privacy” (Nicole and
Cameran, 2015).

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Figure 1: Top social networks in UAE
The figure shows the recent report by comScore in 2016. The report finds that
Facebook has the highest percentage of 46% in UAE, followed by Twitter with 29%. The
least popular form of social network in UAE is Instagram with 27%.
Figure 2: Teen’s Daily Use of Social Media

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Nowadays we see that teenagers are the most affected age group by social media or
you could say social networking. They are among the heaviest users of social networking
(Suren, 2017). Teenagers are mostly who are affected by social media because Teens are
masters at keeping themselves occupied in the hours after school until way past bedtime
(Rachel.E, 2015). When they’re not doing their homework (and when they are) they’re
online and on their phones, texting, sharing, trolling, scrolling, you name it (Rachel.E, 2018).
Rachel had a good point saying that youth are smart at keeping themselves busy until the
bedtime, but in the other hand I don’t think that it’s a better way to waste their time because
there are a lot of side effects and influences.
Some of the influences on the youth are cyberbullying that could lead to depression.
Secondly, youths don’t have anything to waste their time on such as a job and the easiest way
to waste their time is using social media. (Susie.E, 2016) States that adolescence is a period
that is very important for social learning, which could explain why teens are often more tuned
in to what's going on in their respective cultures. Moreover, youth use social networking
rather than using emotional and facial expressions, so they express their feeling in texting or
video calling, etc. because most of the youths are afraid and shy to express face to face.
Teenagers who use social media at night are the most affected group because it affects
the quality of sleep. Those who log on at night to respond to alerts are particularly affected. It
remains unclear, however, whether it is social media that is damaging sleep, or whether
teenagers turn to social media because they can’t sleep for some other reason (Weale, 2015 ).
Thirdly, youth girls like to use social media rather than interacting and sitting with their
family or relatives. But some of the youth girls like to interact and socialize with their family
rather than social networking, youth boys are likely to interact with people by face to face
because they have more freedom than teen girls, overall social media added new complexities
on youth’s life and changed their life from extroverts to introverts. It has been affirmed that

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social isolation can cause many psychological and physical in addition to mental illness such
as depuration, anxiety and pain or fatigue (Danielle, 2018).
Many young people are using their tablets computers and smartphones to check
Tweets and status updates from their friends and family. As technology advances, youth are
pressured to adopt different lifestyles. Social networking sites can help young people to
become more socially talented. However, they may also make them clumsy and unskilled, as
well. Therefore, it is bossy to exercise caution and restraint when dealing with such issues
(AskWriter.com, 2011-2018).
Overall social media affected our teen’s brains. Teens are constantly using the virtual
world to communicate with one another over social networking (Raychelle, 2016). The most
favorite social networking among the youth is snap-chat and Twitter, Instagram, watt pad &
WhatsApp, etc. Snapshot’s disappearing messages makes the site a hit with teens, Facebook
provides a place to virtual hangout and connect with friends (Raychelle, 2016). Also, she
states that Facebook’s popularity with teens is beginning to fade, surveys show that it’s still
the most popular site. As I’m a part of the category, I believe that Snapchat is the most
recommend application because it’s an easier way to communicate with other friends and it's
not complicated as Facebook. But Facebook is mostly used by adults and commonly used by
youths. Furthermore, social media stole the brain of our youths that get affected day by day.
Many research has been conducted to clarify how social networking changes our
behavior and the way of thinking, especially on youth segment. Although the literature covers
a variety of different aspects of social networking impact on UAE youth, this review will
focus only on the behavioral changes. Moreover, human behavior refers to all the exhibited
behavior by humans, like anger, happiness or sadness. Also, adolescence is the easiest target
if we start to talk about behavioral changes.

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Some studies have shown that the most dangerous forms of online behaviors is
bulling. Both Hinduaj S and Patchin JW (2010) agrees that cyber-bullying is quite common,
can occur to any young person online, and it can cause profound psychosocial outcomes such
as depression, anxiety, severe isolation, and the more extreme effects included self-harm in
addition to tragically suicide. Cyber-bullying comes when people misuse social networking
sites to harm, embarrass, target, or threaten others. Bullies and mean people are around all of
us forever, teenagers been facing them in schools only but now they are online 24 hours.
Online bullying can be particularly damaging because it's usually anonymous or hard to trace
and it’s also hard to control. It leads to a lot of serious problems for those young people who
are affected by these harmful behaviors. For example, when some girl posts a picture
nowadays, she may receive tons of messages almost most of them contain bullying words,
she may be depressed and cannot fight the strength of these bad words.
Furthermore, social networking is available 24 hours, and people might isolate
themselves to live in such digital world. Also, young people use it almost all the time
forgetting that they have a real life worth living. However, they maybe already socially
isolated and with the use of social network all the time they will become isolated. Rachel
Hosie (2017) said, “It's possible that young adults who initially felt socially isolated turned to
social media. Or it could be that their increased use of social media somehow leads to feeling
isolated from the real world.” And of course, if they replace their real life with the digital one,
it will be harming their wellbeing. Also, the more they use the social media, the less they will
be participating in real life. People lock themselves into social media to false standards.
As we all know, through the social networking young people are participating in a lot
of activities online. Some posts online can make the teenagers think that others have a perfect
life. In addition, they may become jealous by comparing their lives with others.

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People who engaged themselves in this kind of behavior had lower self-esteem.
According to Stapleton, Luiz, and Chatwin Hannah “Browsing social media isn’t inevitably
damaging to people’s self-esteem – but when people start to compare themselves to others on
platforms like Facebook and Instagram, that’s when social media usage could become
harmful to mental health.” Moreover, some of the young people try to copy others, which
may lead them to different problems.
In social networking sites, there is nothing to ensure that this profile is real or fake,
and this is one of the disadvantages of these sites. Facebook defined in their legal terms that
users are not allowed to put fake information in their profiles, and they should keep their
information up to date (Legal Terms, 2012). However, this was not enough to prevent people
from creating fake accounts, which used for many wrong purposes. According to Facebook,
5% to 6% of Facebook accounts are fake (Weimann, 2014). The owners of these fake
accounts attract people, especially young people, then gain their friendship and trust, and end
up with fraud on them, which affects the psyche of young people. Also, some people resorted
to forging their identities in social networking sites to attract youth job seekers. These young
people are asked to transfer a certain amount of money to complete visa processing
procedures and other documents. For example, in 2014, the Dubai Cybercrime Task Force
arrested a gang that specialized in forging fake employment contracts and jobs through social
networks (Farouk, 2014). So, communication through social networking is not always
constructive, especially when the other side is unknown.
In addition, social networking makes teenagers live under the shadow of others, in
other words, they may talk with fake accounts without knowing that they are harming
themselves. Social networks made it easy, almost all young people now have a lot of social
media accounts, which allow them to have a lot of friends from the world around.
Furthermore, they may think that most of them are real friends and having real accounts, but

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in fact, almost half of the social media is fake accounts with fake identities. They are
targeting young people for their special purposes. However, it is easy to be a child, model or
anybody else with a click. And when a victim knows that they are fooled, they will ultimately
end up being mentally and emotionally destroyed. In addition, Melissa McDonough (2014)
mentions that victims of fake accounts then become aggressive, which opens another door of
behavioral changes.
However, along with UAE religions, most young people deter themselves from most
of these behaviors. In UAE, generations are raised with Islamic basis and religion, which
teaches them that they have a choice over their actions and that they should protect their
health, and preserve their lives. Also, the ethics that they are raised with could deter them
from committing suicide or bullying someone for the sake of joy. In addition, the good family
environment that they live in may also deter them from changing their behavior online.
Social networking sites have captured the interest of people, young and old, until it
became something almost fundamental in their day. So, it is necessary to clarify the
advantages and disadvantages of social media to determine the right attitude and the proper
behavior towards it.
Furthermore, social networking has been exploited by terrorist organizations targeting
youth category around which pursue to pollute their ideas and thinking with extremist and
destructive ideas. These organizations are managed professionally, this is more what led to
disruption the behavior of youth, which makes them aggressive, and terrorism also affects
their future, education, and so on. So, there is a relationship between terrorism and social
networking sites, because they are opened systems for their organizations through the social
networking apps and their target to sending message and videos which effect on people
especially young people. The user might believe this news or fabricated videos (Abdulazim,
2016). ” As cyberterrorism expert, Evan Kohlmann argues: Today, 90 percent of terrorist

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activity on the Internet takes place using social networking tools. . . . These forums act as a
virtual firewall to help safeguard the identities of those who participate, and they offer
subscribers a chance to make direct contact with terrorist representatives, to ask questions,
and even to contribute and help out the cyberjihad.” (Weimann, 2014).
Moreover, communication between people in our time has become the easiest,
especially with the increasing use of social media. The speed of communication leads to good
results when it comes to important news that comes from trusted sources and individuals, but
turns negative if considered a means of spreading rumors. Some people make rumors to serve
their interests and agenda, which could cause chaos somewhere or harm people. (Kostka,
2008) States that “Rumors can spread astoundingly fast through social networks.
Traditionally this happens by word of mouth, but with the emergence of the Internet and its
possibilities new ways of rumor propagation are available”. These rumors are used to
promote wrong ideas, which become a concern and fear for young people, and demolition of
their personalities, moreover wasting their time in the news that is not true.
On the other hand, there are also many advantages of social networking sites. More
generally because of these positive impacts we still use them in our lives and it became a
popular daily in the UAE. The first advantage is the news in social media spread faster. This
advantage will give people ability to get the news faster than waiting for the news channel on
the TV or buying a newspaper. People can write the news without restrictions and condition,
which takes less than 1 minute to write the updates, this can make each of one a TV reporter.
In addition, they can write their opinions too, for example, if there is a something interesting
in the news, the users of the social media program have freedom of opinion and expression,
they can react and comment on the bags site rather than TV programs no one can react with
them or give feedback. Its important feature for all people in general, because by watching
the news, people will be political and social awareness about what is around them. Learning