bad things about social media essay

Essay on Negative Effects of Social Media

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100 Words Essay on Negative Effects of Social Media

The dark side of social media.

Social media is a powerful tool, but it has negative impacts too. It can lead to addiction, affecting our daily life. Many people spend hours scrolling, ignoring real-life interactions.

Mental Health Issues

Studies show excessive social media use can cause anxiety and depression. The constant comparison with others’ lives can lead to low self-esteem.

Privacy Concerns

Personal information shared on social media can be misused, leading to privacy issues. Cyberbullying is another serious concern, causing emotional distress.

Unrealistic Expectations

Social media often presents a perfect life, creating unrealistic expectations and dissatisfaction. It’s important to remember that what we see online isn’t always real.

250 Words Essay on Negative Effects of Social Media

Introduction.

Social media, despite its numerous benefits, has a dark side that is increasingly causing concern. The ubiquitous nature of these platforms has led to several negative implications, particularly among the youth.

Psychological Impact

Firstly, social media can lead to mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. The constant comparison with others’ lives, the desire for validation through likes and comments, and the fear of missing out (FOMO) can lead to feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem.

Secondly, privacy is a significant concern. Users often unknowingly share sensitive information, making them susceptible to data breaches and identity theft. The lack of stringent privacy policies on many platforms exacerbates this issue.

Spread of Misinformation

Lastly, social media contributes to the spread of fake news and misinformation. The speed and reach of these platforms make it easy for false information to spread, leading to confusion, panic, and in some cases, violence.

In conclusion, while social media has revolutionized communication, its negative effects cannot be ignored. It is incumbent upon users to use these platforms responsibly and be aware of the potential risks. As the saying goes, “With great power comes great responsibility”.

500 Words Essay on Negative Effects of Social Media

Social media has revolutionized the way we communicate, connect, and share information. However, it is not without its drawbacks. While it offers numerous benefits, it has also given rise to a myriad of negative effects, impacting individuals and society.

The Erosion of Privacy

One of the most prominent negative effects of social media is the erosion of privacy. Users often share personal information, photos, and life events without considering the potential implications. This information, once shared, is virtually impossible to retract and can be exploited by cybercriminals, marketers, or even prospective employers. The illusion of anonymity and privacy online can lead to a false sense of security, encouraging oversharing and reducing the perceived need for discretion.

Impact on Mental Health

The impact of social media on mental health is another significant concern. The pressure to maintain a perfect online persona and the constant comparison with others can lead to feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and depression. The addictive nature of social media platforms, designed to keep users engaged for as long as possible, exacerbates these issues. The dopamine hit from likes, comments, and shares can create a dependency, leading to an unhealthy relationship with these platforms.

Social media also plays a significant role in the spread of misinformation. The speed and reach of social media platforms make them a potent tool for disseminating false information, leading to real-world consequences. This phenomenon has been particularly evident in recent years, with misinformation about health, politics, and social issues spreading rapidly.

Decreased Productivity

Another negative effect of social media is a decrease in productivity. The addictive nature of these platforms can lead to significant amounts of time wasted, impacting work, studies, and personal relationships. The constant distraction of notifications and the urge to check for updates can disrupt focus and concentration.

In conclusion, while social media has transformed the way we communicate and share information, it has also given rise to several negative effects. The erosion of privacy, impact on mental health, spread of misinformation, and decreased productivity are all significant concerns that need to be addressed. It is crucial for users to be aware of these issues and use social media responsibly, considering the potential implications of their online behavior. As a society, we must also strive to mitigate these effects, through education, regulation, and the development of healthier online habits.

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Why I Do All My Video and Voice Calls on WhatsApp

Why i prefer owning my music over streaming, 6 things i wish were different about modern social media.

If you can't imagine your life without social media, you've probably fallen victim to the strong power that social networking sites have over the public. Chances are that you've also experienced some of the negative effects social media has on people.

Unfortunately, the bad effects of social media are all too real for a lot of us. Let's look at the negative impacts of social media on real people, so you can recognize these symptoms and get help if needed.

How Social Media Is Bad for You

You might be surprised to learn that the negative effects of social media are both physical and mental. They can change your perception of the world and yourself. While social media does have some positive effects , and there are certainly positive social media stories , it also has a lot in the drawback column.

Don't believe this? Read on for a list of social media's negative effects. If you recognize any of them as issues in your own life, it may be time to reduce your usage or even stop using social media altogether.

1. Depression and Anxiety

Do you spend several hours per day browsing through social media? Spending too long on social networking sites could adversely affect your mood. In fact, chronic social users are more likely to report poor mental health, including symptoms of anxiety and depression.

It doesn't take much thinking to figure out why. Social media lets you see the carefully selected best parts of everyone else's lives, which you then compare to the negatives in your own life (that only you see). Comparing yourself to other people is a sure path to anxiety and unhappiness, and social media has made this much easier to do.

So how do you use social media without causing yourself psychological distress? If you turn to the same research (and common sense), the recommended amount of time you should spend on social networks is around half an hour per day. As with many other potential ills in life, it's all about moderation.

If you find yourself upset after a social media session , also consider the networks you use and the people you follow. You're much more likely to feel anxious after reading political arguments and doomsday news than you are after seeing fun updates from your favorite musicians or photos of your friends' pets.

2. Cyberbullying

Before social media, bullying was something that was only possible to do face-to-face. However, now people can bully others online—anonymously or not. Today everyone knows what cyberbullying is , and most of us have seen what it can do to a person.

While social media makes it easier to meet new people and make friends, it also enables cruel people to tear into others with little effort. Perpetrators of bullying can use the anonymity that (some) social networks provide to gain people's trust and then terrorize them in front of their peers. For instance, they might create a fake profile and act friendly to a classmate, then later betray and embarrass them online.

These online attacks often leave deep mental scars and even drive people to hurt themselves or take their own lives, in some cases. And as it turns out, cyberbullying doesn't just affect kids. Adults can become victims of online abuse, too. Since screens hide our faces, you can end up being a jerk on social media and other websites without even realizing it.

Learn how to make your Instagram profile more private , and apply the same advice to other social networks, if you suffer from this issue.

3. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is a phenomenon that became prominent around the same time as the rise of social media. Unsurprisingly, it's one of the most widespread negative effects of social media on society.

FOMO is just what it sounds like: a form of anxiety that you get when you're scared of missing out on a positive experience that someone else is having. For example, you might constantly check your messages to see if anyone has invited you out, or focus on your Instagram feed all day to make sure that nobody is doing something cool without you. You may also see pictures of something fun that your friends were able to do, feeling left out that you couldn't go because you had another responsibility.

This fear receives constant fuel from what you see on social media. With increased social network use, there's a better chance for you to see that someone is having more fun than you are right now. That's exactly what causes FOMO, so if you're prone to this, know how to prevent FOMO when using social media (or cut back on using it altogether).

4. Unrealistic Expectations

As most people are probably aware, social media forms unrealistic expectations of life and friendships in our minds.

Most social media sites have a severe lack of online authenticity. People use Snapchat to share their exciting adventures, post about how much they love their significant other on Facebook, and load up their Instagram page with heavily staged photos.

But in reality, you have no way of knowing whether this is all a farce. While it looks great on the surface, that person could be in massive debt, on bad terms with their significant other, or desperate for Instagram likes as a form of validation.

One simple way out of this mess is for everyone to quit lying on social media. But in the era of Instagram influencers and YouTubers who earn millions from being inauthentic, that isn't going to happen anytime soon.

Remember an important adage: you should not judge your everyday life against the highlights of someone else's.

5. Negative Body Image

Speaking of Instagram celebrities, if you look at popular Instagram accounts, you'll find unbelievably beautiful people wearing expensive clothes on their perfectly shaped bodies.

And to nobody's surprise, body image is now an issue for almost everyone. Of course, seeing so many people who are supposedly perfect (according to society's standards) on a daily basis makes you conscious of how different you look from those pictures. And not everyone comes to healthy conclusions in this situation.

It's really important to remember that everybody is human. No one wakes up every day looking like a supermodel, and while many people have gone to great lengths to train their bodies, that's not the case for everyone who looks fit. Many people, in search of social media fame, have definitely taken unhealthy routes to appear more attractive.

Surround yourself with people who love you for who you are, and you won't have to stress about fake Instagram beauty.

6. Unhealthy Sleep Patterns

On top of increasing the cases of anxiety and depression, another bad thing about social media is that spending too much time on it can lead to poor sleep. Numerous studies have shown that increased use of social media has a negative effect on your sleep quality.

If you feel that your sleep patterns have become irregular, leading to a drop in productivity, try to cut down on the amount of time you browse social media.

This is especially the case when using your phone in bed at night. It's all too easy to tell yourself that you'll spend five minutes checking your Facebook notifications, only to realize an hour later that you've been mindlessly scrolling through some nonsense on Twitter you don't even care about.

Don't let social media algorithms, which are designed to keep your attention for as long as possible, steal your valuable sleep too. Getting less sleep, combined with that sleep being lower quality, is a dangerous, unhealthy combination.

7. General Addiction

Social media can be more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol. It has a powerful draw for many people that leads to them checking it all the time without even thinking about it.

If you're not sure whether you're addicted to social networks, try to remember the last time you went a full day without checking any social media accounts. Do you feel rejected if someone unfollows you? And if your favorite social networks completely disappeared tomorrow, would the absence make you feel empty and depressed?

At the end of the day, social media sites want to keep you scrolling for as long as possible so they can show you lots of ads and make more money. Because of the attention economy , these sites need your eyes on them for as long as possible. Apps like TikTok feed you a constant barrage of quick videos that destroy your attention span over time.

Just because you've been going overboard on social media use doesn't mean you necessarily need to wipe out all your social networking accounts. However, if you think quitting is the best solution for you, it isn't a bad idea. See our guide to quitting social media for good if you'd like help.

How to Handle the Negative Effects of Social Media

As with everything else, there are good and bad aspects of social media. We've discussed some of the negative impacts social media has for many, but you're the one who must decide whether there's more help or harm in it for you personally.

If you find that social media is having a negative impact on your life, stop using it. However, if you decide to stay, there are ways to waste less time on social media, and thus maintain a healthier relationship with it.

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Negative Consequences of Social Media

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The Negative Impact of Social Media on Mental Health

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Is social media bad for you? The evidence and the unknowns

What the science suggests so far about the impact of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram on your mental well-being.

#LikeMinded

A special series about social media and well-being

This month, BBC Future is exploring social media’s impact on mental health and well-being – and seeking solutions for a happier, healthier experience on these platforms. Stay tuned for more stories , coming soon…

Share your tips for a happy life on social media with the hashtag #LikeMinded on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

This story is featured in BBC Future’s “Best of 2018” collection. Discover more of our picks .  

Three billion people , around 40% of the world’s population, use online social media – and we’re spending an average of  two hours every day sharing, liking, tweeting and updating on these platforms, according to some reports. That breaks down to around  half a million tweets and Snapchat photos shared every minute.  

With social media playing such a big part in our lives, could we be sacrificing our mental health and well-being as well as our time? What does the evidence actually suggest?

• Facebook responds to mental well-being claims
• Is it time to rethink how we use social media? An introduction to our #LikeMinded season

Since social media is relatively new to us, conclusive findings are limited. The research that does exist mainly relies on self-reporting, which can often be flawed, and the majority of studies focus on Facebook. That said, this is a fast-growing area of research, and clues are beginning to emerge. BBC Future reviewed the findings of some of the science so far:

People use social media to vent about everything from customer service to politics, but the downside to this is that our feeds often resemble an endless stream of stress. In 2015, researchers at the Pew Research Center based in Washington DC sought to find out if social media induces more stress than it relieves.  

In the  survey  of 1,800 people, women reported being more stressed than men. Twitter was found to be a “significant contributor” because it increased their awareness of other people’s stress.

But Twitter also acted as a coping mechanism – and the more women used it, the less stressed they were. The same effect wasn’t found for men, whom the researchers said had a more distant relationship with social media. Overall, the researchers concluded that social media use was linked to “modestly lower levels” of stress.

In 2014, researchers  in Austria found that participants reported lower moods after using Facebook for 20 minutes compared to those who just browsed the internet. The study suggested that people felt that way because they saw it as a waste of time.

A good or bad mood may also spread between people on social media, according to  researchers from the University of California , who assessed the emotional content of over a billion status updates from more than 100 million Facebook users between 2009 and 2012.

Bad weather increased the number of negative posts by 1%, and the researchers found that one negative post by someone in a rainy city influenced another 1.3 negative posts by friends living in dry cities. The better news is that happy posts had a stronger influence; each one inspired 1.75 more happy posts. Whether a happy post translates to a genuine boost in mood, however, remains unclear.

Researchers have looked at general anxiety provoked by social media, characterised by feelings of restlessness and worry, and trouble sleeping and concentrating. A  study  published in the journal Computers and Human Behaviour found that people who report using seven or more social media platforms were more than three times as likely as people using 0-2 platforms to have high levels of general anxiety symptoms. 

That said, it’s unclear if and how social media causes anxiety.  Researchers  from Babes-Bolyai University in Romania reviewed existing research on the relationship between social anxiety and social networking in 2016, and said the results were mixed. They concluded that more research needs to be done.

While some studies have found a link between depression and social media use, there is emerging research into how social media can actually be a force for good.  

Two  studies  involving more than 700 students found that depressive symptoms, such as low mood and feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness, were linked to the quality of online interactions. Researchers found higher levels of depressive symptoms among those who reported having more negative interactions.

A similar study  conducted in 2016 involving 1,700 people found a threefold risk of depression and anxiety among people who used the most social media platforms. Reasons for this, they suggested, include cyber-bullying, having a distorted view of other people’s lives, and feeling like time spent on social media is a waste.

However, as BBC Future will explore this month in our #LikeMinded season, scientists are also looking at how social media can be used to diagnose depression, which could help people receive treatment earlier.  Researchers  for Microsoft surveyed 476 people and analysed their Twitter profiles for depressive language, linguistic style, engagement and emotion. From this, they developed a classifier that can accurately predict depression before it causes symptoms in seven out of 10 cases.

Researchers from Harvard and Vermont Universities  analysed  166 people’s Instagram photos to create a similar tool last year with the same success rate.

Humans used to spend their evenings in darkness, but now we’re surrounded by artificial lighting all day and night.  Research has found  that this can inhibit the body’s production of the hormone melatonin, which facilitates sleep – and blue light, which is emitted by smartphone and laptop screens, is said to be the worst culprit. In other words, if you lie on the pillow at night checking Facebook and Twitter, you’re headed for restless slumber.

Last year,  researchers from the University of Pittsburgh asked  1,700 18- to 30-year-olds about their social media and sleeping habits. They found a link with sleep disturbances – and concluded blue light had a part to play. How often they logged on, rather than time spent on social media sites, was a higher predictor of disturbed sleep, suggesting “an obsessive ‘checking’”, the researchers said.

The researchers say this could be caused by physiological arousal before sleep, and the bright lights of our devices can delay circadian rhythms. But they couldn’t clarify whether social media causes disturbed sleep, or if those who have disturbed sleep spend more time on social media.  

Despite the argument from a few researchers that tweeting may be  harder to resist  than cigarettes and alcohol, social media addiction isn’t included in the latest diagnostic manual for mental health disorders.

That said, social media is changing faster than scientists can keep up with, so various groups are trying to study compulsive behaviours related to its use – for example, scientists from the Netherlands  have invented their own scale  to identify possible addiction.

And if social media addiction does exist, it would be a type of internet addiction – and that is a classified disorder. In 2011, Daria Kuss and Mark Griffiths from Nottingham Trent University in the UK have  analysed  43 previous studies on the matter, and conclude that social media addiction is a mental health problem that “may” require professional treatment. They found that excessive usage was linked to relationship problems, worse academic achievement and less participation in offline communities, and found that those who could be more vulnerable to a social media addiction include those dependent on alcohol, the highly extroverted, and those who use social media to compensate for fewer ties in real life. 

SELF-ESTEEM

Women’s magazines and their use of underweight and Photoshopped models have been long maligned for stirring self-esteem issues among young women. But now, social media, with its filters and lighting and clever angles, is taking over as a primary concern among some campaigning groups and charities.

Social media sites make more than half of users feel inadequate, according to a  survey  of 1,500 people by disability charity Scope, and half of 18- to 34-year-olds say it makes them feel unattractive.

A 2016 study  by researchers at Penn State University suggested that viewing other people’s selfies lowered self-esteem, because users compare themselves to photos of people looking their happiest.  Research  from the University of Strathclyde, Ohio University and University of Iowa also found that women compare themselves negatively to selfies of other women.

But it’s not just selfies that have the potential to dent self-esteem. A  study  of 1,000 Swedish Facebook users found that women who spent more time on Facebook reported feeling less happy and confident. The researchers concluded: “When Facebook users compare their own lives with others’ seemingly more successful careers and happy relationships, they may feel that their own lives are less successful in comparison.”

But one small study hinted that viewing your own profile, not others, might offer ego boosts.  Researchers  at Cornell University in New York put 63 students into different groups. Some sat with a mirror placed against a computer screen, for instance, while others sat in front of their own Facebook profile.

Facebook had a positive effect on self-esteem compared to other activities that boost self-awareness. Mirrors and photos, the researchers explained, make us compare ourselves to social standards, whereas looking at our own Facebook profiles might boost self-esteem because it is easier to control how we’re presented to the world.

In a  study  from 2013, researchers texted 79 participants five times a day for 14 days, asking them how they felt and how much they’d used Facebook since the last text. The more time people spent on the site, the worse they felt later on, and the more their life satisfaction declined over time.

But other research has found, that for some people, social media can help boost their well-being . Marketing researchers Jonah Berger and Eva Buechel found that people who are emotionally unstable are more likely to post about their emotions, which can help them receive support and bounce back after negative experiences.

Overall, social media’s effects on well-being are ambiguous, according to a  paper written  last year by researchers from the Netherlands. However, they suggested there is clearer evidence for the impact on one group of people: social media has a more negative effect on the well-being of those who are more socially isolated. 

RELATIONSHIPS

If you’ve ever been talking to a friend who’s pulled their phone out to scroll through Instagram, you might have wondered what social media is doing to relationships.

Even the mere presence of a phone can interfere with our interactions, particularly when we’re talking about something meaningful, according to one small study . Researchers writing in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships tasked 34 pairs of strangers with having a 10-minute conversation about an interesting event that had happened to them recently. Each pair sat in private booths, and half had a mobile phone on the top of their table.

Those with a phone in eyeshot were less positive when recalling their interaction afterwards, had less meaningful conversations and reported feeling less close to their partner than the others, who had a notebook on top of the table instead.

Romantic relationships aren’t immune, either.  Researchers  at the University of Guelph in Canada surveyed 300 people aged 17-24 in 2009 about any jealousy they felt when on Facebook, asking questions such as, ‘How likely are you to become jealous after your partner has added an unknown member of the opposite sex?’.

Women spent much more time on Facebook then men, and experienced significantly more jealousy when doing so. The researchers concluded they “felt the Facebook environment created these feelings and enhanced concerns about the quality of their relationship”.

In a  study involving  600 adults, roughly a third said social media made them feel negative emotions – mainly frustration – and envy was the main cause. This was triggered by comparing their lives to others’, and the biggest culprit was other people’s travel photos. Feeling envious caused an “envy spiral”, where people react to envy by adding to their profiles more of the same sort of content that made them jealous in the first place.

However, envy isn’t necessarily a destructive emotion – it can often make us work harder,  according to researchers  from Michigan University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. They asked 380 students to look at “envy-eliciting” photos and texts from Facebook and Twitter, including posts about buying expensive goods, travelling and getting engaged. But the type of envy the researchers found is “benign envy”, which they say is more likely to make a person work harder.

A study published  in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine last year surveyed 7,000 19- to 32-year-olds and found that those who spend the most time on social media were twice as likely to report experiencing social isolation, which can include a lack of a sense of social belonging, engagement with others and fulfilling relationships.

Spending more time on social media, the researchers said, could displace face-to-face interaction, and can also make people feel excluded.

“Exposure to such highly idealised representations of peers’ lives may elicit feelings of envy and the distorted belief that others lead happier and more successful lives, which may increase perceived social isolation.”

CONCLUSIONS?

It’s clear that in many areas, not enough is known yet to draw many strong conclusions. However, the evidence does point one way: social media affects people differently, depending on pre-existing conditions and personality traits.

As with food, gambling and many other temptations of the modern age, excessive use for some individuals is probably inadvisable. But at the same time, it would be wrong to say social media is a universally bad thing, because clearly it brings myriad benefits to our lives.

We’ll be exploring this tension more over the next month, in a series of articles and videos in our special series #LikeMinded – and hopefully providing solutions that could help us all live a happier, healthier digital life.

Join 800,000+ Future fans by liking us on  Facebook , or follow us on  Twitter .

If you liked this story,  sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter , called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.  

15 Dangers of Social Media & How to Avoid Them

Through the teenage years and into early adulthood, we are still learning how to create healthy relationships and care for our well-being. For most adolescents, social media will play a role in developing life skills. Surveys show that 95% of teens and 84% of young adults use social media.

Social media can be an avenue to express yourself, connect, learn, and share. Social media is not entirely bad, but there are dangers. This post will review 15 common dangers of social media for adolescents, plus how to reduce or avoid these dangers.

Dangers to Physical Health

Dangers to mental health, dangers of bad content, benefits of social media, digital citizenship education programs.

#1 Sedentary Behavior

Sedentary behavior means spending time seated or inactive. Relaxing is important, but so is regular exercise and body movement.

Any screen time, including time on social media, encourages people to stay sedentary for long periods of time. A heavy social media user may be sedentary for hours at a time every day. A sedentary lifestyle has negative effects on your circulation, muscle tone, bone health, and immunity.

How to Avoid

Aim to be active every day.

Break up long periods of screen time with a stretch, walk, or other type of movement.

#2 Less Sleep

A survey of teens found that almost 1/3 admit to sleeping with their cell phones next to them in bed.

The light from a cell phone, especially before bed, can disrupt your circadian rhythm (the body's internal clock that works on a 24-hour cycle). This can make it harder to fall asleep at night.

Alerts on phones, like a notification from a social media app, can affect sleep quality. Another report found that more than 1/3 of teens admit waking up at night to check their phones.

Set boundaries related to technology and bedtime. Some options can include the following:

Set a "digital curfew" for one hour before bed.

At night, plug the phone in across the room or in another room.

Silence the phone at night.

Limit which apps you use in the evening.

News and social media apps can cause worry, stress, or anxiety.

Gaming and social media apps are hard to turn off and lead to later bedtimes.

#3 Social Media Addiction

There is no official clinical diagnosis of social media addiction. But over half of teen social media users admit it would be hard to give up social media.

Scrolling apps, refreshing feeds, and getting likes on posts give brains a chemical reward. They get a dose of "feel-good" chemicals like dopamine. This keeps users on apps longer and returning more often. A person can spend so much time using or thinking about social media that it gets in the way of responsibilities, well-being, and relationships.

The human brain enjoys activities that give them "feel good" chemicals. That is how substance use affects the brain . Too much time online can start to look like a gambling disorder or a substance use disorder.

Track how much time you spend on social media. Then decide if you need to set boundaries.

Take an afternoon, day, or week off social media. Reflect on how you feel.

#4 Cyberbullying

Excessive time on social media is linked to cyberbullying . Cyberbullying is verbal or social bullying through instant messaging, social gaming sites, email, texting, or social media. Over half of teens report experiencing cyberbullying.

Learn more about the consequences of bullying .

The first step to reducing cyberbullying is anti-bullying education . Learning about cyberbullying and its effects can help students make better decisions.

Check out McMillen Health's anti-bullying programs .

#5 Missing Out on Face-to-Face Relationships

An important part of adolescence is developing social skills. Social media can be harmful when it replaces time with family and friends. Some opportunities to build social skills can't be recreated online.

Make spending time with friends and family a priority.

When you're with other people, take a break from your phone.

#6 Less Time for Other Activities

When someone is on social media, they’re giving up time for other activities. Social media use can crowd out meaningful activities, hobbies, and quality time with loved ones. It can also get in the way of responsibilities like work, chores, or taking care of yourself.

Choosing to spend time on social media is okay. But it's important to be mindful of your social media use.

Track your daily time on social media (your smartphone can track this for you!).

Add up how much time you spend each week.

Reflect on the hobbies or activities you could be spending that time on.

Decide if you need to make any changes.

#7 Social Comparisons

Social comparison is when someone evaluates themselves based on someone else's life, experiences, and characteristics. It can cause a person to have negative thoughts and feelings about themselves.

People often only see highlights of other users’ lives on social media. This can make them feel left out, disappointed, or critical of their own lives.

Your social media account belongs to you. Make it a place that makes you feel good. If an account makes you feel bad about yourself or any part of your life, unfollow or hide the account.

#8 Affecting Self-Image

Teens and young adults are still learning who they are and who they want to be. Social media can have a positive effect on someone's self-image. It is a place for diverse representation and self-expression.

Unfortunately, for some users, social media or too much social media can have a negative effect. For example, Instagram's own research found that teen girls who use their platform have a poorer self-image.

If someone is already struggling with self-esteem, time on social media can make it worse.

Reflect on how you feel when you use social media. There may be times in your life when a break from social media is a good choice for your well-being. If you need extra help, talk to someone you trust or a counselor.

#9 Damaging Online Reputation

The things someone posts and comments on social media can impact their reputation. Even which accounts they follow can affect their reputation. This can come up during job searches, college applications, and future relationships.

Always think twice before you post.

Make your accounts private.

Think about who you add and who you follow on social media.

#10 Harmful to Mental Well-Being

According to the APA , adolescent mental health conditions have continued to rise. During this time, social media has become more popular too.

More research is needed to determine if and how social media harms mental and emotional well-being. For teens and young adults who have anxiety, depression, or another mental health condition, it is important to monitor how social media affects you.

Pay attention to how you feel when you use social media. If you have mental or emotional problems, don't wait to seek help.

National Suicide Prevention Hotline (or call 988 )

Psychologist Locator

Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist Finder

#11 Misleading Information

A study found that false news stories spread faster on social media than true stories. This means social media users are more likely to see misleading headlines, misinformation, and fake news stories.

Incorrect information can have negative and even dangerous consequences. It affects the decisions people make about their health, finances, product purchases, and more.

Evaluating information on the internet is a skill. When kids start using the internet, they need to learn how to be responsible online users.

McMillen Health's digital citizenship programs are a great resource for educating students on internet skills and safety.

When it comes to online opportunities, it's good to be skeptical. The FTC reported that social media scams skyrocketed in 2021.

Social media users reported frauds such as business/investment scams, online shopping scams, and romance scams. Romance scams are when someone starts an online relationship to convince another person to send them money.

If something sounds too good to be true, it might be. Always be cautious, ask questions, and do extra research before spending or sending money online.

#13 Normalizing Risk-Taking Behaviors

Risk-taking behavior can include substance use, sexual activity, criminal activity, and dangerous pranks or challenges. When social media users see risky behavior being normalized, they may be more likely to engage in it .

Be picky about what accounts you follow on social media.

Think twice before recording and posting risk-taking behaviors.

Reflect on your values. Make sure your online behavior and the accounts you follow match your values.

Writing your values down or discussing them with someone you trust can help you identify what's really important.

#14 Misleading Marketing

Social media is filled with ads and sponsored content for products, services, apps, and more.

Misleading marketing is different than outright scams. Companies and social media marketers want to make money. Sometimes this means they use dishonest marketing strategies, including:

Fake or biased reviews

False product promises

Not disclosing sponsorships

Photoshopping images

Fake time-sensitive deals

Educate on marketing tactics like flash sales, buzz words, and targeted advertising.

Remember that social media influencers usually promote products because they make money through affiliate links and sponsorships.

#15 Inappropriate Content

When a person interacts with content on social media, the algorithm is designed to show more similar content. Social media platforms have guidelines to keep inappropriate content off their websites.

Social media can still include inappropriate content, such as:

Hate speech

Sexual content

Dangerous challenges

In fact, in one survey , a majority of teens reported accidental exposure to pornography online.

The best policy is to not ask for and not send inappropriate images or texts.

Be careful about the accounts you follow and who you message.

Don't click suspicious links.

Block or unfollow accounts that post inappropriate content.

Social media has benefits too. Some of these include:

Connecting with family and friends

Building relationships with peers

Practicing social skills

Finding community

Learning about and supporting important causes

Learn about being safe and responsible online. Our high-tech media rooms allow McMillen's health educators to teach anywhere with an internet connection.

Digital Citizenship 101

Internet Surfin' Safety

Middle School

Digital Citizenship 201

Password to Internet Safety

Wired & Routed: Cyberbullying

Sexting & Texting: Safe Social Media

High School

Ready to schedule? Click here.

Alysia Marshall-Seslar is the Writing and Marketing Associate at McMillen Health. Along with being the author of TamTalks, Alysia contributes to the research and development of McMillen’s custom health education curriculum.

How to Prevent Cyberbullying: Tips and Warning Signs

Understanding nutrients: types, function, and nutrient faqs.

How Harmful Is Social Media?

In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he sought to explain, as the piece’s title had it, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anyone familiar with Haidt’s work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media. Although Haidt concedes that political polarization and factional enmity long predate the rise of the platforms, and that there are plenty of other factors involved, he believes that the tools of virality—Facebook’s Like and Share buttons, Twitter’s Retweet function—have algorithmically and irrevocably corroded public life. He has determined that a great historical discontinuity can be dated with some precision to the period between 2010 and 2014, when these features became widely available on phones.

“What changed in the 2010s?” Haidt asks, reminding his audience that a former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision of a four-year-old with a loaded weapon. “A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.” While the right has thrived on conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, the left has turned punitive: “When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And, unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.” Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: the rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”

These are, needless to say, common concerns. Chief among Haidt’s worries is that use of social media has left us particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias, or the propensity to fix upon evidence that shores up our prior beliefs. Haidt acknowledges that the extant literature on social media’s effects is large and complex, and that there is something in it for everyone. On January 6, 2021, he was on the phone with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke and the author of the recent book “ Breaking the Social Media Prism ,” when Bail urged him to turn on the television. Two weeks later, Haidt wrote to Bail, expressing his frustration at the way Facebook officials consistently cited the same handful of studies in their defense. He suggested that the two of them collaborate on a comprehensive literature review that they could share, as a Google Doc, with other researchers. (Haidt had experimented with such a model before.) Bail was cautious. He told me, “What I said to him was, ‘Well, you know, I’m not sure the research is going to bear out your version of the story,’ and he said, ‘Why don’t we see?’ ”

Bail emphasized that he is not a “platform-basher.” He added, “In my book, my main take is, Yes, the platforms play a role, but we are greatly exaggerating what it’s possible for them to do—how much they could change things no matter who’s at the helm at these companies—and we’re profoundly underestimating the human element, the motivation of users.” He found Haidt’s idea of a Google Doc appealing, in the way that it would produce a kind of living document that existed “somewhere between scholarship and public writing.” Haidt was eager for a forum to test his ideas. “I decided that if I was going to be writing about this—what changed in the universe, around 2014, when things got weird on campus and elsewhere—once again, I’d better be confident I’m right,” he said. “I can’t just go off my feelings and my readings of the biased literature. We all suffer from confirmation bias, and the only cure is other people who don’t share your own.”

Haidt and Bail, along with a research assistant, populated the document over the course of several weeks last year, and in November they invited about two dozen scholars to contribute. Haidt told me, of the difficulties of social-scientific methodology, “When you first approach a question, you don’t even know what it is. ‘Is social media destroying democracy, yes or no?’ That’s not a good question. You can’t answer that question. So what can you ask and answer?” As the document took on a life of its own, tractable rubrics emerged—Does social media make people angrier or more affectively polarized? Does it create political echo chambers? Does it increase the probability of violence? Does it enable foreign governments to increase political dysfunction in the United States and other democracies? Haidt continued, “It’s only after you break it up into lots of answerable questions that you see where the complexity lies.”

Haidt came away with the sense, on balance, that social media was in fact pretty bad. He was disappointed, but not surprised, that Facebook’s response to his article relied on the same three studies they’ve been reciting for years. “This is something you see with breakfast cereals,” he said, noting that a cereal company “might say, ‘Did you know we have twenty-five per cent more riboflavin than the leading brand?’ They’ll point to features where the evidence is in their favor, which distracts you from the over-all fact that your cereal tastes worse and is less healthy.”

After Haidt’s piece was published, the Google Doc—“Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review”—was made available to the public . Comments piled up, and a new section was added, at the end, to include a miscellany of Twitter threads and Substack essays that appeared in response to Haidt’s interpretation of the evidence. Some colleagues and kibbitzers agreed with Haidt. But others, though they might have shared his basic intuition that something in our experience of social media was amiss, drew upon the same data set to reach less definitive conclusions, or even mildly contradictory ones. Even after the initial flurry of responses to Haidt’s article disappeared into social-media memory, the document, insofar as it captured the state of the social-media debate, remained a lively artifact.

Near the end of the collaborative project’s introduction, the authors warn, “We caution readers not to simply add up the number of studies on each side and declare one side the winner.” The document runs to more than a hundred and fifty pages, and for each question there are affirmative and dissenting studies, as well as some that indicate mixed results. According to one paper, “Political expressions on social media and the online forum were found to (a) reinforce the expressers’ partisan thought process and (b) harden their pre-existing political preferences,” but, according to another, which used data collected during the 2016 election, “Over the course of the campaign, we found media use and attitudes remained relatively stable. Our results also showed that Facebook news use was related to modest over-time spiral of depolarization. Furthermore, we found that people who use Facebook for news were more likely to view both pro- and counter-attitudinal news in each wave. Our results indicated that counter-attitudinal exposure increased over time, which resulted in depolarization.” If results like these seem incompatible, a perplexed reader is given recourse to a study that says, “Our findings indicate that political polarization on social media cannot be conceptualized as a unified phenomenon, as there are significant cross-platform differences.”

Interested in echo chambers? “Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter,” which seems convincing—except that, as another team has it, “We do not find evidence supporting a strong characterization of ‘echo chambers’ in which the majority of people’s sources of news are mutually exclusive and from opposite poles.” By the end of the file, the vaguely patronizing top-line recommendation against simple summation begins to make more sense. A document that originated as a bulwark against confirmation bias could, as it turned out, just as easily function as a kind of generative device to support anybody’s pet conviction. The only sane response, it seemed, was simply to throw one’s hands in the air.

When I spoke to some of the researchers whose work had been included, I found a combination of broad, visceral unease with the current situation—with the banefulness of harassment and trolling; with the opacity of the platforms; with, well, the widespread presentiment that of course social media is in many ways bad—and a contrastive sense that it might not be catastrophically bad in some of the specific ways that many of us have come to take for granted as true. This was not mere contrarianism, and there was no trace of gleeful mythbusting; the issue was important enough to get right. When I told Bail that the upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear, he suggested that there was at least some firm ground. He sounded a bit less apocalyptic than Haidt.

“A lot of the stories out there are just wrong,” he told me. “The political echo chamber has been massively overstated. Maybe it’s three to five per cent of people who are properly in an echo chamber.” Echo chambers, as hotboxes of confirmation bias, are counterproductive for democracy. But research indicates that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life, where our social networks—in the original use of the term—are rarely heterogeneous. (Haidt told me that this was an issue on which the Google Doc changed his mind; he became convinced that echo chambers probably aren’t as widespread a problem as he’d once imagined.) And too much of a focus on our intuitions about social media’s echo-chamber effect could obscure the relevant counterfactual: a conservative might abandon Twitter only to watch more Fox News. “Stepping outside your echo chamber is supposed to make you moderate, but maybe it makes you more extreme,” Bail said. The research is inchoate and ongoing, and it’s difficult to say anything on the topic with absolute certainty. But this was, in part, Bail’s point: we ought to be less sure about the particular impacts of social media.

Bail went on, “The second story is foreign misinformation.” It’s not that misinformation doesn’t exist, or that it hasn’t had indirect effects, especially when it creates perverse incentives for the mainstream media to cover stories circulating online. Haidt also draws convincingly upon the work of Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, to sketch out a potential future in which the work of shitposting has been outsourced to artificial intelligence, further polluting the informational environment. But, at least so far, very few Americans seem to suffer from consistent exposure to fake news—“probably less than two per cent of Twitter users, maybe fewer now, and for those who were it didn’t change their opinions,” Bail said. This was probably because the people likeliest to consume such spectacles were the sort of people primed to believe them in the first place. “In fact,” he said, “echo chambers might have done something to quarantine that misinformation.”

The final story that Bail wanted to discuss was the “proverbial rabbit hole, the path to algorithmic radicalization,” by which YouTube might serve a viewer increasingly extreme videos. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this does happen, at least on occasion, and such anecdotes are alarming to hear. But a new working paper led by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, found that almost all extremist content is either consumed by subscribers to the relevant channels—a sign of actual demand rather than manipulation or preference falsification—or encountered via links from external sites. It’s easy to see why we might prefer if this were not the case: algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. “These are the three stories—echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms—but, when you look at the literature, they’ve all been overstated.” He thought that these findings were crucial for us to assimilate, if only to help us understand that our problems may lie beyond technocratic tinkering. He explained, “Part of my interest in getting this research out there is to demonstrate that everybody is waiting for an Elon Musk to ride in and save us with an algorithm”—or, presumably, the reverse—“and it’s just not going to happen.”

When I spoke with Nyhan, he told me much the same thing: “The most credible research is way out of line with the takes.” He noted, of extremist content and misinformation, that reliable research that “measures exposure to these things finds that the people consuming this content are small minorities who have extreme views already.” The problem with the bulk of the earlier research, Nyhan told me, is that it’s almost all correlational. “Many of these studies will find polarization on social media,” he said. “But that might just be the society we live in reflected on social media!” He hastened to add, “Not that this is untroubling, and none of this is to let these companies, which are exercising a lot of power with very little scrutiny, off the hook. But a lot of the criticisms of them are very poorly founded. . . . The expansion of Internet access coincides with fifteen other trends over time, and separating them is very difficult. The lack of good data is a huge problem insofar as it lets people project their own fears into this area.” He told me, “It’s hard to weigh in on the side of ‘We don’t know, the evidence is weak,’ because those points are always going to be drowned out in our discourse. But these arguments are systematically underprovided in the public domain.”

In his Atlantic article, Haidt leans on a working paper by two social scientists, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, who took on a comprehensive meta-analysis of about five hundred papers and concluded that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” Haidt writes, “The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.” Nyhan was less convinced that the meta-analysis supported such categorical verdicts, especially once you bracketed the kinds of correlational findings that might simply mirror social and political dynamics. He told me, “If you look at their summary of studies that allow for causal inferences—it’s very mixed.”

As for the studies Nyhan considered most methodologically sound, he pointed to a 2020 article called “The Welfare Effects of Social Media,” by Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow. For four weeks prior to the 2018 midterm elections, the authors randomly divided a group of volunteers into two cohorts—one that continued to use Facebook as usual, and another that was paid to deactivate their accounts for that period. They found that deactivation “(i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use.” But Gentzkow reminded me that his conclusions, including that Facebook may slightly increase polarization, had to be heavily qualified: “From other kinds of evidence, I think there’s reason to think social media is not the main driver of increasing polarization over the long haul in the United States.”

In the book “ Why We’re Polarized ,” for example, Ezra Klein invokes the work of such scholars as Lilliana Mason to argue that the roots of polarization might be found in, among other factors, the political realignment and nationalization that began in the sixties, and were then sacralized, on the right, by the rise of talk radio and cable news. These dynamics have served to flatten our political identities, weakening our ability or inclination to find compromise. Insofar as some forms of social media encourage the hardening of connections between our identities and a narrow set of opinions, we might increasingly self-select into mutually incomprehensible and hostile groups; Haidt plausibly suggests that these processes are accelerated by the coalescence of social-media tribes around figures of fearful online charisma. “Social media might be more of an amplifier of other things going on rather than a major driver independently,” Gentzkow argued. “I think it takes some gymnastics to tell a story where it’s all primarily driven by social media, especially when you’re looking at different countries, and across different groups.”

Another study, led by Nejla Asimovic and Joshua Tucker, replicated Gentzkow’s approach in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they found almost precisely the opposite results: the people who stayed on Facebook were, by the end of the study, more positively disposed to their historic out-groups. The authors’ interpretation was that ethnic groups have so little contact in Bosnia that, for some people, social media is essentially the only place where they can form positive images of one another. “To have a replication and have the signs flip like that, it’s pretty stunning,” Bail told me. “It’s a different conversation in every part of the world.”

Nyhan argued that, at least in wealthy Western countries, we might be too heavily discounting the degree to which platforms have responded to criticism: “Everyone is still operating under the view that algorithms simply maximize engagement in a short-term way” with minimal attention to potential externalities. “That might’ve been true when Zuckerberg had seven people working for him, but there are a lot of considerations that go into these rankings now.” He added, “There’s some evidence that, with reverse-chronological feeds”—streams of unwashed content, which some critics argue are less manipulative than algorithmic curation—“people get exposed to more low-quality content, so it’s another case where a very simple notion of ‘algorithms are bad’ doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It doesn’t mean they’re good, it’s just that we don’t know.”

Bail told me that, over all, he was less confident than Haidt that the available evidence lines up clearly against the platforms. “Maybe there’s a slight majority of studies that say that social media is a net negative, at least in the West, and maybe it’s doing some good in the rest of the world.” But, he noted, “Jon will say that science has this expectation of rigor that can’t keep up with the need in the real world—that even if we don’t have the definitive study that creates the historical counterfactual that Facebook is largely responsible for polarization in the U.S., there’s still a lot pointing in that direction, and I think that’s a fair point.” He paused. “It can’t all be randomized control trials.”

Haidt comes across in conversation as searching and sincere, and, during our exchange, he paused several times to suggest that I include a quote from John Stuart Mill on the importance of good-faith debate to moral progress. In that spirit, I asked him what he thought of the argument, elaborated by some of Haidt’s critics, that the problems he described are fundamentally political, social, and economic, and that to blame social media is to search for lost keys under the streetlamp, where the light is better. He agreed that this was the steelman opponent: there were predecessors for cancel culture in de Tocqueville, and anxiety about new media that went back to the time of the printing press. “This is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, and it’s absolutely up to the prosecution—people like me—to argue that, no, this time it’s different. But it’s a civil case! The evidential standard is not ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ as in a criminal case. It’s just a preponderance of the evidence.”

The way scholars weigh the testimony is subject to their disciplinary orientations. Economists and political scientists tend to believe that you can’t even begin to talk about causal dynamics without a randomized controlled trial, whereas sociologists and psychologists are more comfortable drawing inferences on a correlational basis. Haidt believes that conditions are too dire to take the hardheaded, no-reasonable-doubt view. “The preponderance of the evidence is what we use in public health. If there’s an epidemic—when COVID started, suppose all the scientists had said, ‘No, we gotta be so certain before you do anything’? We have to think about what’s actually happening, what’s likeliest to pay off.” He continued, “We have the largest epidemic ever of teen mental health, and there is no other explanation,” he said. “It is a raging public-health epidemic, and the kids themselves say Instagram did it, and we have some evidence, so is it appropriate to say, ‘Nah, you haven’t proven it’?”

This was his attitude across the board. He argued that social media seemed to aggrandize inflammatory posts and to be correlated with a rise in violence; even if only small groups were exposed to fake news, such beliefs might still proliferate in ways that were hard to measure. “In the post-Babel era, what matters is not the average but the dynamics, the contagion, the exponential amplification,” he said. “Small things can grow very quickly, so arguments that Russian disinformation didn’t matter are like COVID arguments that people coming in from China didn’t have contact with a lot of people.” Given the transformative effects of social media, Haidt insisted, it was important to act now, even in the absence of dispositive evidence. “Academic debates play out over decades and are often never resolved, whereas the social-media environment changes year by year,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting around five or ten years for literature reviews.”

Haidt could be accused of question-begging—of assuming the existence of a crisis that the research might or might not ultimately underwrite. Still, the gap between the two sides in this case might not be quite as wide as Haidt thinks. Skeptics of his strongest claims are not saying that there’s no there there. Just because the average YouTube user is unlikely to be led to Stormfront videos, Nyhan told me, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry that some people are watching Stormfront videos; just because echo chambers and foreign misinformation seem to have had effects only at the margins, Gentzkow said, doesn’t mean they’re entirely irrelevant. “There are many questions here where the thing we as researchers are interested in is how social media affects the average person,” Gentzkow told me. “There’s a different set of questions where all you need is a small number of people to change—questions about ethnic violence in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, people on YouTube mobilized to do mass shootings. Much of the evidence broadly makes me skeptical that the average effects are as big as the public discussion thinks they are, but I also think there are cases where a small number of people with very extreme views are able to find each other and connect and act.” He added, “That’s where many of the things I’d be most concerned about lie.”

The same might be said about any phenomenon where the base rate is very low but the stakes are very high, such as teen suicide. “It’s another case where those rare edge cases in terms of total social harm may be enormous. You don’t need many teen-age kids to decide to kill themselves or have serious mental-health outcomes in order for the social harm to be really big.” He added, “Almost none of this work is able to get at those edge-case effects, and we have to be careful that if we do establish that the average effect of something is zero, or small, that it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about it—because we might be missing those extremes.” Jaime Settle, a scholar of political behavior at the College of William & Mary and the author of the book “ Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America ,” noted that Haidt is “farther along the spectrum of what most academics who study this stuff are going to say we have strong evidence for.” But she understood his impulse: “We do have serious problems, and I’m glad Jon wrote the piece, and down the road I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a fuller handle on the role of social media in all of this—there are definitely ways in which social media has changed our politics for the worse.”

It’s tempting to sidestep the question of diagnosis entirely, and to evaluate Haidt’s essay not on the basis of predictive accuracy—whether social media will lead to the destruction of American democracy—but as a set of proposals for what we might do better. If he is wrong, how much damage are his prescriptions likely to do? Haidt, to his great credit, does not indulge in any wishful thinking, and if his diagnosis is largely technological his prescriptions are sociopolitical. Two of his three major suggestions seem useful and have nothing to do with social media: he thinks that we should end closed primaries and that children should be given wide latitude for unsupervised play. His recommendations for social-media reform are, for the most part, uncontroversial: he believes that preteens shouldn’t be on Instagram and that platforms should share their data with outside researchers—proposals that are both likely to be beneficial and not very costly.

It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. “But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it—a broader impact on trust,” he said. “Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can’t trust anything, and other people are being misled about it—well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself.” Nyhan had a similar reaction. “There are genuine questions that are really important, but there’s a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There’s so much focus on sweeping claims that aren’t actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better.” He added, “We’re years into this, and we’re still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It’s totally wild.”

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