The pros and cons of social media

Social media has expanded over the years, evolving from a digital forum for connecting people to a news source for younger generations. Its near-ubiquitous presence has transformed the way we interact with each other, how we learn things and how we perceive the world. From the introduction of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in the mid-2000s to the second wave of platforms in the mid-2010s that introduced Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, social media is everywhere. Whether or not that is a good thing is up for debate.

As useful of a tool as social media can be, it also stands accused of causing mental health problems, ruining our concentration and becoming a hub for misinformation. It played a significant role in the recent presidential election, an indication that even the political sphere has bent to its influence. Still, with all of social media's dark sides, it has undoubtedly had some positive effects on its users as well.

Pro: maintain connections

"The biggest pro of social media is that it allows you to keep in touch with people," while at the same time "introducing you to people you may not have met otherwise," said Fox News. The clue is in the name. Social media was first and foremost about building and maintaining social interactions among family, friends and strangers.

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As new platforms developed, so did the way in which people used them. The shift was "almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences," said The Atlantic. "Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections — largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say) — social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel," and all at once, "billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits and tastemakers."

Con: depression and anxiety

The impact on mental health, especially among children and adolescents, has long dominated debate around the use of social media. Numerous studies have found links between heavy social media use at a young age and negative self-esteem, body dysmorphia and higher psychological distress. This is especially true among girls, with the UK government moving to introduce the Online Safety Act in 2022 to safeguard children from the effects of social media-triggered depression.

Experts have raised concerns about how social media use activates the reward circuits in the brain, which can cause addiction, said USA Today; those with a history of trauma are particularly vulnerable. At least 15 children under 13 who tried to participate in the TikTok viral "blackout challenge" died, said Vox. "While pursuing the dream that TikTok dangled in front of them — becoming an overnight superstar — many more have become burnt out, disillusioned or otherwise hurt."

Stateside, the risks to mental health led U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy to call for a "surgeon general's warning label on social media platforms" in an op-ed for The New York Times. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X can create "significant mental health harms for adolescents," said Murthy, which is why Congress should require them to issue warnings to protect America's young people "from online harassment, abuse and exploitation" that are amplified by algorithmic feeds.

Pro: changed politics and news

For all the talk of social media as a toxic cesspit, "it has also encouraged young people to vote, to engage in local politics, and to organize — sometimes against TikTok itself," said Vox. It has revolutionized the way people receive information, forever democratizing news. It has changed politics (for good or bad, depending on your outlook) by ushering in Brexit and Donald Trump but also by helping those living in repressive regimes communicate and mobilize. The Arab Spring was made possible by social media and it is the front line of the communication battle raging in Russia and Ukraine today.

Con: cognitive overload

"Social media can be mentally draining," said Matthew Pittman, an assistant professor of advertising and public relations at the University of Tennessee, in The Conversation. Citing recent experiments on how social media affects behavior, he said: "You are more likely to be influenced by a high number of likes on posts — even to the point of clicking on ads for products you don't need or want." Yet the effect of "cognitive overload" can result in more than just buying things you do not need.

The endless access to information is perhaps of greatest concern for children, said Adam Brown, a clinical assistant professor in the department of child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, to USA Today. As a 2023 study published in JAMA Pediatrics shows, checking social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram too often can even affect how the brain develops in early adolescence, with students who checked social media habitually displaying differences in brain development related to emotions, motivation and cognitive control.

The increasing popularity of short-form content, inspired by the success of TikTok, has also led to concerns about the attention span of children and teenagers. The so-called TikTok brain phenomenon is built around the constant exposure to dopamine-spiking short videos, which have slowly become the norm across other platforms, including YouTube shorts.

Pro: provides education

It is important to stress the educational and entertainment aspects of social media, said Fox News. "A lot of people end up discovering new musicians, styles of clothing they want to try out, or even facts about the world that they didn't know before." Providing a vital window to the outside world during the Covid-19 pandemic, it has inspired people "to make fun iced coffee drinks, to pursue careers in arts and entertainment, to romanticize their lives, to feel more positively about their own bodies," said Vox.

Con: privacy concerns

Fake news, otherwise known as disinformation, has been around in one form or another for centuries. Yet the rise in social media has turbo-charged it. The impact of social media "echo-chambers" and online "trolls" can be seen in the stark polarization of societies around the world and the rise in populist politicians, which have come to define the age we live in. Added to this is a growing concern over privacy and security. The Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018 revealed how data from platforms such as Facebook was being manipulated for political gain by third parties.

More recently, concern about TikTok's links to the Chinese state has resulted in the UK following the U.S. and banning ministers and civil servants from having it on their phone. TikTok "has long maintained" that it does not store users' data in China, but Beijing's laws require firms, including tech companies, to aid the Communist Party and its intellectual services "when asked to do so," The Sunday Times said. Western security officials have warned that "this could expose vast amounts of data" globally.