Social media has made it a lot easier to connect with our loved ones, families, friends, and everybody through sharing pictures, videos, and various moments. Through social media, we strengthened our relationships by bringing families and friends together in a way that was not possible in the past. There are many more things that the community needs. Social media plays a significant role in the community by opening up job opportunity platforms to several unemployed youths. However, in this article, I mostly dwelled on the negative impact that social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Online forums, and Chart boards have destroyed the new generation.

Some Negative impacts of social media on the new generation.

1.    Addiction,

Addiction forms part of the negative consequences of social media on the new generation. People, spend a lot of time gossiping and forgetting to do other responsibilities. Consequently, they miss out on many meaningful opportunities because they keep on liking and commenting about other people’s lives and profiles.

2.    Social-economic impact

Many new generations spend their meager money buying airtime to facilitate their full-time online and forget about economic responsibilities. The situation has turned life upside-down because the elders take care of the energetic youth. 

3.    Moral erosion

While most people positively use social media, they advertise and sell products and services and get money; others are busy posting content not desired by the community. The young generation has so much capacity to grasp new things and put them in store for further use. Hence, such pictures and wrong content information bring about a massive problem for the moral part of our young generation. The situation is especially true in African countries where there are specific moral values that the modern generation should follow.

4.    Cyberbullying,

Most people use social media to bully others by sending, posting, or sharing harmful messages that cause embarrassment or humiliation. Social media platforms are a stock of unlawful or criminal behaviors.  Thanks to many Governments in the world for establishing some laws against cyberbullying.

5.    Health and economic consequences of Inadequate sleep

People spend time until late hours while browsing from one site to another and get a few hours of sleep. Such persons end up sleeping at work and if noted by their bosses they ended up fired and hence unemployed. Every human being requires an average of at least 6 hours of sleep; however, people who spend much time online sleep between 2 to 4 hours.

6.    Self-image issues

Social medial sites provide tools to earn others’ approval and the possibility to compare themselves to others.  People who spend most of their time posting personal images and activities, charting, and scrolling all the time are the most vulnerable to self-image issues. For instance, college girls who post self-images expect to get likes and comments about their looks. These girls may get unrealistic positive comments which make them wear false pride.  By the time they discover that the comments were not a representative of their authentic look, it becomes too late and already disastrous. People go further to the extent of recommending surgery to change someone’s look; they spend money to pay for the surgery and all to find that it was not a genuine case and have already lost their natural beauty.

7.    Mental health impact

Social media has a significant impact on mental health; the constant distraction on social media contributes to shortened attention spans, in addition, many people who use social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram report a high level of stress. The situation is pathetic, to the extent that it has reached the point that when people wake up, they grab a phone and see what happened on social media sites while they were asleep. We may decide to laugh at this point, but the situation is terrible, and if not timely checked, it becomes a habit that results in a mental problem.

8.    Source of crimes,

Most people misuse social media platforms by lying to people about products, jobs, or services they think people need and manipulating them to ask for money. At the same time, they don’t offer such a service or don’t sell that particular product, and at the end of the day, the people in need end up paying and receiving nothing.

9. Depression and anxiety,

 Most people are fooled by what they see without knowing that others post or share unrealistic moments, food, clothes, and fancy cars.  As a result of what they see on social media, they are frustrated.  They start blaming  God and everyone around them instead of working hard and building their kingdom.

10. Social media as a source of marriage breakups

Research has shown that many relationships collapsed because of too many social media platforms. The main problem is not only the type of content in social media but also the on-time couples spend on social media. Spending such time deprives the other partners of the intimacy that binds the relationship. For many marriages that collapsed before five years, the use of social media platforms has been one of the great causes.

Conclusion

 Despite the benefits of using social media economically, socially, and politically, the negative consequences take a big hit compared to the benefits. We build societies of nuisance and destroy the future generation. I, thus, call upon all social media users to be careful and use social media to rip the benefits a lot more. Let’s stop gossiping, bullying, and sharing fake life experiences, wrongly inspiring people, and making others disvalue their lives. Through social media, people consider life to be straightforward so that they can sit down and earn money. Teachers and college lecturers plan to help the world by continuously talking about the pro and cons of social media.

By Deodatus Robert Mgembe