P2

Positives:

1. Learned risks and experienced rewards: Exploring the potential sources of students' attitudes toward social media and face-to-face communication

Students react positively towards social media.

They respond even more positively towards face to face communication.

Teachers and mass media have massively contributed to social media's negative stigma.

Face to face communication provides more positives, with almost no negatives.

Teachers may want to consider how they discuss both modes of communication.

Time spent on social media is largely seen by news outlets as wasted. 

The mixed opinions on social media have also led to mixed opinions on technology in general in classrooms, both due to the advantages and disadvantages that technology provides. 

2. The two side coin of the online social media: eradicating the negatives and augmenting the positives

Social media as impacted health, business, education, politics and agriculture.

Social media relies entirely on user-generated content, barely any of which is created by professionals (unlike systems like emails and messages). 

The reach, quality, frequency, usability, immediacy, permanence, visibility, reviewability, editing capability, and association are all completely different between social media and anything else. 

The 2011 riots in England were the first sources of evidence of the widespread use of social media platforms to organise and respond to disorder.

It has also made it possible for people to use the social media for personal identity construction, social relationships or entertainment.

3. Social Media Use and Social Connectedness in Adolescents: The Positives and the Potential Pitfalls

Social media can affect the users sense of belonging, psychosocial wellbeing, and identity development and processes.

People have mixed feelings on whether or not fostering social connectedness through social media is positive or negative.

Young people may experience both positive and negative psychological outcomes from using these sites.

On one hand, they elevate the ease in which individuals may form and create online groups and communities, but on the other, they can create a source of alienation and ostracism

Negatives: 

1. #Online harms or benefits? An ethnographic analysis of the positives and negatives of peer‐support around self‐harm on social media

The UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock sent a letter to each of the most popular social media sites and explained why he thought that online self‐harm content leads to self‐harm and promotes suicide. As a result of this letter, Instagram blocked "graphic content" in 2019. 

Some people have suggested that "social contagion", making harmful content appear glamorous in some way, has led to an increase in these behaviours. 

The recent UK All Party Parliamentary Enquiry into Young People’s Mental Health acknowledged the emotional support and sense of community and belonging that social media can engender.

Evidence to support either theory is fairly limited, with studies relying on websites and unreliable sources rather than looking at social data. 

By engaging with the peer‐support that is core to self‐harm interactions, the paper reassesses content that previous discussions have seen as harmful, or even as causing self‐harm.

Moves to ban self‐harm content must be undertaken with caution in order not to cause unintentional harm to already‐vulnerable young people.

2. Exploring Positives and Negatives of Social Media and Their Effects on LGBT Youth in America

Empathy and attachment can contribute to feelings of loneliness. 

Young people discovering more about themselves and their sexualities will be massively affected by any related topics and discussions on social media, which could lead them to the correct or incorrect conclusion at the wrong time in their lives. 

Awareness of mental health is especially essential in the LGBT community, as they have been recorded to have the highest suicide numbers. 

There is no practical or easy way to prevent all cyberbullying or to stop anyone from experiencing it, especially considering the high usage numbers of social media in America. 

Interactions on the Internet do not guarantee safety, do not require consent, and can be unpredictable. There is no definitive way to know exactly who the person is on the other end when in a chat room, texting on a cell phone, or messaging someone through social media websites. Harmful exchanges online can lead to feelings of depression, loneliness, hopelessness, and a lack of safety, which can ultimately lead someone to exploring the possibility of suicide.

3. The Power of Evil; The Damage of Negative Social Media Strongly Outweigh Positive Contributions

Media activities from people with no connection to official brands could have game-changing affects on communication and brand building. 

Social media activities can have an impact on actual brand in the market. 

The article suggests ways to condense the complex reality of micro-social-media events for a brand into a manageable set of social media indicators (SMI)

This methodology is illustrated with two real-world examples—one in the market for flat-screen-television market and the other in the set of Internet broadband-service providers in order to estimate their impact on the economic world. 

My Opinions 

It is pretty much inevitable that social media would have an effect on people, whether that be positively or negatively. A lot of these articles explore how interactions through social media would affect mental health. In situations like this, there are so many variables to consider, such as who everyone follows, how likely they are to interact with someone that could cause damage to their mental health intentionally or unintentionally, what content they end up seeing at the time they access social media, how vulnerable the people in question are in their daily life, their mood at the time of seeing this content, etc. Sometimes there will be a certain post or reply that will barely effect someone in the slightest. Sometimes the exact same post or reply could lead someone to suicide. I would argue the focus should be more on the people at risk the most, including most prominently minorities like African Americans and the LGBT community for example. But at the same time, I don't think it's reasonable to assume that these communities operate as a whole. On social media especially, anyone can end up talking to anyone whether intentionally or unintentionally. In other words, a lot of people will never see content that could be harmful to them specifically. In the right situations, certain people will spend their entire lives seeing the positive side of social media, the communities, the interactions, the relationships, the support, the entertainment. There is no reasonable way to deem the entirety of social media as harmful content and to banish it forever, partially because it isn't, and secondly because removing such a widespread and popular system at this point is pretty much a fool's errand. The minimum age isn't high enough to guarantee that the people accessing these websites won't see something harmful that will change their perception forever and could lead to self-harm, but even if you raised the limit there will be plenty of people who lie about their age to access social media. It seems impossible to discuss the positives of social media without confronting the negatives, but on the other hand it seems easy to only recognise the negatives that these articles present without acknowledging the positives. Even now, mental health is a massive problem that isn't taken seriously enough, so of course social media would impact discussions around that topic and even spread misinformation about it. The best way I can think of to prevent harm to users is to educate people as much as possible. If people know beforehand what to look for and how to prevent it, if people are given the helping hand instead of simply being shown that it is there, then the risk to these people could fall drastically. But it has to be done properly, by people with experience and knowledge of how to help people and how social media works, which again is something that can be best achieved through education. It's a massive topic to discuss, both social media's affects and mental health, but it is an essential one, so even an article that entire demonises social media would contribute to the conversation, but it isn't the kind of balanced opinion that is needed to tackle these ideas.