While social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube have been very impactful to young people, they have not been short of ruinous consequences. Social media causes a distraction for students, risks causing mental health problems through cyberbullying and setting unrealistic targets for most of them, and discouraging face-to-face communication (Kwan et al., 2020). Therefore, one can notice that there is a vast amount of positive and negative sides of the question, which means that schools must act in the best interest of the students and prohibit its use.
Social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are very addictive, and hence, disruptive. According to Peris et al. (2020), teenagers aged 13 to 18 years are the second largest group of people in the United States addicted to social media. They spend an average of 37% of their day on social media, constantly posting to get likes from their followers (Peris et al., 2020). It makes the process of studying more difficult for the affected students to achieve their educational milestones as required.
Social media worsens mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. School-going children, whose intellectual capacity may still be low, may be easily influenced by what they see online (Bila, 2018). For example, the body standards displayed by celebrities online might be unattainable for most girls. They begin to dislike their bodies and seek ways such as cosmetic surgeries, which could be harmful, to achieve the desired features. At the same time, cyberbullying is quite common on the internet and may cause significant damage to students’ mental health (Skilbred-Fjeld et al., 2020). The trolling may result in low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, and even suicide.
It is therefore important for schools to block sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram to protect the students from imminent danger, even for just a few hours. It is possible to implement this prohibition as part of an experiment, which will clearly show how necessary this action is. Based on the results, it will be possible to construct a list of further actions to be taken in schools that are interested in student achievement.
References
Bila, J. (2018). YouTube’s dark side could be affecting your child’s mental health. CNBC. Web.
Kwan, I., Dickson, K., Richardson, M., MacDowall, W., Burchett, H., Stansfield, C., Brunton, G., Sutcliffe, K., & Thomas, J. (2020). Cyberbullying and children and young people’s mental health: A systematic map of systematic reviews. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 23(2), 72–82. Web.
Mylona, I., Deres, E. S., Dere, G. D. S., Tsinopoulos, I., & Glynatsis, M. (2020). The impact of internet and videogaming addiction on adolescent vision: A review of the literature. Frontiers in Public Health, 8. Web.
Peris, M., de la Barrera, U., Schoeps, K., & Montoya-Castilla, I. (2020). Psychological risk factors that predict social networking and internet addiction in adolescents. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(12), 4598. Web.
Skilbred-Fjeld, S., Reme, S. E., & Mossige, S. (2020). Cyberbullying involvement and mental health problems among late adolescents. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 14(1). Web.