04/12/2023
by Antonio Bolea and Audrey Garlick
There's a whole other world at our fingertips. With a tap or swipe, someone could jump from one reality to another, skipping through dopamine highs and exploring new places, sights, foods, models, and relationships. Instagram couples and models mesmerize you with simple glances or goofy dances on the other side of the screen, reeling in likes from you and thousands more. They're painfully beautiful, painfully perfect after hours of editing, testing camera angles, adjusting lighting, and meticulously dosing in top-of-the-line makeup. Social Media has expanded so fast that we can't even realize its effects. However, the facade and promotion of self-indulging behavior, hunting for likes and subscriptions, may create false expectations of beauty and relationships among teens without them even realizing it, destroying their self esteems and views on relationships.
Deeper Into The Problem
Since the beginning of time, beauty standards have constantly changed, from the ideal rounded body of the Renaissance to the ultra-thin standards of the 20s. Even now, trends are shifting. With every modern beauty ideal, though, comes a common theme: unattainability. Plastic surgery, filters, and social media algorithms actively promote impossible beauty to teens—and not without consequences. In a study where participants reported their appearance satisfaction randomly throughout the day, body image was significantly lower after social media use. (Stieger). Behaviors surrounding eating disorders, such as meal skipping, were most prevalent in teens with more social accounts, as reported by 52% of girls and 45% of boys. Social media has caused them to internalize Western society's craving for a thin body, turning them to have an extremely negative body image that would lead to those behaviors.
Social Media connects us with the people we know and interact with daily and the celebrities with lives and beauty we wish we had. While constantly interacting with perfect photos of celebrities can cause a negative self-image, we understand that some of their features are unattainable. Social comparison happens primarily with our companions, the people close to us, who we constantly see living perfect beautiful lives with the elegance they carry through it on social media and in person. Tragically enough, posts by people that we know are the ones that have such a tremendous effect on our self-image. The study presents this as a cause of normality; because we know these people in our lives, the standards surrounding them are easier to attain, causing us to feel guilty for not meeting them. Teens start tearing themselves down as they lack and crave the praise the familiar faces around them earn.
What Can We Do?
Social Media isn't necessarily an evil that needs to be eradicated by society, even though companies need to realize the extent of the problems their algorithms cause. But until those companies change, we must build constructive and kind communities with each other and our minds, and this can be extremely hard alone. To do so, friend groups could come together and challenge themselves to reduce their time on social media while trying to refine skills they're good at, supporting each other in the process. Learning to give healthy positive reinforcement will help conquer the drastic harmful effects social media has on self-esteem and, in the process, help us realize that we shouldn't define our worth by the facades we make of our lives but by our goals, passions, and minds.