Weekly Reflection #1- How Social Media Has Impacted My Life

Hi everyone!

For this weeks reflection I wanted to consider how social media has affected me, as it has been a big part of my life since grade 4.

Now looking back I was wayyyy to young to be on social media; however, being in a 4/5 split class I wanted to fit in with the “older kids”. So I begged my parents to let me get Instagram so I could communicate with my friends. My parents did monitor my social media use and I used it safely, but I did notice I instantly started to become more insecure about how many likes or comments my posts would get.

Being a teenager on social media it becomes almost impossible to not compare yourself to others, with constant posts of models, and fitness influencers, and even posts of your friends hanging out without you.

Social media soon became a toxic environment of constant questioning my self worth. I became to anxious to post anything out of fear of what people thought, and worrying I wouldn’t get as many likes as other people my age. It started to feel like everything was a competition. I remember people used to compare how many Snapchat notifications they had. How silly is that, bragging about how many people you purposely aren’t responding too so it looks like more people Snap you.

I follow a younger family member on social media, and I am starting to understand how damaging it is through watching her account. She is 14 years old, and posting links to an app where people can make anonymous comments. She then posts those comments on her Snapchat story responding to them. When I was around her age I did that too, and I am now starting to remember how hurtful those can be. People will comment things like “do you have a crush on (name)” and she will post it saying things like “ewwww no”. I remember when I was in high school someone had posted one of these, and the question was ” who is your least favorite person in your grade?” and the person responded with the first name and last name of someone in my class. At the time people don’t understand that it is bullying and harmful.

Even just the ability to comment anonymously is super dangerous for kids, as they think they can get away with saying whatever they want.

So what can we do? I believe as teachers it is important to help kids understand how to use social media kindly and safely, because we can’t assume all parents are teaching this to their kids before letting them get a social media account. Research found that on 31% of victims of digital aggression knew the identity of the person bullying them. So we must make kids aware of the dangers of social media. Below is a resource I found that can be shown in classrooms to make students aware of cyberbullying.

Video taken from Cyber Civics Student Hub on YouTube.

Overall, I believe social media can be a great form of communication with friends and family if used correctly. Due to my experience growing up and seeing how insecure it can make me, I try to limit my exposure to content about fitness and body image related stuff and try to use it as entertainment and a way to get information for my daily life. An example is I love cleaning videos on TikTok 🙂

Thank you for reading my first reflection!

This post was written by Hailey.