The social media world was supposed to be a utopian world, at least in its infancy that connected us with the long, forlorn friends or relatives we had seemingly lost touch with. However, such has been the metastasization of the platform that it is now compelling individuals to leave the realms of real-life and shift entirely to the virtual world – Facebook, newly rechristened as Meta and its unveiling of future plans, being a case in point.
The biggest casualty of this mass virtual movement has been the little kids. The pandemic has exaggerated the process of children spending hours and hours in front of the blue screens. Inadvertently, most kids spill to social media sites and set up an account in no time. The toxicity of the social media sites drowns them in no time and most slip into depression and anxiety.
Instagram, Facebook and others — graveyard for teenagers and their mental health
According to leaks by whistleblowers, Facebook — the social media giant had kept internal research secret for two years that suggests its Instagram app makes body image issues worse for teenage girls.
Comprised of findings from focus groups, online surveys and diary studies in 2019 and 2020, the Instagram research shows for the first time how aware the company is of its product’s impact on the mental health of teenagers. And yet, in public, executives at Facebook, which has owned Instagram since 2012, have consistently downplayed its negative impact on teenagers.
A similar result was found in earlier studies. In 2017, British researchers asked 1,500 teens to rate how each of the major social-media platforms affected them on certain well-being measures, including anxiety, loneliness, body image, and sleep. Instagram scored as the most harmful, followed by Snapchat and then Facebook.
Another transatlantic study found more than 40% of Instagram users who reported feeling “unattractive” said the feeling began on the app; about a quarter of the teenagers who reported feeling “not good enough” said it started on Instagram.
Read More: The dark side of Facebook’s new avatar Meta
The toxic culture of 30-second videos
If Tik Tok was a menace filled with grotesque and at times lewd content that millions of Indians were served up in atrocious quantities, the banning of the app has allowed Facebook-owned Instagram to take its place by practically usurping the UI of the Chinese platform and similarly serving objectionable and obscene content.
Tik Tok was a Chinese platform built and introduced in India with the sole purpose to harvest the data of its users to send it back to the Politburo sitting in Beijing. Thus, the content disseminated on the platform was barely funnelled by the moderators and more often than not, porn, skimpily clad people dancing to lo-fi psychedelic music were seen indulging in explicit behaviour on the platform which inadvertently harmed the society as a whole.
Instagram and most social media sites and their algorithm has been mutated to an extent that only 30-second videos can be your claim to fame. However, once the views ratchet up, so does the pressure to keep it going. While some stay around, others perish. However, those trying to get noticed are often required to hop onto dangerous and at times, borderline lewd trends.
Skin show, obscene acts, profane language, and sexually suggestive behaviour form the cornerstone of most social media trends and teenagers blindly follow them, not knowing that the sites are compromised with predators, lurking in the shadows, and formulating strategies to target them.
The online predators lurking in the shadows
The online predator/pedophile is networked with millions of other like-minded individuals who share their techniques and experiences with each other. They know how to identify the most vulnerable victims and what techniques to use to groom children into sending nude images or videos to them.
In some cases, the accomplished pedophile can manipulate the child, build a relationship, resulting in the child voluntarily meeting or running away with him. These predators are skillful, one can even say, they are modern-day con artists.
They sympathize with the emotionally vulnerable teenagers who are still trying to find themselves while their bodies are going through substantial changes.
Through attention, flattery, affection, kindness, and even gifts, the predator wins over the kid and lures them into doing all kinds of unspeakable acts. Moreover, the anonymity and the global nature of the Internet makes identifying and prosecuting these predators difficult.
It’s important to understand that the part of the brain that handles rational thought, the prefrontal cortex, is not fully developed until the mid-20s amongst teenagers. It inadvertently means that the teens are naturally more impulsive, prone to be swayed by the likes of experienced predators.
Parents need to keep a tight vigil
This is where the parents are required to step up and monitor their children and their social media footprint. While some might argue about privacy, the fact that the kids are on any social media platform has already ripped them off of any privacy.
With the toxic environment created by these sites, it is better to be accused of a little dictatorship than allowing your precious kid to drift into the nothingness and vanity of the social media platform.
The greed of fame can turn even parents into monsters
However, recently, it’s the parents of few who are exploiting their children and using them to gain that one extra like that will perhaps crown them with the ‘Influencer’ tag.
Recently, the Delhi Commission of Women (DCW) had issued a notice to Delhi police over a vulgar video posted on social media by a woman with a 10-year-old boy who apparently turned out to be her own son. In the obscene videos, she could be seen gyrating in front of the kid, even twerking and forcing the kid to indulge in her sexually deviant behaviour.
The DCW said: “The videos of the woman and the child are obscene. Her activities in the videos can be termed as sexual activities with a minor child. The child has been made to dance inappropriately, grabbing the woman and making sexual gestures. Such actions of the woman cannot be considered as appropriate behaviour of an adult person with a minor child, that too her own child.”
There is no set manual on how to police a teenager or for that matter their parents. However, the least the latter can do is ensure that kids get onto the social media sites, as late as possible in their life. Not a whole lot is lost, if one is not on any platform. We are still in the infancy of social media boom and its only bound to turn more nasty, more profane and more sexually suggestive.
