Journal of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences EPHHR 2022

Volume 8 (2023)

Social Media and Its Impact: Individuals and Society

Tszyu Ye 1, *
1Basis International School Park Lane Harbor, Huizhou, China
*Corresponding author: [email protected]
Abstract. Social media nowadays is a massive topic for people to discuss, and it is even starting to
occupy people’s lives. Many people would see social media as a widespread technique that helps
them to relax and search for information. Still, not many would think that it would be a marketing
strategy or political skill and would harm people’s mental health in a certain way. However, these are
the adverse effects social media would bring to individuals and society without people realizing it.
Social media would not only cause addiction, which is one of the few things that people recognize
as the negative impact of social media, but it would also cause low self-esteem because people
commonly try to find a feeling of importance on the internet, but when things go to a different direction,
it will hurt their self-esteem in multiple ways. More uncommonly, advertising companies or politicians
would usually use data collecting companies to help them manipulate people’s behavior and use it
to make companies’ brand and politicians more influential and use strategies to make themselves
seem more trustworthy on social media. This essay is aimed to show how social media is starting to
impact individuals and society by using the way of literature review.
Keywords: Social medial, Influence, Social, Individuals, Marketing, Politic.

1. Introduction
In recent years, people are getting much more familiar with social media. People have started to
use social media as a new method to learn information about the things that they are most interested
in, those that are very popular in society, and even to use it to relax and waste time. Because of the
efficiency that social media has bought to us, the ways of people’s communication have dramatically
changed. Moreover, social media has not only brought changes to human society but caused several
psychological problems. The World Health Organization estimates that about 10 to 20 percent of kids
and teens globally experience mental health problems. According to data, 75% of mental health issues
are discovered by age 18, and 50% are discovered by age 14 [1]. Social media has also caused people
to become addicted to it, capturing their attention and thus taking over their lives. Social media
addiction can be seen as Internet addiction and often manifests as obsessive and excessive use of
social media [2]. People can no longer control their time using social media and realize the wrong
side of it. Despite mental health issues bought by social media, social media has also changed people’s
way of life, including consumers’ decision-making behaviors and political influence. Social media is
a new way of communicating between consumers and marketers.

2. Literature Review
2.1 Connotation
Following Kaplan and Haenlein, The term "social media" refers to a group of internet programs
that facilitate the creation and dissemination of user-generated content and are built on Web 2.0's
tenets and practices [3]. Which individuals can more easily contact one another online? Examples
include WeChat, Whatsapp, Tiktok, Instagram, etc. More easily than ever before, people can access
the information of others. They now have access to more broad and varied material than abstract.
2.2 The Ways of How Social Media Works and Its Impact
In recent years, many companies hacompanies Thus, making themselves influential and well-
known. Make-up product companies would find people that are popular on YouTube, Instagram, Tik-

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Tok, to tell the audience how useful their products are, and thus making more people pay for their
products Within. Daniel J. Power In a Gloria Phillips-Wren article, was suggested that Web 2.0 was
a method used by social media companies. It is about "people sharing, trading, and collaborating" [4],
and by doing so, every one is personally organizing and administering the web's material. [3]. The
Internet system provided wired and wireless access, larger capacity bandwidth, and low cost of usage,
with obtainability, indicating that by using this specific technique, the target customers are more
significant than previously. Users of Web 2.0 can now perform actions on the Web that they would
not otherwise be able to do due to the confluence of these elements [5]. However, while this new
computer language helps people do things they cannot imagine before, and helps us communicate
more effectively with others, people's experiences with social media and management decisions can
be covered broadly. According to anecdotal evidence, social media may alter our viewpoints and
impact our decision-making by influencing customer preferences and managers' corporate strategies
[3]. It may be that the advertising firms employed a strategy that led us to believe that the information
we consider to be reliable and those that piqued our attention. However, their fabrication of data led
us to believe so, directing our attention to where they wanted it to go and enhancing their power.
2.3 Social Media Impact on Behaviors
2.3.1 Individual: Addiction to Social Media, Low Self-Esteem, and Anxiety
The amount of information people receive from social media increases in direct proportion to the
time people spend on them. Others, however, contend that the ease with which personal experiences
may be shared in the digital information age is a significant contributor to the anxiety of the younger
generation [6]. According to data from the Campaign for Youth Health and the Royal Society for
Public Health from 2017 [7], anxiety and depression are more common among young people than
they were 25 years ago. Young people nowadays routinely post about themselves and their lives
online, allowing them to express their ideas and feelings and gain attention from others. People
occasionally tend to upload their own content, such as selfies and images of their daily lives, to garner
positive feedback from others and thereby raise their visibility and pursue a sense of importance.
However, a correlation between despair and aversion to online interactions was discovered by
Seabrook (2016) in a rigorous investigation. Similar findings were made by Appel, who discovered
that inactive Facebook use is connected to social evaluation and envy, both of which contribute to
sadness. According to research, these persons are more prone to mental depression than others if they
receive more negative than positive remarks on social media. Teenagers are sometimes more prone
to experience this predicament. Young people are more likely to experience psychological issues
because they may not be able to recognize or prevent the negative repercussions of using social media
[7] because self-regulation is restricted, and people are more sensitive to peer pressure impacts.
Another problem associated with social media addiction is that it is almost impossible for people to
control themselves from using social media. People addicted to social media frequently obsess about
using it, and they are motivated by an unquenchable want to log on [8]. They can't stop looking at
information online. Despite their attempts to resist the urges that come with social media, they always
end up failing. Social media addiction affects around 12% of users across social networking sites [9].
Research has demonstrated that interpersonal and psychological factors and emotional, cognitive,
physical, and emotional reactions can all contribute to social media addiction. [10]. However, studies
have shown that teenagers are more likely to have social media addiction than other age groups.
Middle school kids use social media often, with girls primarily using the platforms to deepen
connections and attract attention and boys mainly using them to flirt and make new friends [11]. From
this, we may realize that teenagers are more likely to spend on social media every day than people of
other ages. Students' curiosity about their identity, sexuality, and bodies is proportional to their use
of social media [12]. Because for teenagers, social media is a tool to help them explore themselves.
For example, love, romance, basketball, and other things made them curious. Therefore, social media
can help them to satisfy their curiosity. Negative aspects like inability to block Internet access requests,
frequent thoughts of limiting and controlling use, less and poorer quality sleep, mental stress,

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spending more time online than in other places, and inability to control the desire to use social media
have all been documented in the literature [13].
2.3.2 Social: Political, Consumer Choice Making.
Social media is widely adopted in society. Its awareness is much greater than the other avenues of
communication. Over 500 million individuals are reportedly using social media to interact. [14], and
it is more likely to be used by the younger generation, a group of people with high consuming ability
and an immense urge to discover what they truly want. The main benefit of social media for business
is that it enables users to assess products, suggest them to others, and make purchases through such
platforms [15]. Therefore, from this aspect, we may see why advertising companies would be more
willing to put effort into social media, letting different characters in social media promote their
products. But there are negative repercussions. The consumer socialization theory claims that
communication between advertising or purchasers and consumers will impact their cognition,
emotion, and behavioral attitude [16]. Despite the expensiveness of a particular product, people tend
to focus on the positive rating. Thus, people recently tend to listen to the idea posted on social media
and believe it. So, we can see that social media has changed how the consumer is persuaded. Although
it won't wholly affect customer decisions, it might have a mediating function [17]. On social media,
customers can influence brands' attitudes and decisions by sharing or recommending goods or
services to their friends [15].
However, not only would advertisers use social media to increase their awareness, but politicians
would also use this method to persuade the citizens and make them influential. For instance,
Cambridge Analytica played a crucial part in Donald Trump's win thanks to the creation of innovative
computational approaches that could sway voters in the 2016 US presidential election [18]. They are
not only playing psychology in the entire nation, but they also use it in the context of the democratic
process. The companies’ old employees Those data included the number of time that users spent on
specific information, like pictures and videos, the account of likes that the user likes while using
Facebook, status updates, and some private messages so that they can know what kind of messaging
that users would be interested in, including its framing, topic, tone, etc. By these, they can target
whatever kinds of users they want, interact and control how people behave, since they have the
massive data to learn what kind of personality their targeting people are having. This company would
use a large number of resources, creating false news in the way that their targeting users like, letting
them believe in that false information, and changing their way of thinking about that information
without them realizing it. It also means that every user would receive different styles of the same
messages. So, this is how some politicians can influence people to vote for them, increase their own
awareness or even use it as a weapon to change society. One source claims that the business employed
six Ph.D. data scientists to locate 20 million potential voters in crucial battleground areas [18]. Doing
this can let its customer gain more influence and defeat their competitor successfully.

3. Future Implication
From all the information available to us now, social media will be an issue from now until later.
However, many people still fail to recognize the impact that social media has had on society. They
still see social media as a handy tool that allows them to search for all kinds of news, comments and
new updates and believe everything others tell in their posts. They consider themselves authorities in
these areas without critical thinking. However, they hardly see the negative impact this will have on
their users. Therefore, to convince people of this particular concept, data analysis would be a better
way to inform society of social media's damage. However, instead of looking at society as a whole,
it would be better to narrow it down to the teenage population and look at how social media keeps
them using it for longer and how it changes their critical thinking skills, also see how social media
has changed their behaviors and decision making since they are the age group that would be affected
by social media the most and the age group that used social media the most. By exploring that specific
age group, we can tell people how it works and what adverse effects it can have on individuals. This

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will help people become aware of how to manage their social media accounts and what attitudes they
should use when using them, and raise awareness of not relying solely on these apps.

4. Conclusion
In conclusion, social media affects people in two ways, socially and personally. Although it can
sometimes help people to find their place on social media and gain attention and therefore discover a
sense of identity. However, there are not only positive comments on social media but equally negative
ones as well. These negative comments and the mental state of constantly focusing on what others
think of you can easily cause damage to your mental health. Not only that, but social media can also
stimulate the urge to buy or make a choice. Advertisers use specific methods to get people to spend
more and more time on social media so that people keep following those apps and change their
opinion of the product to attract more potential consumers. Advertisers can learn more about their
customers as they spend more time on the internet. And it impacts the teens more than the other age
group since they are in a situation in which they are curious and are trying to explore the thing that
interested them. Therefore, social media is the best tool for advertisers to increase awareness of their
products and influence consumer decisions. Not only that, but social media is also an excellent tool
for politicians to help them win elections and make themselves influential. Therefore, social media is
an excellent tool for those trying to become famous, but not for those who use it to entertain
themselves, since many adverse effects are brought by the internet, including anxiety and addiction.

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