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T'Asia Porter
5/5
CRAAP Score-47

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The crime of harassment (which can include stalking, hate crimes, and cyberbullying) occurs when one person acts in a way designed to annoy, provoke, threaten, or otherwise cause another person emotional distress. State laws and some federal laws identify multiple ways in which harassment can be committed.

(For information on cyberbullying law in your state, see our section on Bullying and Cyberbullying.)

Intentional, not Unintended, Results

For most crimes, the prosecutor need only show that the defendant did an act that the law has made illegal. The defendant need not have intended the consequences that result. For example, when someone drives recklessly and causes an accident resulting in death, the driver can be charged with vehicular manslaughter because of his driving, even though he didn't intend to cause an accident or death.

But many crimes, including harassment, require "specific intent," which is intending the specific act that one is charged with. This means that the prosecutor must show that the defendant did or said something with the intent that the communication would harass the victim. The person may intend to annoy or intimidate the victim, or the words may be designed to provoke a fight.

Actions that unintentionally cause distress are not considered harassment. For instance, someone who plays loud music and mistakenly thinks that the sound won't carry has probably not harassed his next-door neighbor.

Stalking as Harassment

Harassment can be committed through verbal or non-verbal means. A person may use physical gestures to threaten or annoy a victim, or a person may intimidate a victim through a pattern of behavior, such as showing up at the victim's home or workplace. In some states, harassment that involves monitoring or following the victim is known as stalking.

Cyberbullying or Cyberstalking as Harassment

In addition to in-person communication, harassment also occurs where a person uses an electronic device such as a phone or computer to communicate threats, sometimes anonymously. The prevalence of the internet in everyday life has made harassment via email and social networking sites commonplace. Referred to as cyberbullying or cyberstalking, states have responded in differing ways to the growing problem. Some state legislatures have created separate statutes specifically addressing harassment that occurs online. Virginia, for example, directly addresses harassment that occurs on the internet, making it illegal to communicate via a computer network obscene language, threats of illegal or immoral acts, and obscene suggestions.

HELP FOR VICTIMS

Cyberbullying can have devastating effects on victims. If you are or someone you care about is a victim, seek help. Websites like stopbullying.gov and STOMP Out Bullying provide information and resources, including ways to get immediate help. You might also want to look elsewhere for location-specific information on bullying or cyberbullying; for example, you can try including the name of your state, county, city, or community in an online search.

Hate Crimes and Special Victims as Harassment

Harassment laws also exist to protect specific classes of persons, such as persons holding public office. Hate crime laws typically prohibit harassment that targets victims based on their age, gender, sexual orientation, or race. For additional information on hate crimes, see our topic page covering hate crime laws.

One Act or Many?

For certain types of activity, many states require repeated acts or a pattern of behavior in order for a defendant to be found guilty of harassment. But where the activity involves physical contact, the threat of violence, or conduct likely to provoke a violent reaction, harassment statutes typically require only a single incident. For example, Hawaii's harassment statute requires repeated phone calls in order for a violation of the law to have occurred, but the same statute requires only a single occurrence if the language or action is likely to cause a violent response or cause the victim to reasonably believe that the aggressor intends to physically harm the victim.

In some states, it is not necessary that a person threatens immediate harm. In Washington state, for example, a person commits harassment even where the threat is to commit a physically violent act at a future time. Other states require an immediate threat, such as California's criminal threat statute.

Penalties

States recognize both misdemeanor and felony forms of harassment. Many states punish first-time harassment offenses as misdemeanors, but punish subsequent harassment convictions as felonies. In North Carolina, a defendant's first conviction for stalking is punished as a misdemeanor, but subsequent stalking convictions are punished as felonies.

Some states also identify specific types of harassment as deserving harsher punishment. California punishes as misdemeanors harassing threats that are intended to make a victim fear for his or her safety, but threats to commit a crime that will result in death or severe physical harm are classified as felonies.

In addition to jail time and fines, penalties for harassment can include court-ordered psychological counseling. Sentences also frequently forbid a defendant from having direct or indirect contact with the victim. Violating a no-contact provision can result in new charges, in addition to revoking the probation or parole of a convicted harasser.

State legislatures have also passed laws that require schools to implement anti-bullying policies. A student who harasses another student, either in school or online, may face non-criminal penalties such as suspension or a ban from participating in school sports and activities.

Restraining Orders and Civil Liability

In addition to criminal charges, harassment can result in civil actions brought by the victim. A person who feels victimized by harassing behavior may seek a civil restraining order to prevent further harassment. Restraining orders frequently require that the respondent (that is, the person accused of harassment) not have any contact, direct or indirect, with the person seeking protection. The orders also typically require that the respondent keep a minimum physical distance from the respondent at all times.

While restraining orders are often handled in court as a civil matter, violations of a civil restraining order can trigger criminal charges, including felony charges.

Harassment can also result in civil lawsuits for damages. An employee who feels harassed by a co-worker may sue both the alleged harasser and their employer, regardless of whether the harassing conduct rises to the level of a crime.

Defenses to Harassment Charges

Defendants sometimes raise the following defenses when facing trial on harassment charges.

Free speech

First Amendment free speech principles may come to the aid in some cases. Although both the federal and state constitutions protect the freedom of speech, the freedom is not absolute. Whether a particular communication constitutes free speech, or crosses the line into criminal conduct, often turns on whether the communication is deemed to be for a legitimate purpose.

For example, Alabama's harassment law states that the statute does not apply to telephone communications conducted for legitimate business purposes. Under such statutes, a collection agency employee that makes multiple calls in an effort to collect a valid debt is protected from criminal harassment charges, while an agent who threatens to harm the debtor's family faces possible criminal harassment charges because the agent's threats are not deemed legitimate business practices.

Unintended Consequences

A defendant may also argue that the alleged harassment was an unintended consequence of the defendant's actions. For example, a person at home might play music that contains offensive lyrics, unaware that his child left a window open; a passerby on a seldom-used path hears the offensive music. Although the passerby feels annoyed, the person playing the music did not commit the crime of harassment because the person did not play the music with the intent to harass the passerby.

Just bluffing?

Defendants may think that they can defend themselves by arguing that their threats were hollow and that they did not intend to carry them out. It is generally not a defense that the defendant did not actually intend to follow through with a threat.

Additional Information

For more on harassment, see the following.

Consult With a Lawyer

Laws concerning harassment can be complex, and the meaning of key parts can depend significantly on how courts have interpreted them. Moreover, many of these laws are new and untested in the appellate courts; without this guidance, it can be difficult to know how trial judges will apply them. Congress and state legislatures are crafting new laws to address the increasing use of the internet and other technologies to perpetrate harassment.

If you are facing harassment charges, consulting an experienced lawyer who understands the charges and how the courts have interpreted the law will be of great help. A good lawyer can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your case, seek dismissal or a reduction in the charges, and craft an effective defense strategy should your case proceed to trial.

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Harassment as a Crime - Penalties for Stalking, Hate Crimes, Bullying & More | Criminal Law

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The crime of harassment (which can include stalking, hate crimes, and cyberbullying) occurs when one person acts in a way designed to annoy, provoke, threaten, or otherwise cause another person emotional distress. State laws and some federal laws identify multiple ways in which harassment can be committed.

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T'Asia Porter
5/5
CRAAP Score- 45

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Computers and the internet have ingrained themselves as such an indelible part of modern society that it isn't surprising how often they're used to commit crimes. Computer and internet crimes run the gamut from identity theft to computer fraud and computer hacking. States and the federal government have laws that criminalize various types of behavior involving computers, computer systems, and the internet, and each has its own requirements and potential penalties.

Computer Crime

There are a number of offenses which can fall under the category of "computer crime." Any crime that either targets a computer, or in which someone uses a computer to commit a crime, falls into this category. State computer crime laws differ widely, and when a person uses a computer to commit a crime, that crime may be covered under several different state or federal laws.

Unlawful use or access.Some states have laws that make it a crime to use or access a someone else's computer without permission or authority. This type of crime includes instances where a person physically accesses someone else's computer, gains access electronically, or uses a virus to gain access. These laws are often used incomputer hacking cases where someone gains access to someone else's computer without permission.

Access for fraudulent purposes. Other states have laws that punish using a computer to accomplish a fraudulent act. Some states, for example, make it a crime to use a computer, computer software, or computer network to fraudulently obtain goods or services of any kind.

Data theft.Even if you're allowed to use or access a computer, you can still commit a computer crime if you access, copy, damage, or alter information you don't have permission to use. Some states provide additional penalties in cases where the data theft resulted in damage, while less severe penalties apply for thefts which did result in data being damaged, altered, or destroyed.

Child pornography.It's a crime to make, possess, ortransmit images that portray child pornography. All 50 states, as well as the federal government, have laws which prohibit keeping pornographic images of children. There are also laws which prohibit transmitting harmful materials to children. "Harmful materials" include sexual or pornographic images that may be legal for adults to view, but which are harmful to, or inappropriate for, children.

Internet Crime

While computer crimes cover a wide range of activity, internet crime laws punish activity that specifically involves the internet in some way. These laws apply to emails and websites, as well as using the internet to commit identity theft or other forms of fraud. Like computer crimes, both individual states and the federal government have laws that apply to internet crime.

Luring or soliciting children. Nearly all states have laws that make it a crime to use the internet to solicit, lure, orentice a child to engage in a sexual act. These laws apply when a person aged 18 or older uses the internet to communicate with a child. The age limit of a child for the purposes of these laws is usually 16. However, a person can violate these laws as long as they believe the person they're talking to is 16 or younger,even if the person is actually an adult.

Harassment, stalking, and bullying.Various states have enacted laws which criminalize using the internet tostalk,harass, or make criminal threats against someone. State stalking laws typically require that the threats made must be credible, but a state's harassment laws may also punish internet communications intended to threaten or harass even if the threat is not credible. Recently, some states have enacted cyber bullying laws which criminalizes harassment aimed specifically towards minors.

Other laws and new laws.There are any number of federal and state crimes that may also apply in computer and internet criminal cases.Federal wire fraud, for example, can apply to any case where a person uses a computer or electronic communications device to fraudulently deprive someone else of property. As computers and the internet continue to change and proliferate, legislatures regularly introduce new criminal laws which apply to internet and computer use.

Penalties

Because there are numerous different types of computer and internet crimes, there are also a wide range of potential penalties. Some computer crimes have minor penalties associated with them, while more serious crimes can impose significant fines and lengthy prison sentences.

Fines. Fines for a conviction of various computer and internet crimes range widely. A misdemeanor conviction can result in relatively minor fines of a few hundred dollars, and possibly up to a $1,000 or more, while felony convictions can have fines that exceed $100,000.

Jail or prison. A person convicted of certain internet or computer crimes may also face a jail or prison sentence. The most serious crimes, such as possessing child pornography, can result in a prison sentence of 20 years or more.

Probation. Probation sentences for computer crimes are also possible as either individual penalties or in addition to jail or fines. Probation terms can differ widely, but typically last at least one year and require the person on probation to not commit more crimes, maintain employment, report to a probation officer, and pay all court costs and fines.

Talk to an Attorney

Being accused of a computer or internet crime is very serious. Even if you're never convicted you can lose your job and suffer the stigma of being an accused criminal. Computer and internet crimes can be very complicated, involving numerous laws, evidentiary issues, and extensive government investigations. Anytime you're charged with a computer crime you face the vast resources of the state or federal government. Your best defense against those powers is to find a qualified, experienced criminal defense attorney in your area. Whether you're facing state or federal criminal charges, a local defense attorney will be able to provide you with legal advice based on the facts of your case and the law. You need an attorney who has knowledge of the local courts, police, and prosecutors, and who can help you at every stage of your case.

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Computer Crime Laws and Penalties | Criminal Law

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Computers and the internet have ingrained themselves as such an indelible part of modern society that it isn't surprising how often they're used to commit crimes. Computer and internet crimes run the gamut from identity theft to computer fraud and computer hacking.

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Social media 'teen death groups' encouraging suicides

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Social media 'teen death groups' encouraging suicides

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Tanika Tyler
5/4/2017
CRAAP -

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Hidden groups such as Blue Whale have prompted a surge of teenage suicides

The groups are controlled by 'mentors' who incite members to complete tasks

After challenges such as cutting themselves, they ultimately take their lives

Vladimir Putin has expressed concern and called for harsher punishments

Teenage suicides is up 57 percent in Russia as a surge of social media 'death groups' sweep the country.

Hidden groups such as Blue Whale on social networking site VK, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, are reportedly controlled by 'mentors' who incite their members to complete tasks and ultimately take their own lives.

The existence of these groups has rattled parents and sparked heated debate in a country where suicide is largely a taboo subject.

President Vladimir Putin has publicly expressed concern, this month calling for harsher punishments for those convicted of incitement to suicide - a crime that currently carries a prison sentence of up to three years.

Several dozen Russian teenagers out of the total of 130 who committed suicide between November 2015 and April 2016 were pressured by members of 'death groups' on VK, who remain in the shadows as they spread a suicide cult, Novaya Gazeta reported.

It is said to be an increase of almost two thirds on last year's figures.

A 'mentor' on one death group, 22-year-old Filipp Budeikin, was arrested by investigators in the city of Saint Petersburg in November after allegedly inciting 15 teenagers on VK to commit suicide.

In an interview with local media shortly before his arrest, Budeikin outlined his tactics to attract teens he referred to as 'biodegradable waste' and 'people who are worthless for society.'

'First you have to create groups with depressing content that plunges you into a special atmosphere,' he said.

'People click on links and enter a closed group. That's when the game starts.'

Budeikin admitted he asked his victims to share personal information and perform certain 'tasks', which often involved self-mutilation or scarification.

'I just explained to some people why it was best to die, nothing more,' he said.

'They are the ones who made that decision. No one forced them.'

Budeikin added that he was simply 'cleansing society'.

'Death groups' even threaten to blackmail their members by telling them they will go after their loved ones if they refuse to carry out the tasks, Novaya Gazeta reported.

The discovery of the VK death groups sent a jolt through Russian society, where the suicide rate among minors - 20 for every 100,000 people - is three times higher than the global average, according to World Health Organization (WHO) data.

Russia's children's ombudswoman Anna Kuznetsova said this month that the suicide rate among minors had increased nearly 57 percent last year after dropping in previous years, attributing the phenomenon to the 'death groups.'

These groups have also spread to neighbouring Ukraine, where the authorities have sounded the alarm over a significant increase in teen suicide.

Ukrainian police blocked access to 500 social media groups this month, saying they receive on a daily basis 'nearly 70 alerts regarding runaway minors, 20 to 30 percent of whom are members of a death group'.

Despite the apparent impact the groups have had in Russia and Ukraine, experts think the phenomenon might not be as widespread as it seems.

Support for sufferers

Some have accused Novaya Gazeta of overblowing its findings and of creating an urban legend out of a few isolated cases of teen suicide.

'This is not the first time panic has struck over an increase in suicide among minors,' Meduza news site quoted demographer Yevgeny Andreyev as saying.

'Statistics don't back up' this trend, he added.

Rosstat national statistics agency published data that 22,839 people committed suicide in 2016, down from 24,982 in 2015, without differentiating age groups.

The latest figure has more than halved from 2005 when there were 45,800 suicides.

Suicide, as a subject for discussion, is still shied away from in Russia, adding to the difficulties in tackling it.

It came second only to sexual problems in a November survey by Levada independent polling agency, on topics considered unacceptable to talk about in the family.

In February, police in Russia investigated a rush of teenage suicide attempts amid fears that they may have been manipulated by sinister social media groups.

Two schoolgirls fell to their deaths from a building on the weekend prompting fears they were influenced into doing it by games masters behind a craze called Blue Whale.

Teenagers complete tasks like cutting themselves in the build-up to them being told to kill themselves on day 50 of being involved in the game.

Two school girls Yulia Konstantinova, 15, and Veronika Volkova, 16, fell to their deaths from the roof of an apartment block in industrial Ust-Ilimsk.

Days later, a girl named only as Ekaterina, 15, was critically injured after falling onto snowy ground from a flat in the city of Krasnoyarsk, also Siberia.

Two days earlier, a 14-year-old girl from Chita was reported to have thrown herself under a commuter train.

In all cases state investigators are probing whether a controversial web 'suicide game' has influenced the girls to seek to take their lives.

Yulia left a note saying 'End' on her social page and earlier she had posted a picture with big blue whale, seen as a symbol of a social media movement encouraging children to take their own lives.

Her friend Veronika wrote: 'Sense is lost... End.'

She regularly posted sad messages such as, 'Do you feel that gradually you become useless?' or 'I'm just a ghost'.

It was reported that two teenage boys were detained by police at the scene after allegedly filming the tragic double suicide.

The Russian Investigative Committee opened a probe on 'incitement to suicide' regarding the pair's death.

'Investigators checked the scene, the homes of the minors, and interviewed relatives and friends of the victims, to establish the motives,' said a statement.

'Particular attention during the investigation of the criminal case will be given to the study of their social contacts on the Internet.'

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Social media 'teen death groups' prompt 57% rise in suicides

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Hidden groups such as Blue Whale have prompted a surge of teenage suicides The groups are controlled by 'mentors' who incite members to complete tasks After challenges such as cutting themselves, they ultimately take their lives Vladimir Putin has expressed concern and called for harsher punishments Teenage suicides is up 57 percent in Russia as a surge of social media 'death groups' sweep the country.

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Using Many Social Media Platforms Linked With Depression, Anxiety Risk

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Using Many Social Media Platforms Linked With Depression, Anxiety Risk

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Tanika Tyler
5/4/2017
CRAAP- 46

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The American Psychiatric Association Publishing Textbook of Forensic Psychiatry, 3rd Edition - New!

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Is your online addiction making you anxious?

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Is your online addiction making you anxious?

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Tanika Tyler
5/4/2017
CRAAP Score- 47

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Social media is a great way to keep up with friends, but the need for more likes, followers, and re-tweets can lead to anxiety and addiction.

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Social Media Is Causing Anxiety, Study Finds

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Social Media Is Causing Anxiety, Study Finds

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Myshira Palmer
5/04/2017
CRAAP Score- 46

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Got the Facebook fears?

According to a recent study released by non-profit Anxiety UK, over half of the social media users polled said Facebook, Twitter and other networking sites had changed their lives -- and 51 percent of those said it's not been for the better.

Forty-five percent of responders said they feel "worried or uncomfortable" when email and Facebook are inaccessible, while 60 percent of respondents stated "they felt the need to switch off" their phones and computers to secure a full-fledged break from technology. In other words, it's not being on social networks that makes people anxious. It's being away from them.

"These findings suggest that some may need to re-establish control over the technology they use, rather than being controlled by it," says Anxiety UK CEO, Nicky Lidbetter.

Data also revealed that two-thirds of respondents had difficulty sleeping after using social media, and 25 percent admitted to difficulties in relationships because of "confrontational online" behavior, per the Telegraph.

The survey was conducted by the Salford Business School at the University of Salford, where 228 participants were polled for Anxiety UK's research.

While the study consists of a small sample size, Salford's data backs up other information on social media addiction. In a recent study Mobile Mindset study by Lookout, it was found that 73 percent of people would panic if they lost their smartphone, while another 54 percent admit to checking their phone "while lying in bed."

But are social media users anxious because of social media, or do more anxious people gravitate toward digital interactions?

"If you are predisposed to anxiety it seems that the pressures from technology act as a tipping point, making people feel more insecure and more overwhelmed," Lidbetter states.

A similar study from the University of Bergen in Norway measured Facebook user addiction this last April, finding those with poor sleeping habits were most likely to be Facebook-obsessed.

"We have also found that people who are anxious and socially insecure use Facebook more than those with lower scores on those traits, probably because those who are anxious find it easier to communicate via social media than face-to-face," author of the study Dr. Cecilie Schou Andreassen states.

While social media may cause some anxiety, don't add depression to the list of Facebook's vices just let. As Katherine Bindley of the Huffington Post reported, new research from the University of Wisconsin suggests the amount of time spent on Facebook had little correlation to test subject's symptoms of depression.

Do you believe your social media use has added stress and anxiety to your life? Or are digital interactions a "tipping point" for already anxious users? Let us know in the comments section, and then check out the slideshow below of six things that are allegedly less addictive than social media.

ALSO ON HUFFPOST:

Sick of Facebook? Here are some non-corporate alternatives to try.

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Social Media Is Making Us Anxious, Study Finds

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Got the Facebook fears? According to a recent study released by non-profit Anxiety UK, over half of the social media users polled said Facebook, Twitter and other networking sites had changed their lives -- and 51 percent of those said it's not been for the better.

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The Negative Impacts of Social Media on Face-to-Face Interactions

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The Negative Impacts of Social Media on Face-to-Face Interactions

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Myshira Palmer
5/04
CRAAP Score- 45

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Should You Really Post That? | Abby’s Blog

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The Negative Impacts of Social Media on Face-to-Face Interactions – Final Inquiry Project

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Studies show Facebook may affect mood more than previously thought

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Studies show Facebook may affect mood more than previously thought

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Myshira Palmer
5/04/2017
CRAAP Score- 47

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Social media boils down to an emotional whirlwind of status updates, tweets, retweets, selfies, shares, likes and tags. Twitter users tweet 400 million times a day, and over 4.75 billion pieces of content are shared daily on Facebook, according to Zephoria Internet Marketing. This constant influx of personal information and updates can gradually trail into the gray area of what is often described as social media depression.

Social media serves as a platform for individuals to interact, share content and become more transparent.

While studies from the Pew Research Center show that social networks have the potential to promote a sense of inclusion, more recent reports indicate otherwise.

Although networking mediums such as Facebook and Twitter enhance social ties between people, an unhealthy trend of seeking reinforcement can lead to anxiety, social insecurity and lack of confidence according to reports from the University of Michigan.

Veronica Sullivan, staff psychologist at the University Counseling Services (UCS) explains the conflicting studies pertaining to social media and emotional well-being. Sullivan was recently involved in a project called Get Real! CSUN, which dealt with bringing awareness to body image distortion in the media.

Sullivan describes her encounters with students who spend up to three hours a day on Facebook or Instagram. "It can be a huge time waster," she said. As a result, students are deterred from engaging in more productive activities.

She also suggested this obsession can spark voyeuristic behavior especially after a breakup.

"It can become obsessive, especially as they don't know the full story, only what can be seen in pictures or status updates," Sullivan said. "I often suggest trying to avoid an ex's social media for a while in order to allow some space for the grieving process to happen."

The development of the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale (BFAS) illustrates the severity of imploding instances of depression, social insecurity and anxiety resulting from increased use of social media.

In a study of over a billion status updates, The Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks reveals that emotions are contagious. Positive emotions can spark positive reactions and vice versa.

Additionally, a survey by Anxiety UK in 2012 stated that 53 percent of participants said social media sites changed their behavior while 51 percent of these reported the change had been negative.

Surveys and research confirm that increased use of social media can foster negative emotions and skewed perceptions of body image.

Alixan Gorman, TESOL major, confirms these findings with her own observations.

"People use social media to put others down," Gorman said." I think they post pictures to seek approval and then they have mixed feelings about how their friends respond to them."

For the time being, millennials, those born between the 1980s and 2000s, are the ultimate guinea pigs. Their infatuation with social media is scrutinized by researchers and reprimanded by older generations who recommend a break from gadgets and a dose of the outdoors.

Sullivan said social media isn't entirely bad.

"It's a place that allows for a lot of self-expression, and a great way to share information. I've seen it used in really powerful ways, such as raising money or awareness for important causes."

She said for people who suffer from social anxiety social media can be a mixed bag.

"I have seen it be a way to ease into social interaction in a way that feels a little less vulnerable, but you have to be careful because it can also become a way for people to avoid real life interaction," Sullivan said.

Finding a balance between face-to-face interactions and communication through social media is important to maintaining a more positive outlook.

"Social media is certainly not all bad and can be a healthy way to connect with others and to find like-minded individuals," Sullivan said.

Sullivan said the positive aspect of social media is it allows for self-expression and for ways to share information.

"I've seen it used in really powerful ways, such as raising money or awareness for important causes."

Regardless of the positive outcomes that may come of this, Sullivan said separating social media from real life is an integral part of maintaining that healthy balance.

"It can be difficult but I think that one thing people can do is to remind themselves that what is on social media is not always an accurate representation of that person's life," said Sullivan. "The person smiling in that group photo might be struggling right now. "

Sullivan said many people tend to put the best version of themselves on social media.

"It doesn't reflect the whole picture and can tend to look more ideal than it really is," she said.

Sullivan offered advice for people who experience negative feelings as a result of being a part of social networks.

"I think if someone is continually feeling bad when engaging in social media, it might be time to take a break from it," Sullivan said. "Sometimes taking some time off and engaging in real life for a while can give you some perspective. Take a social media vacation. A bonus is you'll suddenly have a lot of extra time you didn't know you had."

Dayali Corrales, kinesiology major, describes a situation regularly encountered on social media and addressed in various studies.

"Sometimes when we see pictures or tweets or Facebook statuses we were having a good day up until we saw something that made an impact on how we feel," Corrales said. "From my experience people are very quick to jump to conclusions and make negative comments."

Whatever impact this has on users is yet to be confirmed and diagnoses are yet to be made. With time, researchers are guided by a generation that will help them determine the true outcome of using social media.

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Studies show Facebook may affect mood more than previously thought

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Social media boils down to an emotional whirlwind of status updates, tweets, retweets, selfies, shares, likes and tags. Twitter users tweet 400 million times a day, and over 4.75 billion pieces of content are shared daily on Facebook, according to Zephoria Internet Marketing.

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5/4
CRAAP Score-47

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Credit: Dreamstime

People who were bullied throughout childhood and adolescence are more likely than others to engage in delinquent or criminal behavior later in life, a new study finds.

In the new research, scientists found that about 14 percent of those who reported suffering repeated bullying through their childhood and teenage years - up to 18 years of age - wound up serving time in prison as adults. In comparison, 6 percent of people who did not experience bullying ended up in prison.

"Most studies focus on a relatively narrow period of the life course, but I looked at victimization from birth to age 18 and then associated that with legal outcomes - whether they got involved with substance abuse, got arrested, convicted or were sent to incarceration," said Michael Turner, an associate professor in the department of criminal justice and criminology at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. [ 10 Scientific Tips for Raising Happy Kids]

Turner is presenting the findings today (Aug. 1) at the American Psychological Association's 121st Annual Convention, which is being held from July 31 to Aug. 4 in Honolulu.

Bullying and crime

In his analysis, Turner found that compared with nonbullied individuals, victims of bullying had higher rates of criminal conviction. More than 20 percent of those who were bullied throughout childhood and adolescence were convicted of crimes, compared with 11 percent of nonvictims. Sixteen percent of individuals who experienced childhood bullying, up to age 12, were convicted of crimes, with 13 percent of victims who were bullied during adolescence (from age 12 to 18) experiencing similar legal outcomes later in life.

"Being victimized at any point in time was associated with higher odds of delinquency, substance abuse, arrests and convictions in late adolescence and adulthood," Turner told LiveScience. "But chronic victims - those who were bullied in childhood and adolescence - had the highest odds of adverse legal outcomes."

Previous studies have found relationships between young people who bully others and delinquent behavior later in life, but Turner's study shows that victims of bullying can also be negatively affected in the long run.

"Most studies found bullying and offenders are associated with higher crime," Turner said. "I found support that being a victim is also associated with adverse legal outcomes. Most research hasn't found this relationship."

Growing pains

For the study, Turner relied on data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The survey included 7,335 people reflective of U.S. demographics, who were ages 12 to 16 as of Dec. 31, 1996.

Turner separated the individuals into four groups: nonvictims (74 percent of survey respondents); those who suffered bullying before age 12 (15 percent); those who were bullied after age 12 (6 percent); and those who experienced bullying during childhood and adolescence (5 percent).

The youths were followed over a 14-year period, and victimization reports were collected over several periods. Criminal incidents were assessed when the survey participants were in their late teenage years or early adulthood.

The study did not account for severity of bullying and did not focus on the socioeconomic status of the respondents.

Through his analysis, however, Turner did identify some gender differences. "Majority of the significant gender differences tended to sway in favor of females being more adversely affected than males," Turner said. He found no significant differences across races and ethnicities.

What to do?

The results suggest bullying is particularly detrimental early in development.

"There are certainly prevention programs out there, for schools and parents, and if you don't deal with these problems early, they could turn into bigger problems," Turner said. "Early prevention is always a better outlook."

And despite relying on data that had been collected in the mid-'90s, Turner does not anticipate major differences had the survey been conducted among youth today.

"The method by which individuals are bullied now is quite a bit different than what existed then," Turner said. "Specifically, there's a lot more technology-based cyberbullying. The method is a little different, but it's still verbal, physical, emotional or psychological."

Turner plans to submit the research for peer review, prior to publication, at the end of this year's American Psychological Association meeting.

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Bullied Kids More Likely to Commit Crimes As Adults

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People who were bullied throughout childhood and adolescence are more likely than others to engage in delinquent or criminal behavior later in life, a new study finds. In the new research, scientists found that about 14 percent of those who reported suffering repeated bullying through their childhood and teenage years - up to 18 years of age - wound up serving time in prison as adults.

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Disadvantages of Social Networking : Surprising Insights from Teens

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Disadvantages of Social Networking : Surprising Insights from Teens

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Tanika Tyler
4/28
CRAAp Score - 48

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"Honestly, I sometimes truly wish that 'tools' such as the iPhone (or any smartphone), laptops, iPads, tablets, etc. hadn't been invented. Sure, they're great, incredibly useful, and fun time-killers. But the way teenagers abuse them, and turn them into mini social control rooms is frankly awful."

At first glance, you might think this quote came from a parent or grandparent lamenting on the disadvantages of social networking and how social media has doomed today's children. But it was written by a Seattle-area tenth grader as part of an assignment to answer the question, "How has online social networking influenced your relationships with friends and family?"

This student goes on to write, "The teenage way of life has completely changed from what it was only twenty years ago. Now, there is a dramatic decrease in face-to-face communication, which reduces our generation's ability to interact with others on a speaking level."

Not coincidentally, this same message was echoed by the young people interviewed in Tomorrow's Change Makers: Reclaiming the Power of Citizenship for a New Generation. Youth engaged in their communities claim that face-to-face interactions is what motivates them to make a difference in the world.

This is a two-part article gleaned from reviewing the essays of a class of tenth graders, with their permission, of course. It is meant to generate additional discussion on the benefits and disadvantages of social networking and its effect on healthy youth development.

Below are the most discussed disadvantages of social networking according to these tenth graders, including quotes from their essays. In a similar format, you can also read reflections on the benefits of social networking in my column at Psychology Today.

10 Disadvantages of Social Networking

1. Lacks Emotional Connection

"A couple weeks ago, one of my friends and I got into a fight and she told me all of her feelings as to why she ignored me for two weeks. Assuming it would have been really hard to say it to my face, she sent me a text message. The negative side was I didn't know if she truly felt sorry because I didn't hear it from her. The quality of a conversation using social media is awful because you cannot sense the emotion or enthusiasm from the other person. It makes you wonder if they actually mean what they say."

2. Gives People a License to be Hurtful

"I do think it has gotten to an extreme point where you can say things you can't say or get away with in person."

"I'm disappointed whenever I hear about social media being used as a way to hurt people. I wonder if this happens when the writers forget that there are real people behind the screen."

3. Decreases Face-to-Face Communication Skills

"Computer reliance could hurt a person's ability to have a face to face conversation by making it awkward and unusual to hear something and respond with a thoughtful message through the spoken word because of one's dependence on a keyboard to convey a message."

4. Conveys Inauthentic Expression of Feelings

"Social media conversations today are filled with "haha", "LOL", and other exclamations that are meant to represent laughter. This shorthand has become second nature and is often used when the sender is not even smiling, much less laughing, in real life. On the occasion that our "roflcopter" is actually put to use at a funny moment, we are replacing actual laughter with, in this case, a simple ten-letter acronym. According to Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, the actual physical act of laughter, and not the abstract idea of something being funny, is what makes laughing feel so good. If we are so willing to replace the act that, honestly, we all love, with an artificial, typed representation that doesn't even bring the same joy, what else would we be, potentially subconsciously, willing to exchange?"

5. Diminishes Understanding and Thoughtfulness

"Since the inception of social networking, the quality of conversations has dropped. I believe that people are spending so much time online that they don't always understand the feeling, emotion and/or character of the person they are talking to. When you talk to someone through a message or even a voice, you can't always fully understand them."

"Social networking has ruined the thoughtfulness in basically saying hello in person. For instance, you could say hello to your friend in Germany with Facebook, chat in seconds; but what if there was no way to communicate via social networking? Well you would have to write them a letter and that is something very thoughtful."

6. Causes Face-to-Face Interactions to Feel Disconnected

"When I see my friends on their phones and I am around them, I feel disconnected even though we are only two feet apart..... Unfortunately, sometimes friends use their phones so much that it is difficult to have an actual conversation with them. Sometimes friends can get so socially attached to something such as a blog or gaming console that they lose touch with friends, creating small gaps and holes in close friendships/relationships."

7. Facilitates Laziness

"The new socially active era causes laziness because instead of running to your friends you can message them. Or instead of walking upstairs to notify the family of dinner, I can blog it. Social networking makes life so convenient that it creates laziness. In my opinion staying fit is important, but it is difficult to go beyond the newly developed status quo."

"It's really easy to spend hours doing nothing....It's a fantastic way to waste time."

8. Creates a Skewed Self-Image

"We tell ourselves lies about ourselves and develop something we are not. We post pictures of us looking perfect and share the good news. We never post pictures of ourselves when our dog dies, when someone we love leaves, and when we lose a job. We never share the bad news that always clouds our lives. We all develop this perfect image of ourselves and some of us actually try to rely on this imaginative thought we have of ourselves instead of staying true to who we are."

9. Reduces Family Closeness

"Texting, Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail alienate us from our families more than we actually think it does.... When my family is spending family time together and watching a movie, in reality my brother and I are on our phones rather than actually watching the movie with our parents."

10. Causes Distractions

"When I have my phone out, it makes me feel like nothing else is going on around me. I use social media as a way to feel popular, important, and also just to fit in. My friends and I always compare ourselves to each other, wondering who has more Facebook friends or Twitter followers. But what really ends up happening is I begin to talk less and end up relying on text for a conversation. Ever since I got a smartphone I have been distracted from everything. I watch television less, do homework less, and even spend less time with my friends and family."

Addressing the Disadvantages of Social Networking

The disadvantages of social networking and social media will be studied for decades to come. The 10th-grade essays used for this article are five years old now but they could easily have been written today.

In the last five years, social media has proven to be a significant source of concern among privacy advocates, particularly with concerns over how Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data. Parents have become increasingly worried about their children's safety online and how to protect their personal data.

But clearly, the disadvantages of social networking go much deeper than privacy and safety. These high school students described some of the serious drawbacks to relationships and mental health - foundations of human development.

In the past several years, more studies have linked social media to poor mental health. According to a recent Forbes article, several studies have not only shown a correlation but also a causation. Findings suggest that people who limit social media to 30 minutes daily feel significantly better than those who use social media for longer periods of time. By reducing time spent, people were able to reduce depression, anxiety, and loneliness.

Recent statistics from the Pew Research Center show that social networking usage has remained unchanged in the past four years. This may suggest a saturation point has been reached. It may also be a hopeful sign that people are learning to manage social media in healthier ways; or at least they don't show an insatiable appetite for more. In addition, most people don't trust news from social networking sites-only 5% of U.S. adults have a lot of trust in this information.

Among Americans from 12-34 years old, Facebook usage declined from 79% in 2017 to 62% today. The only social network growing among U.S. youth is Instagram, up from 64% to 66% in the past two years.

Researchers suggest that helping children and teens learn to manage social networking is paramount to their healthy development. Most experts agree that parents must lead the way by setting a good example of what healthy computer usage looks like. Family meetings are a great venue to discuss social networking and computer usage with the whole family and get buy-in for solutions.

Listed below are some helpful articles that can spark conversations in your family:

--A special thanks to the students who contributed their voices to this article.
(This article was originally published June 16, 2014. It was updated with new research and information and republished Sept. 6, 2019.)
Published: September 6, 2019

Tags: character strengths, cyberbullying, empathy, happiness, learning, media, moral development, parenting, positive youth development, technology

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Teens Discuss Disadvantages of Social Networking

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"Honestly, I sometimes truly wish that 'tools' such as the iPhone (or any smartphone), laptops, iPads, tablets, etc. hadn't been invented. Sure, they're great, incredibly useful, and fun time-killers. But the way teenagers abuse them, and turn them into mini social control rooms is frankly awful."

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Teens: This is how social media affects your brain

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Teens: This is how social media affects your brain

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Myshira Palmer
4/28/2017
CRAAP Score- 47

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Keeping in touch is no longer about face to face, but instead screen to screen, highlighted by the fact that more than 1 billion people are using Facebook every day.

Social media has become second nature -- but what impact is this having on our brain?

Reward circuitry

In a recent study, researchers at the UCLA brain mapping center used an fMRI scanner to image the brains of 32 teenagers as they used a bespoke social media app resembling Instagram. By watching the activity inside different regions of the brain as the teens used the app, the team found certain regions became activated by "likes", with the brain's reward center becoming especially active.

"When teens learn that their own pictures have supposedly received a lot of likes, they show significantly greater activation in parts of the brain's reward circuitry," says lead author Lauren Sherman. "This is the same group of regions responding when we see pictures of a person we love or when we win money."

The teenagers were shown more than 140 images where 'likes' were believed to from their peers, but were in fact assigned by the research team.

Scans revealed that the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain's reward circuitry, was especially active when teens saw a large number of likes on their own photos, which could inspire them to use social media more often.

Peer influence

As part of the experiment, participants were also shown a range of "neutral" photos showing things like food and friends, and "risky" photos depicting cigarettes and alcohol. But the type of image had no impact on the number of "likes" given by the teens. they were instead more likely to 'like' the more popular photos, regardless of what they showed. This could lead to both a positive and negative influence from peers online.

Sherman believes these results could have important implications among this age group.

"Reward circuitry is thought to be particularly sensitive in adolescence," says Sherman, "It could be explaining, at least in part, why teens are such avid social media users."

Social learning

Adolescence is a period that is very important for social learning, which could explain why teens are often more tuned in to what's going on in their respective cultures. With the rise of social media, Sherman thinks we may even be learning to read likes and shares instead of facial expressions.

"Before, if you were having a face to face interaction everything is qualitative. You use someone's gestures or facial expressions, that sort of thing, to see how effective your message is," she says.

"Now if you go online, one of the ways that you gauge the effectiveness of your message is in the number of likes, favorites or retweets, and this is something that's really different and unique about online interaction."

However, the study may not be applicable to everyone, according to Dr. Iroise Dumontheil,at Birkbeck University.

"[The study] only has adolescents and so they can't really claim anything specific about whether it's adolescents who react to this differently compared to adults."

Changing the brain

Dumontheil does, however, concur that social media is affecting our brain, particularly its plasticity, which is the way the brain grows and changes after experiencing different things.

"Whenever you learn something new or you experience something, it's encoded in your brain, and it's encoded by subtle changes in the strength of connections between neurons," says Dumontheil.

For example, one study showed that the white matter in an adults' brains changed as they learned how to juggle over a period of several months. "They found that if you scan [the brains of] adults before they learn how to juggle, and then three months later, you can see changes in the brain structure," says Dumontheil.

Time spent on social media could, therefore, also cause the brain to change and grow.

"We might be a bit less good at reading subtle expressions on faces that are moving, but we might be much quicker at monitoring what's going on in a whole group of our friends," says Dumontheil.

So are these new skills a good or a bad thing? Neither, she says. "It's just a way we have of adapting to our environment."

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teens: this is how social media affects your brain - cnn

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Keeping in touch is no longer about face to face, but instead screen to screen, highlighted by the fact that more than 1 billion people are using Facebook every day. Social media has become second nature -- but what impact is this having on our brain?

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How Facebook Can Amplify Low Self-Esteem/Narcissism/Anxiety

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How Facebook Can Amplify Low Self-Esteem/Narcissism/Anxiety

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Myshira Palmer
4/28/2017
CRAAP Score- 45

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7 Ways Facebook Is Bad for Your Mental Health

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7 Ways Facebook Is Bad for Your Mental Health

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Myshira Palmer 4/28/2017
CRAAP Score- 50

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Facebook's meteoric rise in popularity suggests that it offers us something we've always wanted. It allows us to simultaneously keep in touch with long-lost cousin Annabelle in Baton Rouge, best friend Percival from the first grade at St. Mary's School, as well as 491 other assorted friends, relatives, and acquaintances-all at once, instantaneously, no trips to the post office necessary. With the click of a button we can see what Percival's cute little daughter had for breakfast this morning, or what Annabelle's pet dog wore to last year's Halloween party.

But like all benefits in life, Facebook comes with its psychological costs-many of them invisible. Indeed, a recent study found that heavy Facebook users experience decreases in subjective well-being over time (Kross et al., 2013). Below we review some research suggesting 7 ways that Facebook may be hurting you.

1. It can make you feel like your life isn't as cool as everyone else's. Social psychologist Leon Festinger observed that people are naturally inclined to engage in social comparison. To answer a question like "Am I doing better or worse than average?" you need to check out other people like you. Facebook is a quick, effortless way to engage in social comparison, but with even one glance through your News Feed you might see pictures of your friends enjoying a mouth-watering dinner at Chez Panisse, or perhaps winning the Professor of the Year award at Yale University. Indeed, a study by Chou and Edge (2012) found that chronic Facebook users tend to think that other people lead happier lives than their own, leading them to feel that life is less fair.

2. It can lead you to envy your friends' successes. Did cousin Annabelle announce a nice new promotion last month, a new car last week, and send a photo from her cruise vacation to Aruba this morning? Not only can Facebook make you feel like you aren't sharing in your friends' happiness, but it can also make you feel envious of their happy lives. Buxmann and Krasnova (2013) have found that seeing others' highlights on your News Feed can make you envious of friends' travels, successes, and appearances. Additional findings suggest that the negative psychological impact of passively following others on Facebook is driven by the feelings of envy that stem from passively skimming your News Feed.

3. It can lead to a sense of false consensus. Sit next to a friend while you each search for the same thing on Google. Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble (2012), can promise you won't see the same search results. Not only have your Internet searches grown more personalized, so have social networking sites. Facebook's sorting function places posts higher in your News Feed if they're from like-minded friends-which may distort your view of the world (Constine, 2012). This can lead you to believe that your favorite political candidate is a shoe-in for the upcoming election, even though many of your friends are saying otherwise...you just won't hear them.

4. It can keep you in touch with people you'd really rather forget. Want to know what your ex is up to? You can...and that might not be a good thing.Facebook stalking has made it harder to let go of past relationships. Does she seem as miserable as I am? Is that ambiguous post directed at me? Has she started dating that guy from trivia night? These questions might better remain unanswered; indeed, Marshall (2012) found that Facebook users who reported visiting their former partner's page experienced disrupted post-breakup emotional recovery and higher levels of distress. Even if you still run into your ex in daily life, the effects of online surveillance were significantly worse than those of offline contact.

5. It can make you jealous of your current partner. Facebook stalking doesn't only apply to your ex. Who is this Stacy LaRue, and why is she constantly "liking" my husband's Facebook posts? Krafsky and Krafsky, authors of Facebook and Your Marriage (2010), address many common concerns in relationships that stem from Facebook use. "Checking up on" your partner's page can often lead to jealousy and even unwarranted suspicion, particularly if your husband's exes frequently come into the picture. Krafsky and Krafsky recommend talking with your partner about behaviors that you both consider safe and trustworthy on Facebook, and setting boundaries where you don't feel comfortable.

6. It can reveal information you might not want to share with potential employers. Do you really want a potential employer to know about how drunk you got at last week's kegger...or the interesting wild night that followed with the girl in the blue bikini? Peluchette and Karl (2010) found that 40% of users mention alcohol use on their Facebook page, and 20% mention sexual activities. We often think these posts are safe from prying eyes, but that might not be the case. While 89% of jobseekers use social networking sites, 37% of potential employers do, as well-and are actively looking into their potential hires (Smith, 2013). If you're on the job market, make sure to check your privacy settings and restrict any risqué content to "Friends Only", if you don't wish to delete it entirely.

7. It can become addictive. Think society's most common addictive substances are coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol? Think again. The DSM-V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) includes a new diagnosis that has stirred controversy: a series of items gauging Internet Addiction. Since then, Facebook addiction has gathered attention from both popular media and empirical journals, leading to the creation of a Facebook addiction scale (Paddock, 2012; see below for items). To explore the seriousness of this addiction, Hofmann and colleagues (2012) randomly texted participants over the course of a week to ask what they most desired at that particular moment. They found that among their participants, social media use was craved even more than tobacco and alcohol.

Of course, the news isn't all that bad. Some research finds Facebook may decrease loneliness when used to keep up to date-and keep in touch with-others. Fenne Deters and Matthias Mehl (2012) randomly assigned participants to post more status updates than they typically did per week, and found that this led to increased feelings of social connectedness, and lower levels of loneliness. In the end, Facebook is probably a lot like other technological advances, such as the automobile - whether or not it hurts you or cousin Annabelle depends on where y'all drive, and how frequently y'all get behind the wheel.
Post coauthored by Jessica E. Bodford Related blogs: Self-evaluation via the internet: How to go viral: If you pursue happiness, you may find loneliness. Some sad facts about happiness. 6 rules of contagion. References How am I doing? Um, I'll check the internet.

Facebook Addiction Scale (Paddock, 2012)

1. You spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook or planning how to use it.

2. You feel an urge to use Facebook more and more.

3. You use Facebook in order to forget about personal problems.

4. You have tried to cut down on the use of Facebook without success.

5. You become restless or troubled if you are prohibited from using Facebook.

6. You use Facebook so much that it has had a negative impact on your job/studies.

Buxmann, P., & Krasnova, H. (2013, February). Envy on Facebook: A Hidden threat to users' life satisfaction. 11th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik. Leipzig, Germany: Wirtschaftsinformatik.

Broadbent, S. (2009). How the Internet enables intimacy. TED Talks. Retrieved from www.ted.com/talks/stefana_broadbent_how_the_internet_enables_intimacy.html

Chou, H. G., Edge, N. (2012). They are happier and having better lives than I am: the impact of using Facebook on perception toward others' lives. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.

Constine, J. (2012, November). Facebook explains the four ways it sorts the news feed and insists average page reach didn't decrease. Tech Crunch. Retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/16/facebook-page-reach/

Deters, F. G. & Mehl, M. R. (2012). Does posting Facebook status updates increase or decrease loneliness? An Online social networking experiment. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4(5), 579-586.

Hofmann, W., Vohs, K. D., & Baumeister, R. F. (2012). What people desire, feel conflicted about, and try to resist in everyday life. Psychological Science, 23(6), 582-588.

Krafsky, K. J. & Krafsky, K. (2010). Facebook and Your Marriage. Maple Valley, WA: Turn the Tide Resource Group, LLC.

Kross, E., Verduyn, P., Demiralp, E., Park, J., Lee, D. S., Lin, N., & Ybarra, O. (2013). Facebook use predicts declines in subjective well-being in young adults. PloS one, 8(8), e69841.

Marshall, T. C. (2012). Facebook surveillance of former romantic partners: associations with postbreakup recovery and personal growth. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 15(10), 521-526.

Paddock. C. (2012, May). Facebook addiction: New psychological scale. Medical News Today. Retrieved from http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/245251.php

Peluchette, J., & Karl, K. (2010). Examining students' intended image on Facebook: 'What were they thinking?!'. Journal Of Education For Business, 85(1), 30-37. doi:10.1080/08832320903217606

Smith, J. (2013, April). How social media can help (or hurt) you in your job search. Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/04/16/how-social-media-c...

Wood, J. V., Forest, A. L., & Machado, D. (2014, February). Social networking is a double-edged sword: Low self-esteem and self-disclosure on Facebook. Oral presentation delivered at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Austin, TX: The Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

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7 Ways Facebook Is Bad for Your Mental Health

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Facebook's meteoric rise in popularity suggests that it offers us something we've always wanted. But like all benefits in life, Facebook comes with its psychological costs-many of them invisible. We review research suggesting 7 ways that Facebook may be hurting you. (coauthored by Jessica E. Bodford)

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Tanika Tyler
4/28
CRAAP Score - 49

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Tanika Tyler
4/28
CRAAP Score - 46

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Image credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture

Steven Liu (2015, May). "Social Media and Depression." CYS.

Summary

Does social media play a part in youth depression? This generation of teenagers is the first to grow up in the U.S. without ever having seen a world without texting, social media, and other similar forms of online communications. So much of their social reality occurrs over venues like Facebook or Snapchat, and their social world is defined by an unending connection to one another throughout the day albeit a connection without physical or auditory proximity. According to a recent poll, 75% of teenagers own cell phones and most use them for texting or social media, 22% of them accessing social media sites more than 10 times a day and more than half accessing them more than once a day. With this trend seeming to usurp traditional in-person relationships, does this new reality contribute to young people becoming depressed?
Physiological
With this question in mind, let us survey some of the research that had been done by practitioners and students of mental health. There seem to be several factors pointing to a connection between social media and depression.

Late night usage of technology with light-emitting screens impacts quality of sleep. Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital found that an extended amount of activity in front of a florescent light four hours before bed resulted in difficulty falling asleep, less REM sleep, and grogginess the next day, even after a full night of sleep. The UV spectrum of screens was found to inhibit the release of melatonin, which the body uses to regulate sleep (Arianne Cohen, 2015, Mar., " 6 physical effects of binge-watching TV," Fox News).

While this effect is not due to social media alone, studies with teenagers find that many of them did use their devices close to bed time. And true to the research, 21% of the teenagers we polled in a survey reported difficulty sleeping after using social media. Since the quantity and quality of sleep is important for adolescent development, we would expect this kind of social media usage to negatively affect youth cognitively.
Emotional
Additionally, frequent use of handheld devices and social media may be correlated with difficulty concentrating. In a survey we conducted among 30 respondents, 30% of the youth reported concentration problems immediately after using social media. This factor too may be related to the sleep deprivation that sometimes comes with night-time social media consumption.

In a University of Missouri study, Facebook use was tied to depression, depending on how users used the site. Particularly, "surveillance use" of the social media site, where users checked up on how their friends were doing and compared what they saw to their own lives, tended to produce feelings of depression. Users who view Facebook in this way often "sized up their accomplishments against others", producing envy that their vacations, possessions, or relationships could not match up to what their friends posted. An important truth to realize for those who experience this kind of envy, however, is that the image seen on a user's social media presence is precisely that: an image that the user customizes to present the positive report of him or herself that the user desires other users to believe (Nathan Hurst, 2015, Feb., " If Facebook Use Causes Envy, Depression Could Follow," Missouri University News). A similar study done at the University of Houston also found that this comparison behavior on social media was linked to more feelings of loneliness and isolation (Melissa Carroll, 2015, Apr., " Facebook use linked to depressive symptoms ").
Analysis
In addition, cyber-bullying is a recent phenomenon that puts children in emotional and social danger. Smartphones allow for constant unsupervised access to the internet and communities where youth can be exploited or defamed by fellow youth via text or post. According to the American College of Pediatricians, "over half of adolescents state they have been bullied online and over 25 percent of adolescents state they have been bullied repeatedly through internet or on cell phones. However, only 1 in 10 teens will tell a parent about the bullying" (American College of Pediatricians, 2014 Feb., " The Media, Children, and Adolescents"). According to child psychotherapist Julie Lynn Evans, there has been an explosion of mental health issues since the turn of the century, including rises in the numbers of depression, anorexia, and cutting, all having "something to do with computer, the internet and the smartphone" (Peter Stanford, " Are smartphones making our children mentally ill? " Telegraph). The lack of traditional adult role-modeling and presence in this new societal frontier creates an unsafe peer space where all these mental health problems can thrive before adults are aware of the problems.
Notes on Additional Surveys for this Research
From the available studies and data, there seems to be enough evidence to establish that social media can contribute to depression. Social media usage is bound up with how we view and portray ourselves, in other words, it affects our sense of identity. While depression is not only emotional and spiritual, experience working with youth shows that depression often comes with a lowered sense of self-esteem and self-efficacy. When youth base their identity on what others perceive, they develop a twisted version of their own worth, value, and capacity to be loved. This inaccurate view of self leaves teens vulnerable to things like Facebook envy and depression and cyber bullying. It causes them to look to the power of social media to heal our hurts and provide affirmation when they post our authentic or inauthentic selves for the world to see. And it causes them to experience frustration and disappointment when that power lets them down.

The subjects were Chinese-Americans and Caucasians in the urban context, both middle- and high-school students. They were polled in an after school program at Boston Chinese Evangelical Church, Chinese Gospel Church of Greater Lowell, and Charlton Baptist but most of the respondents were from non-churched backgrounds.

The information we obtained led to only a few correlations with depression symptoms, but there were many findings that could be peripherally symptomatic or contributive.

One notable finding was a big difference in who obtained social-media capable devices at different points in their lives. I had expected that youth in the urban, low-income, immigrant context might obtain devices later, but in fact, they were the earliest adopters of smart-phones or other similar devices. Almost all the BCEC youth got their devices before the age of 12! By contrast Chinese Gospel Church of Greater Lowell, a suburban Chinese church, where most youth are from Christian families, had youth receiving their devices in the 13-14 age bracket. In the rural Caucasian church, Charlton Baptist, the youth obtained devices after the age of 14. This is significant, as it has been well documented that Asian American youth have higher rates of depression and suicide risk.
Conclusions
Finally, my analysis of the teenagers' quantity of time spent with parents yielded some results. Out of the 13 who reported negative effects with social media (low concentration, sleep difficulty, anger, anxiety appetite), only one student had spent more than 2 trips or extended times with his or her parents in the past 12 months. Most of the others had been on 0 or 1 trip/family time. There was not enough of a connection to establish a correlation, however, since there also six youth who did not experience negative effects while also having had 0 family trips.

Social media is a powerful force in our culture. My work with teenagers has shown me that social media's power is amplified when parents are not able to expend the in-person relational energy to balance the virtual relational allure of sites like Facebook. It is important for youth workers to help parents understand this important part of their teenagers' social world. One practical application is offering workshops where parents can be educated about responsible management of their children' s social media exposure, and also be able to identify signs that somebody is heading toward social media depression.

It is important for youth workers to have a presence on social media. This helps them to understand the social world of youth, but also to be able to look out for warning signs or risk indicators that would otherwise remain invisible, and to respond or counsel accordingly. In addition, youth workers should find a way to include media education to help young consumers be self-aware about messages that are being fed to them without their knowledge.

Relationally, social media can never make up for in-person relationships. Intimacy in relationships was designed with physical proximity in mind, where we can hear, touch, and see one another. We should continue to foster real-life relational communities and to challenge our own community when we follow too much in the direction of the world when it comes to valuing shallow but voluminous social media "friends" over the few but deep relationships we can have in person.

Finally, we need to understand that though there are risks associated with social media, the answer is not always to completely disconnect. Engaging with culture in a healthy, balanced way requires both creativity and wisdom.

Steven Liu, May 2015

© 2018 CYS

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Social Media and Depression - Culture and Youth Studies

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Image credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture Steven Liu (2015, May). "Social Media and Depression." CYS. Does social media play a part in youth depression? This generation of teenagers is the first to grow up in the U.S. without ever having seen a world without texting, social media, and other similar forms of online communications.

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USA Today: Social Media research raises privacy and ethnic issu

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USA Today: Social Media research raises privacy and ethnic issu

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Fatima McKinney
April 27th, 2017
CRAAP Score: 49

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Vast amounts of information collected by private companies, including Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter, give new insight into all aspects of everyday life.

Every time you search online for the best restaurant deal, share good news or bad with your Facebook friends, or tweet to your followers, your "audience" is bigger than you know.

That's because your every online move leaves cyber footprints that are rapidly becoming fodder for research without you ever realizing it. Using social media for academic research is accelerating and raising ethical concerns along the way, as vast amounts of information collected by private companies - including Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter - are giving new insight into all aspects of everyday life.

Just consider that mining online communication has already helped Microsoft identify women at risk of postpartum depression. It's also allowed Facebook to study how parents and kids interact. The possibilities appear limited only by the imagination of the researchers, which is why such issues were in the spotlight recently at a meeting of social and personality psychologists. They gathered to concentrate on what's ahead amid concerns that some users of these sites may not like that their behavior is under the microscope. Even as this mining of huge digital data sets of collective behavior is on the rise, the word "caution" is coming from all sides.

"Be aware it is a space that is watched," says social psychologist Ilka Gleibs, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics in London, whose study about social networking sites for research field studies has been drawing attention since it went online in January in the journal Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy.
RELATED: Facebook posts 'contagious,' research suggests
"Facebook is transformed from a public space to a behavioral laboratory," says the study, which cites a Harvard-based research project of 1,700 college-based Facebook users in which it became possible to "deanonymize parts of the data set," or cross-reference anonymous data to make student identification possible.

"Sometimes it's easier than we think to identify this data," she says. "I'm not saying no one should ever do this kind of research, but I'm saying we should be more cautious when we use this data."

Some of Facebook's research on user behavior found that 71% of people drafted at least one post that they never posted. Another analyzed 400,000 posts and found that children's communication with parents decreases in frequency from age 13 but then rises when they move out.

Facebook data scientist Adam Kramer, of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company, outlined what the company is learning as part of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology meeting in Austin. Its president, social psychologist James Pennebaker, of the University of Texas-Austin, says privacy is a big issue for the research world.

"Facebook especially, and Microsoft, is scared to death about privacy issues," he says. "A bunch of researchers have access to everybody's posts and Facebook is built on what's yours is private. They are struggling with the problem the same way as the scientific community."

Attorney and privacy expert Parry Aftab, of New York City - a member of Facebook's Safety Advisory Board - suggests that users shouldn't worry because the very large companies such as Twitter, Google, Microsoft and Facebook have privacy policies for users.

"The sites will never provide personally identifiable information unless they have the consent of the users. And there is legal recourse if they're using it in any other way," she says.

But Facebook aficionados might recall that the company has had to backtrack on its privacy policies - more than once. Indeed, a University of Vienna study published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, found almost half of Facebook users who left the site said it was over privacy concerns.

Caution isn't only about those on such sites, says J.B. Michel, of Brooklyn, N.Y., a visiting researcher at Harvard University and co-author of Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture, published in December.

Researchers who use these large sets of data "need to be especially cautious about the quality of the data and the error it can produce."

"It's easier to think you have found something," he says. "There are fewer data errors. But it's easy to misinterpret these data."

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1ik0UPt

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Social media research raises privacy and ethics issues

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Vast amounts of information collected by private companies, including Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter, give new insight into all aspects of everyday life. Every time you search online for the best restaurant deal, share good news or bad with your Facebook friends, or tweet to your followers, your "audience" is bigger than you know.

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By:T'Asia Porter
4/27
CRAAP Score-47

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Schools throughout New York are preparing to put a new curriculum in place that will teach students civility and tolerance, to comply with new legislation intended to cut down on bullying.

The 2010 legislation, called the Dignity for All Students Act, goes into effect July 1. It will require school districts to report instances of bullying to the state Education Department, and also mandates that schools adopt programs to counter bullying.

It is one of several laws passed throughout the nation to try to keep children from bullying each other. But one New York legislator thinks all those laws on the book do not do enough to combat cyberbullying, an issue of growing concern as more children communicate through the Internet and texting.

State Senator Jeffrey D. Klein, a Democrat who represents part of the Bronx and Westchester, introduced a bill in January to raise the punishment for some cases of cyberbullying to a felony with prison time if the threatening messages are sent by someone on school grounds.

With the help of state prosecutors, he crafted the bill to make cyberbullying eligible for prosecution as a hate crime. The Senate bill has 17 co-sponsors, and Mr. Klein said the bill was one of his top priorities for the spring session.

"The Constitution is very clear," Mr. Klein said in a phone interview. "Free speech ends when you harm someone else. Words can kill."

But critics argue that criminalizing cyberbullying is not the answer. They say education programs like those mandated by the Dignity Act are more likely to have an impact on young people.

Cy Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, whose office would prosecute students under such a law, said: "We don't think legislation is the best way to deal with cyber-bullying. When we take the opportunity to have kids talk to us and listen to us, we make more progress than the police."

Justin Patchin, co-director of the national Cyberbullying Research Center and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, said there were better alternatives to criminalizing cyberbullying. Schools should use loss of extracurricular activities, they could assign cyberbullying research projects, or they could mandate detention and family partnership programs to teach students about cyber harassment, he said.

"We know from decades of research that teens are not deterred by threat of formal punishment," said Dr. Patchin, who has researched cyberbullying for more than 10 years. "They are more likely to be deterred by relationships they care about within the schools and what their friends think."

Hanni Fakhoury, staff lawyer for the Electronic Freedom Foundation, said the Klein bill might be going too far. "If you hurt a 15-year-old's feelings really badly, do you go to jail for that?" Mr. Fakhoury asked.

Mr. Klein defended the measure.

"When we create a law, it isn't an automatic conviction," Mr. Klein said. "It's up to a prosecutor to make a good case."

Johanna Miller, assistant advocacy director for the New York Civil Liberties Union, which helped to push the passage of the Dignity Act, said the Klein bill would short-circuit schools' new programs by dragging children into the criminal system, instead of educating them.

The Dignity Act, Ms. Miller said, needs time to work. Most schools won't implement new measures until next school year, she said.

"The Dignity Act is so promising," Ms. Miller said. "There's no limit on the method of bullying. It applies to any kind of communication that creates a hostile environment for students."

In preparation for the act, a group of 34 student advocacy groups, including the bus drivers' union and the principals' union, worked to develop curriculum for schools.

In the aftermath of some high-profile cases of children bullying each other, many states have adopted legislation to try to counter bullying. Forty states have adopted measures to specifically address cyberbullying or electronic harassment, according to the Cyberbullying Research Center. The researchers define cyberbullying as persistent electronic harassment over the Internet or mobile phones.

New York is among nine states that do not have comprehensive laws that deal specifically with electronic harassment, but it has at least a dozen laws to address bullying, including two new ones that apply to youths. One is the Dignity Act. The other one is the Cyber-Crime Youth Rescue Act, which created both an educational and punishment alternative for some teenagers charged with sexting -- sending inappropriate photo or word texts about sex -- or cyberbullying.

Mr. Patchin of the Cyberbullying Research Center said that 11 states have made cyberbullying misdemeanors. New York's proposed legislation, if it passes, would make the state only one of two, along with Missouri, that make some cyber-bullying cases felonies.

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Schools throughout New York are preparing to put a new curriculum in place that will teach students civility and tolerance, to comply with new legislation intended to cut down on bullying. The 2010 legislation, called the Dignity for All Students Act, goes into effect July 1.

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By:T'Asia Porter
4/27
CRAAP Score-45

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We have received numerous requests from high school students and teachers over the last several weeks for information about whether or not there should be a criminal law to cover cyberbullying. It seems that this is a national high school debate topic this year. Since we have discussed this issue quite a bit on this blog, I wanted to point interested readers (and debaters) to information that might help them determine for themselves a position on this question. First, I encourage anyone interested in this topic to review the following blogs posted by us over the last couple of years:

Most Cyberbullying Cases Aren't Criminal (10-12-2010)

Cyberbullying Laws and School Policy: A Blessing or Curse? (9-28-2010)

The Current State of Cyberbullying Laws (8-3-2010)

Do We Need Cyberbullying Legislation? (9-6-2009)

Cyberbullying Legislation: Clarification of My Position and Invitation to Participate (5-19-2009)

Cyberbullying Legislation (5-7-2009)

Second, we also have a few fact sheets that could provide valuable information, including the following:

Cyberbullying Fact Sheet: Identification, Prevention, and Response (a good primer on the issues)
Cyberbullying Fact Sheet: A Brief Review of Relevant Legal and Policy Issues State Cyberbullying Laws: A Brief Review of State Cyberbullying Laws and Policies
Take some time to explore the many other resources on our site (and others), to develop an informed perspective about cyberbullying and appropriate responses. Research-based legislation is just one prong of a multi-pronged approach. And in our view a criminal sanction should be reserved for only the most serious of cases. As we point out in the resources above, many states already have existing statutes on the books that would apply to the most egregious forms of electronic harassment. So do we need a new law? That is the question.

Best of luck with the debate - I am sure a lot of valuable information will come from this important dialog.

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The Great Debate: Should Cyberbullying be a Criminal Offense?

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We have received numerous requests from high school students and teachers over the last several weeks for information about whether or not there should be a criminal law to cover cyberbullying. It seems that this is a national high school debate topic this year.

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CNN: Teens- This is how social media affects your brain.

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CNN: Teens- This is how social media affects your brain.

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Fatima McKinney
April 27th, 2017
CRAAP Score- 49

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Keeping in touch is no longer about face to face, but instead screen to screen, highlighted by the fact that more than 1 billion people are using Facebook every day.

Social media has become second nature -- but what impact is this having on our brain?

Reward circuitry

In a recent study, researchers at the UCLA brain mapping center used an fMRI scanner to image the brains of 32 teenagers as they used a bespoke social media app resembling Instagram. By watching the activity inside different regions of the brain as the teens used the app, the team found certain regions became activated by "likes", with the brain's reward center becoming especially active.

"When teens learn that their own pictures have supposedly received a lot of likes, they show significantly greater activation in parts of the brain's reward circuitry," says lead author Lauren Sherman. "This is the same group of regions responding when we see pictures of a person we love or when we win money."

The teenagers were shown more than 140 images where 'likes' were believed to from their peers, but were in fact assigned by the research team.

Scans revealed that the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain's reward circuitry, was especially active when teens saw a large number of likes on their own photos, which could inspire them to use social media more often.

Peer influence

As part of the experiment, participants were also shown a range of "neutral" photos showing things like food and friends, and "risky" photos depicting cigarettes and alcohol. But the type of image had no impact on the number of "likes" given by the teens. they were instead more likely to 'like' the more popular photos, regardless of what they showed. This could lead to both a positive and negative influence from peers online.

Sherman believes these results could have important implications among this age group.

"Reward circuitry is thought to be particularly sensitive in adolescence," says Sherman, "It could be explaining, at least in part, why teens are such avid social media users."

Social learning

Adolescence is a period that is very important for social learning, which could explain why teens are often more tuned in to what's going on in their respective cultures. With the rise of social media, Sherman thinks we may even be learning to read likes and shares instead of facial expressions.

"Before, if you were having a face to face interaction everything is qualitative. You use someone's gestures or facial expressions, that sort of thing, to see how effective your message is," she says.

"Now if you go online, one of the ways that you gauge the effectiveness of your message is in the number of likes, favorites or retweets, and this is something that's really different and unique about online interaction."

However, the study may not be applicable to everyone, according to Dr. Iroise Dumontheil,at Birkbeck University.

"[The study] only has adolescents and so they can't really claim anything specific about whether it's adolescents who react to this differently compared to adults."

Changing the brain

Dumontheil does, however, concur that social media is affecting our brain, particularly its plasticity, which is the way the brain grows and changes after experiencing different things.

"Whenever you learn something new or you experience something, it's encoded in your brain, and it's encoded by subtle changes in the strength of connections between neurons," says Dumontheil.

For example, one study showed that the white matter in an adults' brains changed as they learned how to juggle over a period of several months. "They found that if you scan [the brains of] adults before they learn how to juggle, and then three months later, you can see changes in the brain structure," says Dumontheil.

Time spent on social media could, therefore, also cause the brain to change and grow.

"We might be a bit less good at reading subtle expressions on faces that are moving, but we might be much quicker at monitoring what's going on in a whole group of our friends," says Dumontheil.

So are these new skills a good or a bad thing? Neither, she says. "It's just a way we have of adapting to our environment."

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teens: this is how social media affects your brain - cnn

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Keeping in touch is no longer about face to face, but instead screen to screen, highlighted by the fact that more than 1 billion people are using Facebook every day. Social media has become second nature -- but what impact is this having on our brain?

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Teen Cyberbullying and Social Media use On the Rise 

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Teen Cyberbullying and Social Media use On the Rise 

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4/21
CRAAP Score-49

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With high online activity, teens either witness cyberbullying, are a victim, or become a perpetrator. Cyberbullying is on the rise, impacting many lives.

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Social Media Bullying has Become a erious Problem.

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Social Media Bullying has Become a erious Problem.

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4/21
CRAAP Score- 4

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Facebook is the worst social network for bullying with 19-year-old BOYS the most common victimsBy: Myshira Palmer

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Facebook is the worst social network for bullying with 19-year-old BOYS the most common victimsBy: Myshira Palmer

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4/21
CRAAP Score- 45

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Facebook is the worst social network for bullying with 19-year-old BOYS the most common victims

Leading social network used to target teenagers in 87 per cent of reported cases of cyber-bullying

Around one-fifth of youngsters were picked on by trolls on Twitter, according to a report

The most frequently victimised were 19-year-old males

Facebook is the worst social networking site for internet trolling, and bullying is now more prevalent online than anywhere else, a study has suggested.

Some 87 per cent of teenagers who reported cyber abuse said they were targeted on Mark Zuckerberg's site, while around one-fifth of youngsters were picked on by Twitter trolls, the report showed.

Those most frequently victimised were 19-year-old boys.

According to the report, 49 per cent of those targeted by bullies were victimised off-line, while 65 per cent of teenagers were subjected to abuse in cyberspace.

Only 37 per cent of those who had experienced trolling ever reported it to the social network where it took place, the report found.

Emma-Jane Cross, CEO and founder of the charity BeatBullying, said many young people were suffering in silence.

'Bullying both on and off-line continues to be a serious problem for a huge number of teenagers and we cannot ignore its often devastating and tragic effects,' she said.

'We work with hundreds of young people being cyber-bullied or trolled so badly that it can lead to depression, truancy, self-harm, or even force them to contemplate or attempt suicide.'

Media psychologist Arthur Cassidy said online bullying could have a 'massive impact' on older male teenagers.

'Suicide rates are particularly high amongst this demographic, so it's worrying to hear that teenagers on the whole are choosing to deal with internet abuse themselves rather than speaking to parents or teachers for help,' he said.

'Whilst some might expect girls to be more vulnerable online, this study shows that older boys are more at risk from trolling and cyber-bullying.

'Many boys feel under pressure to demonstrate their bravado, particularly on the web, but this attitude and male deficiency in coping strategies can make them more vulnerable and open to trolling.'

The study, for internet site knowthenet.org.uk, found a number of social networking sites had become 'popular forums' for trolls.

Some 13 per cent of the 13 to 19-year-olds consulted claimed they were targeted on BlackBerry Messenger, 8 per cent said they were picked on by trolls on Bebo and 4 per cent said they were victimised on Whatsapp.

Fewer than one in five (17 per cent) teens said their first reaction would be to tell a parent and only 1 per cent of those surveyed said their initial response would be to inform a teacher.

Around 34 per cent of those who were picked on by trolls said their experiences lasted more than a month.

Knowthenet, which released the study, has now launched a 'trolling hub' offering advice on how to deal with online bullying.

This can be found at www.knowthenet.org.uk/trolling .

Opinium Research consulted more than 2,000 teenagers for the study.

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Facebook is the worst social network for bullying with 19-year-old BOYS the most common victims

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Leading social network used to target teenagers in 87 per cent of reported cases of cyber-bullying Around one-fifth of youngsters were picked on by trolls on Twitter, according to a report The most frequently victimised were 19-year-old males Facebook is the worst social networking site for internet trolling, and bullying is now more prevalent online than anywhere else, a study has suggested.

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BY: Myshira Palmer
4/21
CRAAP Score- 40

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Social media has changed the way people interact. We can now remain in constant contact with hundreds of so-called friends, even ones we rarely see in person.

The impact of social media on society has prompted researchers to investigate whether its effect is positive or negative. The findings are mixed, showing both benefits and downsides to the use of social media sites. One area of focus in these studies is the effect of social media on mental health.

Recent research has shown that using social networking sites, namely Facebook, can increase people's stress levels, produce anxiety and negatively affect a person's sense of self. Using these sites might even cause a person to develop a mental health disorder or exacerbate an existing one. Social media even has the power to quickly spread moods around the world.

Social media sites provide places where people can create the face they want the world to see. Creating a profile allows a person to decide exactly what image to present to others. For some people, this can lead to a near-obsession. This could reflect a person's self-esteem, according to one study.

This study looked into the association between a person's self-esteem and how much time he or she spent on maintaining his or her profile, specifically what actions they performed to create their online persona. Those with lower self-esteem cared more about what others had posted about them on Facebook and were more likely to remove certain posts to ensure their profile remained a reflection of the image they wanted to portray. They might even scour Facebook and other networking sites to ensure that there are no negative remarks or unflattering photos. Conversely, those with high self-esteem spend time creating their own profile, adding pictures and information about themselves to show the world their ultimate persona.

Another study showed that Facebook increases people's anxiety levels by making them feel inadequate and generating excess worry and stress. Social media provides constant updates. This motivates many people to continually check their status and newsfeed on mobile devices. Some people feel a constant impulse to check for updates, only feeling relief when they turn off the mobile device. In this study, over half of the respondents felt uneasy when they were unable to access their social media and email accounts.

Additionally, two-thirds had difficulty sleeping due to anxiety and other negative emotions after they had used the sites. The constant updates also led many respondents to frequently compare themselves to others, leading to feelings of inadequacy. This anxiety and worry creates chronic stress that could lead to health problems, including mental health issues.

Facebook also can increase the amount of social anxiety a person has upon meeting someone for the first time, according to another recent study. Prior to this study, experts hypothesized that for those with social anxiety, looking at a person's Facebook or other social media profile prior to meeting could help alleviate some of their feelings of nervousness. Reviewing someone's social media profile is a way to get to know someone prior to meeting them. Other studies have shown that people with social anxiety prefer communicating with people via the Internet rather than in person, so it would seem as though it would be an ideal way to initiate relationships.

A team of researchers performed an experiment to see whether reviewing a person's Facebook profile before picking a person out of a picture would decrease anxiety levels. The researchers looked at the social anxiety levels of 26 female students between the ages of 18 and 20 using the Interaction Anxiousness Scale (IAS).

The participants had to interact with another student in one of four randomly assigned conditions while their skin response (which shows the body's psychological arousal) was measured by electrodes on their ring and index finger. The conditions included Facebook only (memorizing student's face from the profile page only), face-to-face only (a participant studied the student's face in the same room), face-to-face and Facebook (study the Facebook photos and then meeting the person), and in person to Facebook (meeting a person face-to-face and then having to find their picture on Facebook). After being introduced to the other person, in one of these four manners they had to identify and circle the student in four different group pictures.

The researchers found that the participants who were first exposed to another student via Facebook and then had to meet them in person had increased psychological arousal, which means that they were more anxious. The researchers are not completely sure why this might be the case. They postulate that this might be due to the participants making comparisons between the other students and themselves when reviewing the Facebook profile. The participants may also have felt safer at first, but then became nervous knowing they had to meet the person in real life because there was already a basis of knowledge about the person.

The study was limited, as it did not reflect real-world situations and only included encounters with the same sex. Therefore, more study is needed.

Facebook also has the power to affect one's mood and even spread that mood globally, according to a recent study. Researchers focused on weather patterns and their effect on a person's mood. They found that when it rained in one location, making people feel gloomier and subsequently posting negative comments, it caused an increase in bad moods of people who were friends with those people on Facebook but lived farther away, in places where it was not raining.

Likewise, people whose friends posted cheery status updates tended also to have a more positive mood, at least reflected by their status posts. The researchers found that for every negative post, there were an extra 1.29 negative posts than normal in that person's social network. Happy posts had an even stronger effect, with every upbeat statement causing an extra 1.75 positive posts in the social network. It should be noted some of these researchers were Facebook employees.

Another study found that Facebook actually can make people miserable. Researchers for this study looked at 82 young, frequent Facebook users, 53 female and 29 males. They were sent text messages with links to an online survey that asked how they felt, whether they were worried, if they felt lonely, how often they have used Facebook, and how often they interacted directly with people.

The researchers found that when the participants increased their Facebook use, their state of well-being declined, while those who increased the amount of time they spent with people face to face had an increased sense of well-being. There was no indication that people used Facebook more when they already felt depressed or that there was a link between loneliness and Facebook; these were both independent predictors.

These are just a sampling of the studies on the negative effects of social media sites on users. Although they can cause problems, these sites also have been shown to have positive effects on people. It can help psychologists monitor the mental health of patients, spread awareness about issues (including mental health disorders), connect people with one another, and make the world a little smaller.

Although there are many benefits, it is important to remember the possible downsides of social media sites and their use in order to help people who are vulnerable to mental health problems, such as anxiety disorder or depression, to not develop or exacerbate existing problems due to use. The best way for anyone to take advantage of the benefits of these sites while minimizing the downsides is to moderate his or her use and maintain a level of detachment.

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Social media has changed the way people interact. We can now remain in constant contact with hundreds of so-called friends, even ones we rarely see in person. The impact of social media on society has prompted researchers to investigate whether its effect is positive or negative.

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Effects of Media on Teens: A Look at the Research

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Effects of Media on Teens: A Look at the Research

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By: Tanika Tyler
4/21
CRAAP Score- 47

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By Alison Burkhardt and Daniel White Hodge
May 1, 2012

We know there is a lot of research on how media affects adolescents, but many of these whitepapers are only available via academic libraries. We decided to gather some useful nuggets of information that cross cultural and socioeconomic boundaries. Listed below are some important points, followed by questions for discussion and our list of references for this information.

American media and culture significantly impacts media and culture around the globe, as well as how teenagers view beauty.

In a 2009 Good Morning America recreation of the 1940s study by Kenneth and Mamie Clark which asked black children to choose which baby doll they prefer (black or white), 47% of the children stated the white baby doll was the prettiest, reinforcing that ideals on beauty are shaped at an early age. (AHUJA, 2009)

In another example, Thai teenage females are beginning to view Asian teenage males as attractive, due to the "Bieberization" of Korean pop singers, as opposed to holding them to the oft-held Western standard of beauty. (Siriyuvasak & Hyunjoon, 2007)

Mass media gives indicators to young people about what is considered "normal" and "not-normal," reinforcing stereotypes and teaching young people how they should view themselves and others around them. (Orange & George, 2000)

"When [journalists] report what is normal, they also make an implicit statement about what is abnormal. If they favor the old or new, and if they imply what they consider normal should be considered normal, they convey preferences - individual, institutional, and societal - in the news they report ((Gans, 1979) as cited in Johnson, 1991).

In studies of media from around the country, there are disproportionately higher reported instances of minorities shown in a negative light victimizing Caucasians. (Johnson, 1991)

Media has different effects on adolescents based on their time spent engaging with the media.

Low income families spend more money on television programming than on hobbies, and young people in these homes watch far more hours of television than those of higher income homes where more money is spent on hobbies. Orange and George correlate the academic gap by low income African American students with the higher rate of television/media usage. (Orange & George, 2000)

The more exposure to unrealistic violence in media (e.g. games, television, movies), the higher the likelihood for aggression or violence in young people.

Realistic violence is defined as showing punishments for violent actions and displaying the emotional and physical pain associated with violence, and the majority of youth-targeted media (including mainstream blockbusters) do not qualify as realistic violence.

Most media targeting youth show a hero acting aggressively in the name of the greater good. These consistent unrealistic portrayals shown to young people, with little to no exposure to realistic violence, can result in apathy towards violent acts. "Typically a hero violently and justifiably defeats a villain. As Bandura (1986) states, when aggressive behavior is modeled by someone who is powerful and attractive to youth, learning is very likely to follow. In contrast, Kremar and Valkenburg (1999) tell us that youth with a history of watching realistically portrayed violence (such as that shown in the program Cops) are less likely to accept the use of justified violence. (As cited in Kirsch, 2012, p. 207)

Children's programming has far more violence than any other regularly scheduled programming.

"... for every four violence acts on prime time television, 32 violent acts occur on children's programs every hour." The report also states that violent characters are found in 56% of children's programs, compared to 34% of prime time programs. Characters who are victims of violence are found in 74% of children's programs, compared to 34% of prime time programs. Finally, characters that commit crimes or are victims of crime are found in 79% of children's programs, compared to 47% in prime time. (Orange & George, 2000)

Music and music video choice by aggressive teens may be a means to develop their identity.

Most research does not show indicators that teens who watch aggressive music videos or listen to aggressive lyrics are, or will become, aggressive. Some research suggests that teens who choose music with aggressive lyrics/videos choose it because they see it as a reflection of themselves, rather than the music influencing them to be aggressive. As many aggressive teens are perhaps labeled as anti-social or defiant, these music/music video choices can help them identify with a social group.

Carpentier, Knoblock, and Zillmann (2003) contend that some youth prefer this music because the lyrics and pictures mirror their aggressive lifestyle. Gardstrom (1999) supports this contention, with a study that shows juvenile delinquents report their choice of music is a reflection of their lifestyle more than a cause of it. (As cited in Kirsch, 2012, p 190)

Carpentier and colleagues (2003) contend that teenagers high in aggressive behavior and rebellion are attracted to "defiant, antisocial music (and more so than are other adolescents) in an attempt to define their social identities." (As cited in Kirsch, 2012, p190)

Excessive media viewing alters the way an adolescent's brain functions.

"Healy (1990) contended that intensive or excessive [media] viewing can affect a child's brain and the development of creativity and intelligence by: a) reducing stimulation of parts of the brain that are critical for the development of language, reading and analytic thinking, b) diminishing mental ability and attention, and c) discouraging the development of executive systems needed for regulating attention organization and motivation." (Orange & George, 2000)

Aggression may or may not result in continuing aggression as adults.

Many facets of development include times of rebellion or aggression as children grow and learn boundaries. Aggression coupled with other environmental and behavioral factors can result in a young person moving beyond aggression into violent behaviors, but not always. There is no formula to predict a young person's development with aggression. (Kirsch, 2012)

But for those that continue to be aggressive, Kokko, Pulkkinen, Huesmann, Dubow & Boxer note that "Aggressive youth are more likely to become aggressive adults and may remain that way for the next 30 to 40 years. (As cited in Kirsch, 2012, p. 27)

Social media and online gaming groups do not necessarily produce a false sense of friendship.

Valkenburg, Peter & Schouten (2006) indicate in their research that "it is the quality of the relationships (as measured by the tone of the [positive or negative] feedback) and not the quantity of "friends" that influence adolescents' feeling about their social selves." (As cited in Kirsch, 2012, p 245)

Conclusions and Application

This is a small sample of the research out there on how media affects adolescents. All research has room for error, and should be read knowing that there are always exceptions. It's also important to consider the sample used for the research to determine if the findings are specific to a region or people group. That said, we wanted to give you some information that might help you and your team better understand how the media your teenagers are engaging with affects their abilities to learn, grow, and relate in today's society.

We encourage you to gather your students and/or leadership teams and use the following discussion points:

1. What are your students viewing and how might it be affecting them? For that matter, what are you viewing and how might it affect you?

2. To avoid a "Christ against culture" stance/ethos, how do we deal with misogyny, sexism, and degrading lyrics/messages within videos toward women? Particularly women of color? How do you begin to get into the conversation with your students?

3. How might relationships online turn into healthy ones in "real life?" How does that affect the way you do ministry?

4. To take this a step further, how does race affect this? For example, most "Heroes" are White heterosexual males. What might that say to a Black gay teen? How might that affect Latinas playing video games?

Works Cited

AHUJA, G. (2009, March 31). What a Doll Tells Us About Race. Retrieved from Good Morning America: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Story?id=7213714

Johnson, K. A. (1991). Objective News and Other Myths: The Poisoning of Young Black Minds. Journal of Negro Education, 328 - 341.

Kirsch, S. J. (2012). Children, Adolescents and Media Violence. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publishers.

Orange, C. M., & George, A. M. (2000). Child Sacrifice: Black America's Price of Paying the Pied Piper. Journal of Black Studies, 294 - 313.

Siriyuvasak, U., & Hyunjoon, S. (2007). Asianizing K-pop: Production, Consumption and Identification Patterns Among Thai Youth. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 109-136.

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Effects of Media on Teens: A Look at the Research - North Park University

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Effects of Media on Teens: A Look at the Research By Alison Burkhardt and Daniel White Hodge May 1, 2012 We know there is a lot of research on how media affects adolescents, but many of these whitepapers are only available via academic libraries. We decided to gather some useful nuggets of information that cross...

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By: Tanika Tyler
4/21
CRAAP Score- 47

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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Summary of Findings

Harassment-from garden-variety name calling to more threatening behavior- is a common part of online life that colors the experiences of many web users. Fully 73% of adult internet users have seen someone be harassed in some way online and 40% have personally experienced it, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center.

Pew Research asked respondents about six different forms of online harassment. Those who witnessed harassment said they had seen at least one of the following occur to others online:

60% of internet users said they had witnessed someone being called offensive names

53% had seen efforts to purposefully embarrass someone

25% had seen someone being physically threatened

24% witnessed someone being harassed for a sustained period of time

19% said they witnessed someone being sexually harassed

18% said they had seen someone be stalked

Those who have personally experienced online harassment said they were the target of at least one of the following online:

27% of internet users have been called offensive names

22% have had someone try to purposefully embarrass them

8% have been physically threatened

8% have been stalked

7% have been harassed for a sustained period

6% have been sexually harassed

In Pew Research Center's first survey devoted to the subject, two distinct but overlapping categories of online harassment occur to internet users. The first set of experiences is somewhat less severe: it includes name-calling and embarrassment. It is a layer of annoyance so common that those who see or experience it say they often ignore it.

The second category of harassment targets a smaller segment of the online public, but involves more severe experiences such as being the target of physical threats, harassment over a sustained period of time, stalking, and sexual harassment.

Of those who have been harassed online, 55% (or 22% of all internet users) have exclusively experienced the "less severe" kinds of harassment while 45% (or 18% of all internet users) have fallen victim to any of the "more severe" kinds of harassment. Online harassment tends to occur to different groups in different environments with different personal and emotional repercussions.

In broad trends, the data show that men are more likely to experience name-calling and embarrassment, while young women are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment and stalking. Social media is the most common scene of both types of harassment, although men highlight online gaming and comments sections as other spaces they typically encounter harassment. Those who exclusively experience less severe forms of harassment report fewer emotional or personal impacts, while those with more severe harassment experiences often report more serious emotional tolls.

Key findings

Who is harassed: Age and gender are most closely associated with the experience of online harassment. Among online adults:

Young adults, those 18-29, are more likely than any other demographic group to experience online harassment. Fully 65% of young internet users have been the target of at least one of the six elements of harassment that were queried in the survey. Among those 18-24, the proportion is 70%.

Young women, those 18-24, experience certain severe types of harassment at disproportionately high levels: 26% of these young women have been stalked online, and 25% were the target of online sexual harassment. In addition, they do not escape the heightened rates of physical threats and sustained harassment common to their male peers and young people in general.

Overall, men are somewhat more likely than women to experience at least one of the elements of online harassment, 44% vs. 37%. In terms of specific experiences, men are more likely than women to encounter name-calling, embarrassment, and physical threats.

Beyond those demographic groups, those whose lives are especially entwined with the internet report experiencing higher rates of harassment online. This includes those who have more information available about them online, those who promote themselves online for their job, and those who work in the digital technology industry.

Perpetrators of online harassment: A plurality of those who have experienced online harassment, 38%, said a stranger was responsible for their most recent incident and another 26% said they didn't know the real identity of the person or people involved. Taken together, this means half of those who have experienced online harassment did not know the person involved in their most recent incident.

Where harassment occurs: Online harassment is much more prevalent in some online environments than in others. Asked to recall where their most recent experience took place:

66% of internet users who have experienced online harassment said their most recent incident occurred on a social networking site or app

22% mentioned the comments section of a website

16% said online gaming

16% said in a personal email account

10% mentioned a discussion site such as reddit

6% said on an online dating website or app

Women and young adults were more likely than others to experience harassment on social media. Men-and young men in particular-were more likely to report online gaming as the most recent site of their harassment.

Responses to online harassment: Among those who have experienced online harassment, 60% decided to ignore their most recent incident while 40% took steps to respond to it. Those who responded to their most recent incident with online harassment took the following steps:

47% of those who responded to their most recent incident with online harassment confronted the person online

44% unfriended or blocked the person responsible

22% reported the person responsible to the website or online service

18% discussed the problem online to draw support for themselves

13% changed their username or deleted their profile

10% withdrew from an online forum

8% stopped attending certain offline events or places

5% reported the problem to law enforcement

Regardless of whether a user chose to ignore or respond to the harassment, people were generally satisfied with their outcome. Some 83% of those who ignored it and 75% of those who responded thought their decision was effective at making the situation better.

Those with more "severe" harassment experiences responded differently to their most recent incident with harassment than those with less "severe" experiences. Those who have ever experienced stalking, physical threats, or sustained or sexual harassment were more likely to take multiple steps in response to their latest incident than those who have only experienced name-calling and embarrassment, 67% vs. 30%. They are more likely to take actions like unfriending or blocking the person responsible, confronting the person online, reporting the person to a website or online service, changing their username or deleting their profile, and ending their attendance at certain offline events and places.

After-effects of online harassment: Asked how upsetting their most recent experience with harassment was, the responses ran a spectrum from being quite jarring to being of no real consequence:

14% of those who have experienced online harassment found their most recent incident extremely upsetting

14% found it very upsetting

21% said it was somewhat upsetting

30% reported it was a little upsetting

22% found it not at all upsetting

Taken together, half found their most recent experience with online harassment a little or not at all upsetting. But a significant minority, 27%, found the experience extremely or very upsetting.

Women were more likely than men to find their most recent experience with online harassment extremely or very upsetting-38% of harassed women said so of their most recent experience, compared with 17% of harassed men.

Again, there were differences in the emotional impact of online harassment based on the level of severity one had experienced in the past. Some 37% of those who have ever experienced sexual harassment, stalking, physical threats, or sustained harassment called their most recent incident with online harassment "extremely" or "very" upsetting compared with 19% of those who have only experienced name-calling or embarrassment.

When it comes to longer-term impacts on reputation, there is a similar pattern. More than 80% of those who have ever been victim of name-calling and embarrassment did not feel their reputation had been hurt by their overall experience with online harassment. Those who experienced physical threats and sustained harassment felt differently. About a third felt their reputation had been damaged by their overall experience with online harassment. Overall, 15% of those who have experienced online harassment said it impacted their reputation.

Perceptions of online environments: To explore the context that informs online harassment, respondents were asked about their general perceptions of and attitudes toward various online environments.

Fully 92% of internet users agreed that the online environment allows people to be more critical of one another, compared with their offline experiences. But a substantial majority, 68%, also agreed that online environments allow them to be more supportive of one another. Some 63% thought online environments allow for more anonymity than in their offline lives.

Respondents were asked whether they thought a series of online platforms were more welcoming toward men, more welcoming toward women, or equally welcoming to both sexes. While most online environments were viewed as equally welcoming to both genders, the starkest results were for online gaming. Some 44% of respondents felt the platform was more welcoming toward men.

About this survey

Data in this report are drawn from the Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel, a probability-based, nationally representative panel. This survey was conducted May 30 - June 30, 2014 and self-administered via the internet by 2,849 web users, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points. For more information on the American Trends Panel, please see the Methods section at the end of this report.

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Harassment-from garden-variety name calling to more threatening behavior- is a common part of online life that colors the experiences of many web users. Fully 73% of adult internet users have seen someone be harassed in some way online and 40% have personally experienced it, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center.

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Cyber-bullies could face two years in jail under new internet troll rules

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Cyber-bullies could face two years in jail under new internet troll rules

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By:T'Asia Porter
4/20
CRAAP Score-49

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The justice secretary, Chris Grayling, has backed an amendment to the criminal justice bill that would target new rules at combating trolls that sexually harass and verbally abuse people on the internet or via mobile phones in England and Wales.

The justice secretary, Chris Grayling, has backed an amendment to the criminal justice bill that would target new rules at combating trolls that sexually harass and verbally abuse people on the internet or via mobile phones in England and Wales.

The amendment, due to be discussed in parliament on Thursday, was proposed by the Conservative MP for Ealing Central and Acton Angie Bray, after one of her constituents said her 14-year-old daughter had been "verbally raped" by 2,000 obscene texts sent by an older man, who escaped conviction.

"Just tabled amendment to criminal justice bill to make life just a bit harder for cyber-bullies and sex pests using texts to harass victims," said Bray on Twitter.

Crown court upgrade

The amendment would allow for greater penalties of up to two years in prison and extend the period of time made available to authorities attempting to build difficult cases against offenders.

Offences such as internet trolling fall under the Malicious Communications Act, which can only be tried in a magistrates' court.

Bray's tabled amendment comes after a string of high-profile abuse cases involving Twitter and text messages. Two abusers of the feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez were jailed in January for subjecting her to threats of violence and rape on Twitter after Criado-Perez launched a campaign for more women to be represented on banknotes.

The Labour minister for culture, media and sport, Helen Goodman, called for "a clear legal framework" to tackle the problem of cyber-bullying and the suicides of vulnerable young people in January, after the deaths of the teenagers Tallulah Wilson and Hannah Smith.

Wilson died in 2012 aged 15 when she was hit by a train. An inquest into her death found that she had developed an alternative fantasy life online. In 2013, 14-year-old Hannah Smith was found hanged after being bullied on the open-discussion site Ask.fm.

A committee will discuss the tabled amendment in parliament on Thursday, which will be added to the changes to laws to be voted on this year.
* Social networks faced government pressure for greater action over sites promoting self-harm and suicide

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Cyber-bullies could face two years in jail under new internet troll rules

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The justice secretary, Chris Grayling, has backed an amendment to the criminal justice bill that would target new rules at combating trolls that sexually harass and verbally abuse people on the internet or via mobile phones in England and Wales.

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By: Tanika Tyler
4/20
CRAAP Score - 46

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The influence of social media on adolescents and teenagers is of particular importance, not only because this particular group of children is developmentally vulnerable but also because they are among the heaviest users of social networking. According to a report by Common Sense Media, 75 percent of teenagers in America currently have profiles on social networking sites, of which 68 percent use Facebook as their main social networking tool.

While social networking undoubtedly plays a vital role in broadening social connections and learning technical skills, its risks cannot be overlooked. The lack or difficulty in self-regulation and susceptibility to peer pressure makes adolescents vulnerable to such evils as Facebook depression, sexting, and cyberbullying, which are realistic threats. Other problems such as social network-induced obesity, Internet addiction and sleep deprivation are issues that continue to be under intense scrutiny for the contradictory results that have been obtained in various studies.

The American Psychological Association defines bullying as aggressive behavior by an individual that causes discomfort to another. Cyberbullying ranges from direct threatening and unpleasant emails to anonymous activities such as trolling. 32 percent of online teens admit to having experienced a range of menacing online advances from others. While direct unpleasant emails or messages are the most straightforward form of cyberbullying, they are probably the least prevalent in that only 13 percent of surveyed youngsters admitted to receiving threatening or aggressive messages. Even forwarding a private note to a group without permission from the sender is often perceived as cyberbullying; Pew research found that 15 percent of teens were disturbed and uncomfortable about having had their private message forwarded or posted in a public forum. Pew also found that nearly 39 percent of teens on social network have been cyberbullied in some way, compared with 22 percent of online teens who do not use social networks. Trolling, the act of deliberately inflicting hatred, bigotry, racism, misogyny, or just simple bickering between people, often anonymously, is also pervasive in social network. If you thought Trolls lived under bridge, 28 percent of America lives there, it seems.

A very important cause for cyberbullying is the anonymity possible on the Internet. According to Stopbullying.gov, two kinds of people are likely to be cyberbullies -- the popular ones and those on the fringes of society; the former resort to such activities to stay popular or to feel powerful, while the latter troll to fit into a society or to get back at a society that excludes them. The National Council on Crime Prevention found from a survey that about three out of four victims of cyberbullying eventually trace the identity of the cyberbully, and so the anonymity may not be as safe a net as the bully believes. The cyberbully is often a friend (if they can be called that without insulting the word or sentiment), or someone they know from school or outside. Only 23 percent of the victims reported to have been bullied by someone they don't know.

Cyberbullying appears easy to the bully because they do not see their victims' reactions in person, and thus the impact of the consequences is small. In reality, however, the consequences can be life altering to the extent that the victims could go as far as taking their lives or become psychologically distressed enough to require medical intervention. The ironically individualistic nature of social networking activities makes it difficult to recognize a victim of cyberbullying, but tell-tale signs include avoiding or being anxious around the computer or cell phone and sudden change in behavior patterns.

Sexting, the action of sending sexually revealing pictures of themselves or sexually explicit messages to another individual or group, is another common activity among the teen community in social media. A nationwide survey by the National Campaign to Support Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found a shocking 20 percent of teens participating in sexting. While teenage boys resort to sending sexually explicit or suggestive messages, teenage girls are more likely to send inappropriate photos of themselves, mostly to their boyfriends. However, the permanence and pervasiveness of the internet makes it a fertile ground for spreading such information to the extent of getting viral -- 17 percent of sexters admittedly share the messages they receive with others, and 55 percent of those share them with more than one person. Beyond the personal trauma and humiliation sexting may cause, there are judicial ramifications as well; some states consider such activities as misdemeanors while many group sexting under felony.

" Facebook depression," defined as emotional disturbance that develops when preteens and teens spend a great deal of time on social media sites, is now a very real malady. Recent studies have shown that comparisons are the main cause of Facebook depression; the study showed that down-comparison (comparing with inferiors) was just as likely to cause depression as up-comparison (comparing with people better than oneself). However, there are contradictory reports as well. Another study showed that Facebook makes us happier and increased social trust and engagement among users. Given that our brains are wired to connect, it seems logical to expect that social networks, by enabling sharing, could cause a self-reinforcing sense of psychological satisfaction. These studies show that the effect of social network on well-being hinges on how social networks are used -- whether to connect or to compare.

Other risks of extensive social networking among youth are loss of privacy, sharing too much information, and disconnect from reality. The digital footprint is a permanent trail that users of social media, indeed of the Internet itself, leave the moment they sign into any service. The digital footprint, by its permanence, can have serious repercussions in future, in both professional and personal areas of life. It is important to know that every activity online -- posts on social media accounts, comments left on various sites, tweets, retweets and +1s through years can contribute to the digital footprint. Another serious risk is the amount of information shared on social network sites. LexisNexis and Lawers.com surveyed 1,000 Americans and found that half of them divulged too much personal data online. What is more worrying is the fact that 44 percent of them believed that the information they posted on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace were being used against them.

Adolescence is the time to spread wings and take the tentative first flight out into the world, and parents and caregivers must be part of the process. In the domain of social networking, this entails parents becoming educated about the advantages and disadvantages of social networking and themselves joining social network sites, not to hover, but to be aware of the activities of their teenage wards. It is essential that parents are aware of and monitor privacy settings and online profiles of their wards. Open discussions about social network protocols and etiquettes would go a long way in establishing global digital citizenship and healthy behavior.
Writing credit: Co-authored by Lakshmi, a Mobicip blogger who is just as passionately opinionated about the juxtaposition of technology, parenting, and education.
Mobicip offers powerful parental controls for the iPad and other mobile internet devices. Learn more at www.mobicip.com.

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The influence of social media on adolescents and teenagers is of particular importance, not only because this particular group of children is developmentally vulnerable but also because they are among the heaviest users of social networking.

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Social media are computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks. ... Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.
www.google.com/search?q=social+media&rlz=1CAHPZV_enUS741&oq=social+media&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.4666j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&safe=active&ssui=on

CRAAP Score- 50
posted by myshira 4/18