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Do different social networking sites offer other benefits and drawbacks?

I think different social media sites inherently offer different strengths and weaknesses within their platform. Each network caters to a somewhat different audience -- Facebook still appeals to an older generation, offers long-form text capabilities and makes it easy to see each others "friends"; Twitter (or X) offers an onslaught of short-form text and videos, this is a platform that is perfect for breaking news and headlines; Instagram is an image based platform, this offers users an excess of visual content. All of these networks are slightly different, but they also share a lot more similarities than differences at their core -- especially when considering impact on mental health.

Reference: https://www.statista.com/chart/30579/us-survey-girls-of-exposure-to-harmful-social-media-content/

This chart highlights a decent amount of access to mental health resources on social media. The problem is that there is also a significant amount of harmful content.

Do social networking sites have any responsibility in promoting mental health in their users? If so, how might they go about doing so?


Responsibility is a tough word for this question. Technically, legally, I don't think that social networking sites have a responsibility to promote the mental health of their user base. Morally is a different story. I think more than anything else they should have a responsibility to do no more harm than is already present just in the nature of social media. This can mean not promoting and platforming negative content with their algorithms. They could go even a step further and use their algorithms to promote positive content. I found a TED talk by a digital marketer in Canada named Bailey Parnell. She talks about how harmful social media can be on multiple levels. She emphasizes the importance on the users behalf of recognizes these negative triggers and finding ways to craft a better experience in an increasingly unavoidable digital era. I think she's right -- placing the responsibility on the social networking sites seems like a fool's errand and generally a losing battle. We, as users, have to find ways to promote our own mental health and that starts with being aware of the negative triggers that social media use might showcase.

Check it out, it's an interesting watch:
Reference: https://youtu.be/Czg_9C7gw0o?feature=shared 




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