I am not either promoting anything or demoting facebook anyway in the article. It totally depends on how people use it and how people use the term “depression”. You agree or not, facebook has linked to lure people into depression. Oddly, several studies found this matter significantly. They are showing how facebook use is associated with lower life satisfaction. And yeah, I believe it too. It has a greater psychological impact. Throughout the entire article, we will bring psychological, scientific views on how facebook can be linked with depression.
- Sick Brain Competition
- Wasting Time
- Fake News
- Deception
Sick Brain Competition
Scrolling down through all the status updates, thrilling moments , vacation photos, enjoying with family, friends events etc just led participants to compare their lives with their friends on facebook. Facebook users usually highlight the happy moments of his/her life with a smile. But those are not just moments in life. So, those social sick comparisons led other users to assume his or her facebook friends having better time than him/her. So, it literally causes envying on others. A study published in June 2016, found that feeling of envy over friends leads to depression. [1]
And, when someone shares the status of his/her achievement or salary, another friend starts hating his/her own niches and focuses on what others have succeeded in doing. So, he/she switches to another dream that is not easy to achieve. Right that way, neither he/she can’t develop their own skills in order to reach their goal nor others by how he/she got invigorated. And another thing could be like, when you notice your friend buying expensive motorbikes, and posting the attractive pictures of it on facebook, you start thinking why won’t I buy? You subconsciously start envying on your friends.
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Shahin Alam
This is not the all, the most negative things come by it, when your friends upload 150 kmph + speedy moments by riding motorcycles, you think am I less than them! Nope, you try to capture a moment of yours whilst driving your car at more than 151 kmps + speed. AND “ THIS IS SICK BRAIN COMPETITION”. It doesn’t bring anything positive but destroys you more often.
Taking all into consideration, it really takes you in a sick brain competition where you start feeling envious of your facebook friends and get nothing but “depression’. There are many reasons among these. Let’s keep writing short.
Wasting time
What do you do all day on facebook? You will just say chit-chat, watching others status, entertainment video, news or will say just nothing. Well, if this is meant to you a lot, actually it’s nothing when you just use them for wasting your time. Like I mentioned before, it totally depends on users how they use it. I am not putting a full stop sign here. Because, it may arise arguments. Like for any business use, spreading any true update news or let’s say productive something is actually fine. But, most of the people are using it for nothing much more important rather than just killing time.
According to a 2014 study published in Computer in Human Behavior, just 9 percent of facebook users’ activities involve communicating with others. Instead, most of the users are consuming random pieces of contents. Funny thing is that researchers found that consuming information on facebook for the rest of others is not really fulfilling or satisfying. And going throughout all the studies, researchers concluded that by the time people log out of facebook, most likely they feel they’ve wasted their time on facebook. And their contrition over being unproductive led them to feel depressed. [2]
Shahin Alam
Fake News
When you are about to read a newspaper online, you will obviously look forward to getting some branded news channels for digesting some information. Well, if you are die hard fan of Facebook for being updated with news, you probably have a greater chance of being updated with more fake news. Why do I say that! Because, Facebook has millions of journalists as users themselves. Most of the news that is spread on Facebook is a personal website, not an official one. And they are full of exaggerated, fabricated false information.
Here, you can make a point that every media is filled with so much fake news. I agree, but facebook is by far the worst perpetrator when it comes to spreading fake news. Worse than twitter, worse than google. A new study published in the Journal Nature : Human Behavior, where researchers tracked the internet use of over 300 Americans.They found facebook to be the referrer sites for untrustworthy news sources over 15%. And there facebook referred only 6% users to the authoritative news sites. [3]
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Shahin Alam
So, when you always keep scrolling down on your newsfeed, you are surrounded with many thumbnail photos with eye-catching headlines. And you make your engagements there. Then, you also share that info in your timeline. That’s how it spreads so fast. Even though, most of the news is so much exaggerated and fabricated, without judging or any kind of consideration you end up sharing it with others. Therefore, those false news often cause depression for many. Sometimes you also start feeling depressed by some of that news. That’s so sad.
Deception
Facebook is overwhelmed by cheating somehow everyday. The advertisement presents on facebook targeting individual users according to their interests or the kind of things they post most of the time. So, they feel like engaging there. Unfortunately, most of the advertisement makes no sense for profiting facebook users. Few days ago, I saw some guys who were very frustrated due to the victims of fraud on facebook. They actually were interested in doing some online courses. Actually, they found advertisements on facebook about their niches. Engaged there, spent a lot of money. After having some classes there, they had no access to go for the rest .They lost totally themselves by losing a huge amount of money.
This happens everyday on facebook. You can take this just as a simple tiny example from a broad area of deception. I know, most probably, the user himself/herself is responsible for those trap situations. But, where fraud is rampant at a much higher rate, these are very normal issues of everyday life there. And yeah, there are hundreds of other such fraudulent things on Facebook.
Fraudsters are getting people’s personal information from social media sites. There were 148,000 victims in the UK in 2015 compared with 94,500 in 2014. More than 85% of the frauds were carried out online. [4] Among those social media, facebook is a “hunting ground” for being cheated.
Shahin Alam
Facebook sometimes intensely works as a ‘Special field of theft’. For instance, some anonymous rude people send many unusual links to many users. They say flamboyantly that click here, you will find this or that bla bla or even money, data packs et cetera. Users click or engage them without any consideration or even a bit of thinking, and in a moment, they lose all their important information or even Facebook ID in the blink of an eye. As a result, they lose many things that just bring nothing but depression deeply.
There are many things that can be shared relating to facebook negativity. But, I don’t want to make this article long. I will not recommend you to leave facebook after reading this one. Rather, it can cause more despair for you. I personally run it from class 8th grade. It took away many things, at the time, it helped me in many ways to learn and earn many things. So, I will suggest you to be more careful on what you have been doing here and use it for something really important and great productive as well.
DO YOU LIKE "DEPRESSION"? Of curse NOT!! Those all above problems that explained are directly linked to your DEPRESSION regarding social media, specially FACEBOOK.
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References :
[1] Current Opinion in Psychology, The interplay between facebook use, Retrieved From : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X15002535 in June,2016
[2] Chicago Tribune, The science behind facebook sadness, Retrieved From : https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/success/tca-the-science-of-facebook-sadness-20160212-story.html on Feb 12, 2016
[3] Nature Human Behavior, Exposure to untrustworthy in the 2016 US election, Retrieved From : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0833-x
[4] BBC NEWS, Identify fraud up by 57% as thieves ‘hunt’ on social media, Retrieved From : https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-36701297 on 5 July, 2016
