How Social Media Is A Toxic Mirror Analysis

A major problem arising in preteens, teens and young adults is the increasing use of social media and the impact it has been playing on their self-confidence. For as long as there have been strong influencers in society, there has been the issue of comparison. People have judged themselves based off how others appear since before there was even a television to showcase them, but with the increase of smartphones and the internet, so came the increase of something else far more harmful for this issue of comparison, social media. Social media, as a whole, gives a single person access to millions of other people and increases the pressure to appear flawless on their accounts. In the article “How Social Media is a Toxic Mirror”, published by Rachel Simmons in Time Magazine, Simmons’ main idea is how social media has become a method of directly comparing yourself to others based purely on what is posted on the internet. Simmons focus in the article is the decreasing use of social media as a platform for cyberbullying and an increasing use of social media as a comparison, or as she words it, “a toxic mirror”. The increased use of social media has given impressionable teens access to endless pictures of the “ideal” body, therefore, giving them more to compare themselves to. With social media …show more content…
Many teens feel as though, as previously stated, their worth lies in the amount of likes or comments they get on a picture, or how many followers they have. They believe if they don’t look the same way others do in pictures then they are less than. Their social media becomes how they view themselves instead of them seeing the reality of who they are on the phone. This is “toxic” because this will lead them to believe they are below others, or that they are only as important as their media accounts make them out to