Social Stereotypes : The Unrealistic Standards Of Social Media

Social media creates an ideal body image in an adolescent’s mind that affects them in various ways. Having an ideal body image can lower self-esteem in some adolescents’ creating eating disorders, and this idea of getting plastic surgery as they get older. Social media is steadily increasing and has heavily influenced adolescent’s to be more aware of their body figure. As a result, many adolescent’s have developed low self-esteem due to the fact that social media continues promoting fit women and creating the idea that women need to be thin to be loved or accepted by society; this can cause harm to adolescent’s because they feel the need to fit in to society.

As this generation has easy access to social media, culminating to 95.9% of girls having access to the internet, it is no wonder that these girls have easy access to view these “ideal” images. There is a cause and effect, which can be seen through sites like Facebook and Instagram, as users are more prone to body obsession than non-users. Second, no one is immune to these beauty ideals, even the women who started it all. The women who post these photos, have internal problems as well, such as eating disorders and unhealthy fitness habits. These “role models” are achieving these beauty ideals in unhealthy ways, which is not a positive message to send to viewers. Third, we have massive studies and data to show the damages of social media, but it is the individual stories that people can

Social media affects girls from a young age. If we were to take a look at Barbie, we would notice that, if she was real, she would be 5’9”, weigh about 110 pounds, have a bust of 39”, 18” waist, 33” hips, and

The ideal body image that is seen by society is being tall, thin, muscular, and fit. It is commonly seen across various media platforms, making it more popular. The group of people that are targeted ranges from teenagers to adults who engaged in social networking websites (Fardouly and et, al.). The increase in media consumption has proven that it leads to body dissatisfaction among consumers. A statistic from Body Image shows, “Similarly, 90% of 16-24 year olds in the United Kingdom (Office for National Statistics, 2013), and 90% of 18-29 year olds in the United States (Pew Research, 2013a), use social networking websites” (Fardouly and et, al.). The amount of exposure to social media is relatively high in a particular age. These social networking websites have images that are constantly

Your daughter taps in her passcode on her phone, she immediately goes to instagram and scrolls through her feed. She's thirteen years old, young and growing. Models by the ocean in Monaco with perfect, skinny, tan bodies, million dollar clothes, and makeup done by professionals. Seven million followers, six hundred thousand likes, and five thousand comments. Your daughter locks her bedroom door and stands by the mirror and grasps her stomach and frowns, she touches her clothes and her hair and looks at her untouched face. As she scans her body she's disappointed in what she sees. She asks herself why she doesn't look like those girls by the pools and those girls laying on the sandy beach with curled blonde hair. Why doesn't she get as many

When teens go online they are faced with edited photos of their idols, or even people they don’t know. Popular social media sites such as tumblr, instagram, twitter, and facebook all have photos of “perfect” girls. Teens log onto these sites are immediately immersed in photos of everything they want to be. Instagram provides the opportunity for girls to edit their photos in such a way that a person would hardly be able to tell who it is anymore. Adding lighting, blurring the background, getting the picture at just the right angle. Teen girls are practically becoming professional photoshoppers at this point. “Encouraging” pictures flood the feed on the social media sites. Examples are “Every time you say no to food, you say yes to thin”, “Skinny jeans. Skinny shorts. Skinny for life.” and “Every time you skip dinner, you wake up thinner” (Marin,

Social media puts us in a little box so we can all be alike. Stereotyping our personalities in order to target us with advertisements. Everyone has two identities; the one they give themselves and the one social media gives them. Not everyone fits perfectly into the advertising identity, there are things that social media got wrong. As a girl, I go through these stereotypes quite often because of societies already made impressions into others around me. Many advertisements don't fit my personality the way society wants. I am put into the box of a Starbucks lover, the makeup hoarder, and the girl who eats her feeling in chocolate.

There are three important reasons to think that life has been exposed through a distorted electronic mirror; Facebook. According to my experience, social media has been the path that many teens and adults (myself) with ages ranging from 10 to 45 years old are using to expose their lifestyles and impressions that are not necessarily true to others. First, everybody is completely aware of the fact that it is not easy for others to make sure the information you post is veridic, therefore, posting an incorrect or a false statement becomes tempting. Second, it is a fact that nobody wants to share tragic stories about their lives in order to avoid any kind of pity from others. Finally, I have noticed that the more you lie on face book the more “likes” you get,

When I was in 7th grade I was jumped right after lunch time by three kids. They cornered me into the bathroom and each of them got a good piece of me. Yelling “terrorist”, “Sand N****”, and other profane words along while stomping me down and beating me to a pulp. The beating was roughly 3 minutes in real time but to me it felt like a horrendous tedious 3 hours. I was never handled like that ever and I would’ve never thought that something like that would ever happen to me in my lifetime, where I was living. I’ve brought that day along myself, October 13th 200* and I will never forget that. Before that incident I was harassed not as harshly but it came to my attention just about 3rd grade, I grew immune to their verbal attacks and I never had

Essena O’Neill is an Australian teenager that got extremely famous on social media having more than 612,000 followers on Instagram. Every time she posted a picture she was paid almost $2,000 per post in the platform. Even though in the pictures she posted it was all happiness and sunshine the truth behind them wasn’t even close to that. Recently she decided to get rid of 2,000 post she posted on Instagram and just leave 96 with captions telling the story behind the picture such as saying how much she was paid, how she feels about it, and how miserable it was to keep up with the “perfect” image that made her gain popularity and money. She has declared a war against social media and their ridiculous standards of beauty, describing it as a “contrived

Colleges and employers look through an applicants social media to see if they can find out about their attitudes. Some believe social media can't prove any attitudes, but it can show the attitude towards situations may being posted about whether it be positive or negative. If an applicant happens to post about the bad day they were having and speaks negatively then that shows the attitude they have when faced with it. For example, if the employee would happen to have a bad day at work and showed up, how do you think they would react and what would be the attitude they put out? However, posting positive and friendly things online shows that the applicant has a pretty positive attitude. For example, if an applicant posts that it is a “beautiful

Due to the increase in popularity of social media, today’s generation is bombarded with unrealistic standards when it comes to beauty. When young people today first turn on their cellphones, more often than not, they refer to a social media site. Whether it’s the ever-popular Instagram, where people can post pictures and followers can “like” to show their approval or post comments. Or, whether it’s Twitter, where people can post witty or inspiring or informational things for their followers to see and can be retweeted or favourited. Or they could click on the little blue Facebook icon, where all of the above can happen. These are some of the most popular social media outlets today because young people are

We’ve gotten to the point where everybody is so scared of being called racist, sexist, homophobic, or anything else that describes being hateful towards a certain group. Sometimes people define such words, but a plethora of people get offended way too easily nowadays. I have a sinister outlook on most subjects. I don’t think that I go against any other topic more than political correctness. I say and do things that go against these correct morals almost every day. Feeling hatred towards my generation, I see most of us as children, whose highest achievement is our amount of idiocrasy. Maybe this is just my harsh outlook and attitude, being the cynical, callous person that I am.

With the increase of negative social conceptions associated with Islam and terrorism, Muslims face many adversities such as stereotyping, the criminalization of the Islamic religion, and discrimination against the majority based on the few extremists. Negatively stereotyping a group of people based on the actions of few extremists can greatly affect those of that group. People that practice Islam, especially youth, are often bullied for their religious views, and face many micro aggressions, such as the portrayal of Muslims in the media often cast as “the enemy” in movies/TV shows/etc., news coverage that concerns Islam is usable talking about terrorism, etc. These views are harmful and put a negative light on a peaceful religion by linking

In today’s society, the public is exposed to technology at even younger ages than ever before. Everywhere you go these days you see kids even as little as three holding their parent’s phones or even their own, watching videos or playing games. But as said in the article Does Social media impact on body image by Philippa Roxby, as kids start becoming teenagers their technological uses advance and they start to rely on social media sites for new sources of communication, and their main channel to the outside world. Based on studies conducted by psychologists they have come up with a conclusion that social media has a direct relationship to body image concerns. I believe that in today’s society we should focus on promoting self-confidence as most of the adolescents have a very low assurance of their own bodies. Although a study conducted in the article The Upside of Selfies: Social media isn’t all bad for kids by Kelly Wallace says that a survey which resulted in 52% of the teens saying that social media positively influences them. Even though social media platforms have some beneficial aspects such as they make people want to go on diets, exercise, and eating healthy, the teenagers don’t really look/understand the negative aspects of it. The impacts that are carried with social media are mostly negative such as fancying teenagers to lose confidence in themselves and has become a toxic mirror to them. The visual platforms impact