The coronavirus pandemic has made it extremely hard for people to socialize. This is especially hard on teenagers who are still learning where they fit, who they want to be friends with, and who they want to be. I for one am a high school freshman. I've never seen my campus, never met 99% of the kids there. Many of my peers were anxious and scared about the transition to high school. Then the pandemic hit and schools shut down. We were then supposed to make new friends, find our group, and learn to navigate a new space, without actually being there. With the coronavirus barring many in-person interactions, many teens have turned to and relied on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat to keep in touch, to make new friends. While already a popular way to socialize, social media became the only way to socialize. Teens became unhealthily attached, addicted, and reliant on social media. This is extremely dangerous because teens became dependent on a place of toxicity, hate, lies, and insecurities. One of the biggest support systems for teens during these times is also a place that can easily make them feel lesser than, insecure, depressed, and less inclined to be honest.

While social media is a great tool, it has also given teens a method to quantify their popularity and therefore their self-worth. There's a kid in my class who’s always talking about this one TikTok video he made that got over 10 thousand views. I’ve watched this video. It was nothing special. It's the same thing I see everywhere else. But he’s always bragging that his TikTok has a big number displayed under it. This person is a good example of the way teens start to use their number of followers, likes, and shares as a way to gauge their own value. This easily becomes addictive and extremely unhealthy. Who doesn’t want to have more self-worth? Another downside to this is that teens’ only source of self-worth can easily become a place of hate. According to Psychology Today, a “Civility in America survey said that 84 percent of us had experienced some form of cruelty – 69 percent of us blamed the Internet and social media.” The internet is an easy place to attack people. People can hide behind a screen and hurt others without facing the consequences. When teens not only experience a drop in likes but are also subjected to hate, this can easily get to them. They are so reliant on social media to gauge their self-worth, that when they experience hate and cruelty on it, they can easily lose all self-worth, fall into depression and self-hatred, and have no other support system to boost their morale.

According to ScienceDirect.com, there are two types of social media use: viewing and posting, but neither benefits teens in the long term. When viewing, it often lowers teens’ self-esteem. They are seeing the very best of the posters, not what the posters usually are, just their peaks. Teens compare that peak to what they look like and what their life is like day to day, noticing and fixating on the gaps. The other type of social media use is posting. It provides temporary satisfaction. Online.king.edu reports that social media “likes” give a quick, addictive rush of dopamine. But in the long term, that rush has no benefit and causes more dependence on social media. There are many other ways to fire off your dopamine receptors such as eating and exercising which, needless to say, benefit you in the long run. But social media is an easy shortcut to firing off those receptors. After a while, many teens start to rely on social media as their primary source of dopamine.

Social media can easily become a cookie-cutter for personalities, stamping the same one into every teen. A friend of mine dislikes dancing. She never really found it fun. Yet on social media, she puts on a cheesy smile and posts the same dances everyone else does. Social media users mimic one another, following the same trends: The Renegade, the Time Warp, the Bored in the House, the Two Pretty Best Friends. I rarely see my friends post things that they like, just the things that everyone else supposedly likes. They start posting stuff that they personally do not enjoy, but it gets them numbers so they do it. The danger in this behavior is that they can become so easily influenced and shaped by what gets them likes, they become who they are on social media. The danger in trying to get those likes and follows is that people can become carbon copies of one another. We can be left with no individuality—just the same person, acting the same way, liking the same things.

Let’s imagine again that new highschooler: they’ve just left many of their friends, their teachers, and their old school. They’re entering a brand new school, a school likely much larger than their previous one, where they won't have any classes with anyone they know. Where grades matter more than ever. Where classes are harder than ever. Where the media they’ve been seeing for all their life has set so many expectations of what's to come. And it all gets put online. In their bedroom, on their computer, just as confused, worried, and anxious, but with no way to alleviate that stress, no way to make what high school was supposed to become true, this high schooler turns to a toxic, addictive, homogenous, dangerous, and unhealthy place for a sliver of the high school experience. Social media is not inherently a bad thing, yet teens have to use it with open eyes or risk the loss of self-esteem and individuality.