The Negative Impact

Hello everyone!

Welcome back once again, let's dive into the negative impacts social media has had on women and their body image in this current digital era we live in.

Like I mentioned in previous posts, social media is a 'fake' world that we are all living in. I put quotation marks around 'fake' because the irony behind social media is that it is supposed to be a place where you can be open and post about your life as much as you want to, but people use it to mostly show off only the good parts of their lives, thus creating a fake persona that everyone has perfect lives. This ideology relates to how it negatively impacts women and their body image. Everyone is guilty of posting themselves only at their best angles on their social media pages, which creates a false idea that everyone is 'perfect'. According to a study done by the National Eating Disorders Association most young girls in the teens agree that they realize that not everything on social media is real but they still admit that they have a hard time deciphering which parts of it are real and which is fake.

Another prominent aspect of social media is like counts and what determines how many likes one will get on different social media platforms. Let me paint a picture for you: a teenage girl posts a picture of themselves on Instagram that they feel they look beautiful and feel really confident in. A few hours pass and they check back on that Instagram post and it has not gotten as many likes as they had hoped for or as many as one of their peers have gotten on a similar photo.. questions will run through that young woman's mind, "am I not pretty enough?", "how come no one likes me as much as her?", "how can I get more likes and look like her?". Putting yourself in that young woman's shoes, you can imagine it would knock down some of that confidence you had built up to post the photo in the first place. This is a prime example of how social media can ruin body confidence and keep up the ideal body image of what will get the most likes in a photo.

There is a constant comparison going on in all females minds as they scroll through different social media platforms. Looking at posts from other women constantly will lead to comparing yourself to someone who you think is better looking than you and will make you think, "how can I look like that". According to study done by 'emotion matters' 88% of women compare themselves to images they observe on social media.

In comparison to the ideal body images from the past, social media has a whole new form of trending body types. Body types will be trendy on social sites such as TikTok and Instagram and if someone posts. having that body type they are more likely to go viral.

Sources:

How does social media affect your body image? National Eating Disorders Association. (2018, August 28). Retrieved April 4, 2022, from https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/blog/how-does-social-media-affect-your-body-image

How does social media influence body image? EmotionMatters. (2021, February 2). Retrieved April 4, 2022, from https://emotionmatters.co.uk/2018/10/04/how-does-social-media-influence-body-image/#:~:text=Studies%20show%20that%2088%25%20of,that%20the%20comparison%20is%20unfavourable.