Effects of Social Media
June 2021
By: Hailey Capuzzo
Social media is meant to be a positive environment where you share pictures of yourself, friends, family, and the exciting things you’re doing. It’s supposed to be a safe place to express yourself and share your life with others.
Unfortunately, as technology advances, pictures become less real. Influencers, models, and other people in the spotlight tend to photoshop their pictures to an unrealistic extent. As this has become so normalized, it’s also harming the self image and self confidence of the people seeing these pictures.
Photoshop and photo editing isn’t the problem. The issue is in the fact that big influencers will use forms of photo editing and fail to admit to it. Some won’t say they edited their photos and some will completely deny doing it when that just is not the case.
If heavily edited photos are constantly posted on social media, these become the norm. These unrealistic and extremely difficult to obtain bodies become the beauty standard. Living in 2021 as a teenager, it is almost impossible to go onto any form of social media without seeing a model or an influencer immediately after opening the app.
No one should have to see themselves as less than or not good enough because they aren’t the “beauty standard”. People with bigger platforms should be using those platforms to show people, especially young girls and young women, that they don’t need to look a certain way to be enough. If you’re constantly seeing people that look a certain way being praised for the way they look, there’s a good chance a lot of people would feel pressured to look the same way.
Seeing a lack of diversity in the bodies of these influencers and models can easily cause the people seeing the photos to have a lessened sense of self worth and self confidence. On social media, as well as in the real world, more positivity needs to be spread. There needs to be
reminders that not everything on social media is real or influencers should be more honest about editing their photos. Even if the editing is obvious, it seems as if the influencer wishes that’s what they genuinely looked like so the people seeing the photos may also fall into the pressure of having to look a certain way.
Body positivity is often something that people preach about, but fail to practice. People shouldn’t be judged off of the way they look and no one should feel pressured to look a certain way to fit into the standards of society. Our society as a whole needs to do a better job of reminding people that they are unique and perfect in their own way.