A couple named Lou Ree and Avery Scott were confused that their daughter Anna used social media like a teenage girl and, like countless other girls, believed that she was ugly and no one would love her. One night, Lori and Avery were in the car when a neighbor called. 'I'm sorry.' The neighbor went to check on Anna and found out that Anna had committed suicide with a pistol in the house. Those people were shocked and asked, 'But he is alive, isn't he?' The answer came, 'No.' Lori and Avery buried Anna on the hillside of their farm. Rodeo cowboys came to mourn him, one of them brought a wagon to carry his ashes, and thirty other cowboys rode behind him. A video of the mourning procession was posted online and has been viewed more than sixteen thousand times. Anna's fear was wrong. Thus, thousands of people are ready to love him! A former Facebook product manager claimed the company was aware of Facebook's harmful effects but preferred 'profit over security'. Lori found her dead daughter Anna's social media account open. It had feeds full of suicides, self-harm and eating disorders: Anna told a friend she'd seen a live-streamed truly gruesome suicide she'd seen on TikTok. 'I have to break free from this social media bond.' He said. But she could not leave. Anna shuddered at the thought that if her parents found out what was going on in their daughter's mind, they would forcefully commit her to a mental hospital. Attorneys general of forty-one US states and the District of Columbia have sued the social media platform, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, for harming children by promoting social media addiction. Both the United Kingdom and the European Union have enacted new legislation that increases the liability of companies for content on platforms The US Surgeon General, Vivek H. Idol! Dr. Murthy took to social media platforms and said, 'This is likely to cause mental health damage to teenagers.' It has called for such warning labels to be placed. A.D. Between 2007 and 2021, Americans between the ages of 10 and 24 who commit suicide have increased by 62 percent. The Centers for Disease Control says that teenage girls who thought about suicide were one in five in 2011, rising to one in three in 2021. There has also been a sharp rise in depression among drug-addicted teenagers and teenagers who have pistols or guns in their homes, and fifty-three percent of Americans now believe social media is to blame. Most American teenagers check social media regularly; More than half of them spend at least four hours a day on their phones. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University say that spending more than three hours a day online increases depression in teenagers. A 2023 report found that reducing social media exposure significantly improves self-esteem in teens and young adults. If you cannot differentiate between the 'real' world and the 'virtual' world, the result is mental confusion and physical illness. Facebook founder-president Sean Parker said in 2017, 'God only knows what Facebook is doing to our children's brains.' Social media addiction is as destructive as nicotine, alcohol or cocaine addiction. Its effect is similar to that of narcotic drugs, which activate the brain's 'neurological pleasure circuitry', the pleasure peak. It's as murderous as putting kids in a 24-hour gambling casino and feeding them shots of chocolate-flavored liquor. Social media platforms tap into our innate tendency to compare ourselves to others. It acquires users by publishing the number of likes, views and followers, which has made the social-media platform an arena for such a like-competition. Nearly one in three teenage girls who have a negative opinion of their bodies blame Instagram themselves. They are bad for their mental health but helpless. Last year, Arturo Bejar, Facebook's former director of engineering, told the US Congress that nearly forty percent of thirteen- to fifteen-year-old users compared themselves to others. The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, announced to make users' profiles private. This is just the conclusion, originally from a lengthy article in the New Yorker magazine, that makes one shudder to read. Cellphones are used more in India than in America, and teenagers will be proportionally more. Any statistics on them? Jai Durga!
Image Credit: (Divya-Bhaskar): Images/graphics belong to (Divya-Bhaskar).
