Research Paper on Negative Effects of Social Media on Education

Social media negatively impacts the average child’s education. While social media seems like it would be very beneficial to a student's learning capability, it can actually decrease a child's performance in school. It seems that the younger the student is, the more social media affects their learning capabilities.  A study in 2015 showed that a freshman in college has worse grades when using social media for over 2 hours a day. With sophomores and juniors, time on Facebook while studying worsened their GPA. However, time spent on social media for seniors had no impact on their grades because by senior year, students have gotten better at multitasking. This means that when using social media, 75% of the college students had a negative impact on their learning performance. As we move into the younger years, we see an estimate of about a 0.76 GPA difference when comparing students who do and don’t use social media when studying. A study shows a 6.41% increase in student performance in a school that has cell phones banned. This demonstrates how social media can be a hindrance to a student's education by contributing to a decrease in grades. As well as a negative impact on performance, when using the internet, the user is granted the ability to cheat. Other students can post the answers to a test on social media for other students to use. The company has shown 76 examples of students putting answers on the internet. Cheating does not help a person's learning skills and actually deteriorates a student's intelligence if they rely on the internet to increase their performance in school, since they are learning nothing from looking up the answers instead of solving it. Since social media is a major source that enables cheating, it negatively impacts a student's education. How can you say social media is beneficial to our society when it is withering away the average student's performance?

As well as the hindrance on education, the communication that people can access because of social media can be very negative. At first glance, the communication that the internet provides seems extraordinary with no flaws. However, because of internet sites, quarrels can now happen virtually. About 31% of teens have argued over something that happened on social media. Text messages online could potentially cause fights and arguments. Something that happened online causes more than double the arguments compared to something that happened outside the internet. Since research found that 91% of teens that use the internet to meet with their friends online, the  amount of problems caused because of online quarrels gets outrageous. This is due to how fast communication is online. Meaning that since messages can get sent instantly, arguments can happen almost instantly. However, communication does not only lead to arguments, it also introduces cyberbullying. There are too many people being bullied online, with 52% of students have stated that they have been cyberbullied, Facebook being the main site of cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is very harmful, almost doubling the chance of a middle school student attempting suicide. A study in 2020 states that not only cyberbullying victims, but also cyberbullies have shown omens of PTSD, percentages being 39% for victims and 29% for cyberbullies. Because of the internet, bullying can happen at any time through the use of social media. The consequences of cyberbullying happen much faster compared to face-to-face bullying due to how quick communication travels in social media. This means that bullying is happening at a much faster rate. The drawbacks of communication do not only apply to the younger ages, it also affects adults. Social media has an influence in politics. In the 2008 election, more than 25% of the voters used social media to gain information on the 2008 campaign. Facebook supporters for the candidates also had an impact on the election of 2008. While this may seem like a benefit for politics, there is one major flaw in social media that is detrimental to politics, which is the reliability of the source of information. Some of the sources that voters use to learn about the campaign could be biased, exaggerated, or completely false. This is possible without the internet, but the spread of information about the election happens much faster compared to other forms of communication such as newspapers. Meaning that the communication speed that social media provides is actually a drawback to our society.