“We’ve started to wonder: where do our personal brands end and our actual personalities begin?”
The extent to which social media has embedded itself in our unconscious fantasies is bewildering, to say the least.
The greatest illusion is the belief that our social media accounts represent a truer version of ourselves, something that is really common in content creators. We edit out the imperfections, filter the dark side and disregard the flaws thus portraying a glamorously perfect life just so that the society can accept us. A 2017 survey by the UK’s Royal Society for Public Health on the effects of social media on British youth linked use of these social media platforms to anxiety, depression, lack of sleep, worries about body image and “FOMO” or fear of missing out, with Instagram being the most damaging platform, especially amongst women.
The entry fee to participate in the race of social media presence is our peace and mental health. We have willingly dedicated our lives to an algorithm which understands our emotions better now by learning from our experiences. The question lingering in everyone's mind is “What will we do if we let our phones die.” The most obvious evidence of the toxic standards is Lil Miquela — the computer-generated Instagram it-girl — who has been the most talked about influencer we’ve had in years. Social media worships unrealistic beauty and leaves most feeling awful about their natural and true self. Moreover cyber bullying adds fuel to the fire. Charlotte Dawson, a TV presenter and a judge on Australia's Next Top Model, killed herself in 2014 following a campaign of cyber-bullying against her on Twitter. Consequently in 2015, the Enhancing Online Safety Act created an eSafety Commissioner with the power to demand that social media companies take down harassing or abusive posts. Australia also passed the Sharing of Abhorrent Violent Material Act in 2019, introducing criminal penalties for social media companies
Even though no one can deny the myriad of opportunities created by these platforms and multitudes of benefits brought by them, it’s high time to limit the influence they have on our lives. It’s time to accept and acknowledge the fact that social media isn’t real and it is a fool’s errand to aspire to live an instagrammable life. In this area, Germany has taken a step by the NetzDG law that required social media companies to review complaints about the content they were posting, remove illegal content within 24 hours and publish updates on their performance every 6 months or else pay a set fine. The EU also introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which set rules on how companies, including social media platforms, store and use people's data. Furthermore, sites such as Twitter, Google and WhatsApp are blocked in China. China has hundreds of thousands of cyber-police, who monitor social media platforms and screen messages that are deemed to be politically sensitive.Russia's data laws from 2015 required social media companies to store any data about Russians on servers within the country, thus preventing leakage of important information. The objective of all these measures is to make social media a safe space for everyone.
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