“Sign in”. It’s just a button. What can happen if you press it? You just don’t want to feel excluded from the environment everyone seems to belong to. Maybe we will have fun together when we’ll share posts, more than likely you have nothing to suffer from. Pressing it, you enter a world whose impact on young people’s minds is not yet fully known.
Many people I know, including myself, saw, not just once, something they didn’t want to on the internet. If you are not careful and you start this activity early, that is more and more common and consuming you for hours on end. After some time, you won’t want to just scroll on social media and see your best friends posting stories from cool places. Your attention span is decreasing more and more, and you start searching for content that is harder to forget. You get to another part of the internet, which according to some, is even more populated than the nice and safe pages that are presented to you when you first sign up there. We are always warned from all sides about the dangers we face on the internet, especially not talking to strangers from there, but this is one of the facts that adults are too concerned about, instead of paying attention to what affects their children the most. Yes, it is true that as a child, you can trust the wrong people, and there are a lot of people who have weird intentions, with URLs that are more than strange, but with proper guidance, a child should be able to make the difference between the good and the bad.
But what should we do when the dangers are dressed in influencers and models, with their doll-like faces, perfect skin, and aesthetic outfits? These have a huge impact on teens' minds and bodies, I can tell it from my experience, and so many others. As a young teen with a still-growing body, the perception of it can be altered if you relate too much to those perfect standards. We all know, real life has no filter. But how can we explain to some young people that their “imperfections” must not be hidden or even removed? Sadly, this is how the comparison to those from online platforms begins, then compared to those around us, you even start comparing others to what you have seen on the internet. We are comparing all the time to ideals that cannot be achieved, which don’t even exist in real life. All the standards are exaggerated to the maximum to take advantage of the insecurities created by young people.
Teenagers live in a place where everyone hates the way they look, but where everything is hidden by filters and false smiles, where everyone cares more about the opinion of others, except their own. A world that is mostly unknown to the majority of its users and which protects its secrets deep down.
Editor- Melissa Parv
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