Over the years it has become a habit of scrolling through all of your social media pages, like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Where it started with only reading texts, social media has evolved to a platform full of pictures. The question is how much are those pictures affecting your view on yourself?
It is not uncommon that the media is showing unrealistic beauty standards. Multiple studies indicated that there is a correlation between social media and body image. However, there is no proof that social media causes a negative body image.
A survey conducted showed that women compare themselves negatively mostly with their own peer group and celebrities. However, the question that arises is: “Is everything real what you see?” For example, take the private jet studio in Los Angeles. Influencers go there to make the best Instagram-worthy pictures where it looks like they are in a private jet, but this is far from the truth. It is all about creating the perfect life on social media.
You probably have heard about or seen the documentary called “the Social Dilemma”. They showed that social media is not about posting something online anymore, it is about generating likes. The more likes you get the better and otherwise people are questioning themselves whether they are good or beautiful enough.
With the many filters possible on social media channels people have the idea that those filters are the beauty standards. Recently, Google and Snapchat have been facing some issues with the term “beauty filters”. Both have abandoned this term and instead of calling it ‘beauty filters’ both companies started to name it “retouch”.
The reason behind renaming the term is that Google conducted multiple studies based on the mental health of adults and children. The results of those studies showed that those ‘beauty filters’ could negatively impact the mental health of both adults and children.
Social media and the view on yourself will be an ongoing topic as social media is getting more integrated into our lives. The danger is that we are getting too involved in this and that social media becomes a standard where everybody compares itself with.
References:
https://medium.com/@shrishtisaraf/the-manipulation-of-body-image-by-social-media-6f4030297f35
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190311-how-social-media-affects-body-image
