Auld, S. (2019, November 4). Social media and low self-esteem. ACC Blog.

Retrieved
December 13, 2021, from https://www.acc.edu.au/blog/social-media-low-self-esteem/.

The rise in smartphone use has linked with an increase in depression rates. In a 2017 study published in
the journal Clinical Psychological Science, researchers looked at the use of social media/smartphones,
depression, and suicide death rates in over 500,000 US teenagers in grades 8 to 12. They discovered a 33
percent increase in the number of adolescents with high levels of depressive symptoms between 2010
and 2015, as well as a 31 percent increase in suicides. Females were virtually entirely responsible for the
increase.

The study's primary author noticed that the rise in depressed symptoms coincided with the usage of
smartphones during that time period. There was also an increase in the number of students seeking help
from counseling centers, primarily for despair and anxiety.

Those who spent more time on non-screen activities (such as face-to-face social interaction, sports, and
religious services) were less likely to report mental health difficulties.

Another study, published in JAMA Psychiatry recently, looked at the use of social media by 6,595
adolescents. They discovered that adolescents who spend more than three hours per day on social
media are more likely to develop mental health issues, particularly internalizing problems (suffering on
the inside, including symptoms like anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, negative self-image, and
loneliness).

Shaohai Jiang, A. N. (2020, May 6). The effects of Instagram use, social comparison, and self-
esteem on social anxiety: A survey study in Singapore. SAGE Journals. Retrieved
December 13, 2021, from
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305120912488.

Social comparison also raised social anxiety, according to our findings. Users of social media frequently
compare their beauty, talent, status, and social skills to those of others (Feinstein et al., 2013). When
others selectively present more favorable information, such comparisons elicit strong psychological
responses (Yang & Robinson, 2018). Instagram offers a variety of filters for editing and enhancing
photos, and exposure to these idealized images of others might trigger unpleasant feelings, resulting to
psychological problems including social anxiety (Sherlock & Wagstaff, 2018).

It's also worth noting that self-esteem acts as a mediator. Our findings revealed that social comparison
had a significant negative impact on self-esteem. Previous research has found that people who have a
higher social comparison orientation have a weaker self-perception, lower self-esteem, and more
negative moods (Jang et al., 2016). The identity processing theory explains how social comparison leads
to the adoption of identity processing patterns, which leads to low self-esteem (Berzonsky, 1988, 2008).
Social comparison, for example, promotes awareness of certain important norms while using the
normative approach (e.g., beauty standard, correctness of opinion). When users believe they diverge
from the norms, they are more likely to have an unfavorable opinion of themselves, which encourages
them to change in order to conform to the referent group's expectations and values. In addition, social
media users that employ the diffuse-avoidant style choose to ignore online voices in order to maintain
their self-images. In the long run, however, such avoidance will alienate people from online networks,
reducing their self-esteem (Yang et al., 2018). Lower self-esteem was also linked to higher social anxiety
in our study, which is consistent with previous studies (de Jong, 2002; Ritter et al., 2013). As one's self-
esteem declines, the person's perceived inadequacy may lead to unfavorable social network navigation
and interpretation, and such perceived disapproving responses may raise social anxiety (Heatherton &
Wyland, 2003). Self-esteem is one component that explains for individual differences in emotional states
while engaging with others, according to McCarroll et al. (2009), with high self-esteem helping to
overcome negative thoughts about others' reactions and minimizing the risk of unfavorable social
interactions.

Steinsbekk, S., Wichstrøm, L., Stenseng, F., Nesi, J., Hygen, B. W., & Skalická, V. (2020,
August 20). The impact of social media use on appearance self-esteem from childhood to
adolescence – a 3-wave community study. Computers in Human Behavior. Retrieved
December 13, 2021, from
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563220302806.

The current study used a community sample from childhood through adolescence and found that
increasing other-oriented social media use predicted worse appearance self-esteem from ages 10 to 12
and 12 to 14, whereas self-oriented social media use had no effect. In addition, the findings revealed
significant gender differences: the impact of other-oriented social media use on appearance self-esteem
was considerable in females but not in boys. There was no evidence of a reciprocal relationship between
appearance self-esteem and social media use. The use of cross-sectional studies, simplistic measures of
general frequency of usage (Krause et al., 2019), and statistical approaches that confound between and
within-person effects have hampered research on adolescent social media use.