What would you be able to do for a like? Buying bots? Posing half-naked? Lie? Likes have become a sort of “exam” on social networks: you need approval, like, be viral … According to a study by The Social Media Family, every day on Instagram there are more than 4,000 million likes, double the number of users assets that the platform has worldwide. But what is behind those numbers? What is behind a “like”?
From Qustodio, the leading digital education platform for families, they explain the emotional and psychological dependence that social networks cause in children. It should be borne in mind that, according to the latest Qustodio report, ‘From change to adaptation: living and learning in a digital world’, in 2021 Spanish minors spent an average of almost 180 minutes a day between TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat , Twitter and Pinterest, the five most followed social networks by the youngest.
It is about three hours a day in which minors interact with their friends, follow their favorite influencers and upload their own content: stories, images, videos … Behind these publications, young people try to please on social networks and, in many occasions, his way of measuring it is through likes. In fact, the same Instagram allows, from May 2021, the possibility to choose whether or not to show the number of “likes” to try to reduce the pressure on publications.
And it would not be the first time that minors suffer from mental problems due to the pressure of social networks: depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, cyberbullying, addiction or even suicide. According to a UNICEF study, 25% of Spanish teenagers have ever experienced fear on social networks, 20% anguish and 14% discrimination. Some traumas that Spanish society is aware of, as shown by the survey carried out this year by the Ministry of Economy and Digital Transformation: 71% of people over the age of 15 believe that social networks generate anxiety, the 43% loss of quality sleep and 48% believe they are exposing people to cyberbullying. Despite this, the Digital Report Spain 2022 indicates that 9 out of 10 Spaniards use social networks.
Qustodio experts warn of the danger that excessive pressure from social networks can generate on the little ones. And, although the platforms themselves try to reduce the emotional impact they generate, minors are exposed to emotional and psychological dependence, which can generate:
- Low self-esteem: Not getting the expected number of likes can lead to frustration and a sense of inferiority compared to friends or family.
- Identity Issues: It’s very common for teens not to show themselves as they are on social media. The posture forces them to analyze each publication and to project an image of themselves that does not always correspond to reality.
- Over-attention: When uploading a publication, young people may spend too much time seeing the path it generates and whether they get the expected feedback.
- Risky situations: To have a greater impact on social networks, young people can take pictures of themselves or engage in risky activities simply by being able to share them later.
- Addiction: a common phenomenon among the youngest is to continuously publish their daily life on social platforms: meals, study, parties, sports …
Eduardo Cruz, CEO of Qustodio, assures that “a balanced digital diet allows you to spend time daily or weekly on these platforms without generating excessive emotional dependence on them. To do this, it is often necessary to help minors achieve this balance by controlling the use of mobile phones or by limiting some networks to a certain age. Everything possible must be done so that the life of young people does not depend on their activity on the networks ”.
