Social media has transformed how people connect and share experiences, giving rise to a new digital phenomenon: social media influencers. Such people who have many followers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have a great influence over their followers’ thinking, decision-making, and even actions. Despite all the good and continued positivism from influencers, their influence on young minds is alarming due to various reasons.
Influencers as Role Models for the Youth
The so-called opinion leaders are considered ‘contemporary ‘referents’ and hence, fashion icons, especially for the younger generations. Most of them stage a successful, beautiful, and popular lifestyle. This has led to increased cases of what might be called “fake” posts, where influencers present an ideal and unattainable existence of glamour and excess.
To youth particularly this content serves as admiration and emulation of these influentials. It is not wrong for one person to admire another person. Promoting motivational, educational, or philanthropic messages has a positive influence as it can motivate followers to set goals and achieve or support various worthy causes. However, the problem with this content is that it is still selective and ends up giving an unrealistic and unrepresentative picture of the world.
The Pitfalls of Aspirational Content
One of the main problems we encounter while considering influencers as the advertising tool is the role models they set and the messages they convey. Most influencers share perfect physiques, skin, teeth, and body stature, all thanks to beads, camera lenses, apps, and doctor’s touches. This can eventually make young followers compare themselves in the wrong way which leads to negative feelings regarding their body and at worst can trigger eating disorders.
Also, they often recommend some goods and services, from exclusive fashion accessories to beauty supplements, so. consumerist culture thrives. Such exposure can force young people to purchase products they do not require or could otherwise not afford, which would put financial stress, or encourage unhealthy spending.
The Impact on Mental Health
Today, the use of social media is not just limited to the buying behavior perspective. It highly influences the well-being of people, especially the youth. Instagram and TikTok, for example, are social networks that are built to provide users with something to scroll through for hours. Young people usually invest time to read posts, or watch videos, and evaluate themselves with standards based on others or stars.
Ideally, perfect, attractive, and cool lives shown by the influencers result in low self-esteem, anxiety, and inferiority felt by the audience. To others, such exposure fosters the cultivation of a superficial perception of the world, and the individuals’ tendency to feel that they are failing in life.
A Balanced Perspective on Influencers
Nevertheless, stating this, I would like to note that those individuals we call influencers are not per se destructive. The majority do that by posting good and uplifting things about mental health, body positivity, and many others. Promoters of diversity, body positivity, and meaningful social justice show that creators can be constructive. However, people can only trust information that they find from influencers with some skepticism.
Realizing that many of these influencers are being paid to endorse the products is an important aspect in trying to distinguish between recommendations and marketing. While young people are active consumers of information published on the Internet, their parents and educators bear the critical responsibility of leading young people to be critical of the content they come across on social media.
The Role of Media Literacy
In that respect, whenever one is dealing with social media influencers, teaching the above-mentioned media literacy skills enables one to counter their negative impact. In so doing, young people become capable of separating realities from constructed fantasies in their social media world. Media literacy enables them to be savvy concerning all of this and makes them select how they would like to see themselves online.
Children and their caregivers should not only talk about the advantages and disadvantages of social media but also freely choose its topic. It is only natural, that by creating the proper environment they can build up a healthier and wiser young generation when it comes to the new digital world.
Striking a Healthy Balance
Social media influencers know how to influence society and how to bring people creativity and positive changes today. But those effects come at a price, especially in the developing brains of our children and young people. Several steps need to be considered to strike that balance; teaching young people to think critically about the content they see and consume, the need to move away from equating individual self-worth with the number of followers and likes, and the importance of recognizing the purpose behind influencer posts.
Only when youths will master media literacy and awareness there will be a chance that many will be able to find constructive uses of social media while leaving behind the destructiveness of their lives. Parents, educators, and society in turn are required to prepare the successive generation to be wise when facing the world of influencers.
Therefore, social media influencers possess a lot of power over their target followers, especially the youth. In essence, social media remains a double-edged sword to young people since it must be harnessed in a means that helps young people to be more wise in thinking, about social media. By teaching the public, increasing their knowledge as well as making them aware, we can avoid cases of the info
