The Negative Influence Of Social Media On Young People

1. Introduction

Our world when we were kids was definitely different than the current world that our kids are living in. We used to pass messages to our friends using paper notes, but our youngsters are texting or instant messaging their friends using their mobile devices. We wrote about things that happened in our lives in our diaries which were more private, but they write on their blogs or post their status on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram which are more public. When we were playing board games, our youths are playing online games and other electronic games. We used to listen to music through the radio or cassettes using Walkman, our kids are downloading songs from iTunes or listening to songs from YouTube. In fact, our parents did not

The Internet has become a part of our daily routines from e-commerce, work purposes, education to entertainment and socialization. Despite its benefits, there are some downsides to it. A study shows that social media use among employees opens the door for security risks: information leakage, malware attacks, espionage, sabotage and decrease organizational productivity (Abdul Molok, Chang, & Ahmad, 2013). Social media with its geo-tagging capability may also allow users to be physically harassed by stalkers. If these dangers of social media, particularly social networking sites, can happen to adults, what about the young people who are less matured and less

However, in the U.S., teenagers are grouped as persons between the ages of 13 to 17 and those between 18 to 29 are considered as young adults. In this paper, youth or adolescents are referred to as social media users who are between the ages of 15 to 25 years.

Figure 1 shows the results from CyberSecurity Malaysia (2014) about Malaysian digital citizens and their adoption of social network sites particularly Facebook. It portrays massive adoption of social media users in which these sites were accessed and viewed 14 billion times every month and 88% of Malaysia Internet users accessed Facebook. Out of 27 million people in Malaysia, 13 million Malaysians were Facebook users. According to CyberSecurity Malaysia (2014), nearly 50% of Malaysian Facebook users were between 13 – 24 years of age. However, since Facebook only allows its users to be 13 and above, it is not surprising that some children would lie about being less than 13 and declare that they are 13 in order to create a Facebook