How Does Social Media Influence Self-Esteem?

We all know the sound of that Facebook pop. The excitement we may get knowing that we have a Facebook notification. People join social media outlets for various reasons; Facebook can be wonderful for connecting across the world, staying in contact with business partners, friends, and family. Clearly, those connections are appealing because three years after its release, Facebook already had an estimated 21 million members (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007). As of June 2015, there were an estimated 1.49 billion Monthly Active Users (MAUs) (Facebook, Inc., 2015). According to research by Feinstein (2013), the more one uses social media, the higher their risk of depressive behavior and depression (Feinstein et al., 2013). Other studies reported that Facebook users most often had poor self-esteem compared with participants who did not use Facebook or spent less time on Facebook (Vogel, Rose, Roberts, &Eckles, 2014). Self-esteem is self-value; how much value people place on …show more content…
Previous studies have focused purely on social media in terms of individual profiles; just viewing, or just building profiles. Not only is this study looking at a more narrow spectrum—social media through social networking sites (SNS), but it is also taking into account media in the form of exposure to television. This is important to do because social media has been said to have negative impacts on self-esteem; television exposure has also been said to have negative impacts on self-esteem. But what can the combination do? With both social media and regular media in combination, social comparison can greatly escalate and can sometimes cause disastrous effects. This being said, it was hypothesized that a person will report lower self-esteem after exposure to television, and that more frequent use of social media (SNS) would result in lower reports of self-esteem as opposed to no social media