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Thesis Statements about Social Media: 21 Examples and Tips

by Judy Jeni
January 27, 2024

Writing Thesis Statements Based On Social Media

A thesis statement is a sentence in the introduction paragraph of an essay that captures the purpose of the essay. Using thesis statements about social media as an example, I will guide you on how to write them well.

It can appear anywhere in the first paragraph of the essay but it is mostly preferred when it ends the introduction paragraph. learning how to write a thesis statement for your essay will keep you focused.

A thesis statement can be more than one sentence only when the essay is on complex topics and there is a need to break the statement into two. This means, a good thesis statement structures an essay and tells the reader what an essay is all about.

A good social media thesis statement should be about a specific aspect of social media and not just a broad view of the topic.

The statement should be on the last sentence of the first paragraph and should tell the reader about your stand on the social media issue you are presenting or arguing in the essay.

Reading an essay without a thesis statement is like solving a puzzle. Readers will have to read the conclusion to at least grasp what the essay is all about. It is therefore advisable to craft a thesis immediately after researching an essay.

Throughout your entire writing, every point in every paragraph should connect to the thesis. In case it doesn’t then probably you have diverged from the main issue of the essay.

How to Write a Thesis Statement?

Writing a thesis statement is important when writing an essay on any topic, not just about social media. It is the key to holding your ideas and arguments together into just one sentence.

The following are tips on how to write a good thesis statement:

Start With a Question and Develop an Answer

If the question is not provided, come up with your own. Start by deciding the topic and what you would like to find out about it.

Secondly, after doing some initial research on the topic find the answers to the topic that will help and guide the process of researching and writing.

Consequently, if you write a thesis statement that does not provide information about your research topic, you need to construct it again.

Be Specific

The main idea of your essay should be specific. Therefore, the thesis statement of your essay should not be vague. When your thesis statement is too general, the essay will try to incorporate a lot of ideas that can contribute to the loss of focus on the main ideas.

Similarly, specific and narrow thesis statements help concentrate your focus on evidence that supports your essay. In like manner, a specific thesis statement tells the reader directly what to expect in the essay.

Make the Argument Clear

Usually, essays with less than one thousand words require the statement to be clearer. Remember, the length of a thesis statement should be a single sentence, which calls for clarity.

In these short essays, you do not have the freedom to write long paragraphs that provide more information on the topic of the essay.

Likewise, multiple arguments are not accommodated. This is why the thesis statement needs to be clear to inform the reader of what your essay is all about.

If you proofread your essay and notice that the thesis statement is contrary to the points you have focused on, then revise it and make sure that it incorporates the main idea of the essay. Alternatively, when the thesis statement is okay, you will have to rewrite the body of your essay.

Question your Assumptions

Before formulating a thesis statement, ask yourself the basis of the arguments presented in the thesis statement.

Assumptions are what your reader assumes to be true before accepting an argument. Before you start, it is important to be aware of the target audience of your essay.

Thinking about the ways your argument may not hold up to the people who do not subscribe to your viewpoint is crucial.

Alongside, revise the arguments that may not hold up with the people who do not subscribe to your viewpoint.

Take a Strong Stand

A thesis statement should put forward a unique perspective on what your essay is about. Avoid using observations as thesis statements.

In addition, true common facts should be avoided. Make sure that the stance you take can be supported with credible facts and valid reasons.

Equally, don’t provide a summary, make a valid argument. If the first response of the reader is “how” and “why” the thesis statement is too open-ended and not strong enough.

Make Your Thesis Statement Seen

The thesis statement should be what the reader reads at the end of the first paragraph before proceeding to the body of the essay. understanding how to write a thesis statement, leaves your objective summarized.

Positioning may sometimes vary depending on the length of the introduction that the essay requires. However, do not overthink the thesis statement. In addition, do not write it with a lot of clever twists.

Do not exaggerate the stage setting of your argument. Clever and exaggerated thesis statements are weak. Consequently, they are not clear and concise.

Good thesis statements should concentrate on one main idea. Mixing up ideas in a thesis statement makes it vague. Read on how to write an essay thesis as part of the steps to write good essays.

A reader may easily get confused about what the essay is all about if it focuses on a lot of ideas. When your ideas are related, the relation should come out more clearly.

21 Examples of Thesis Statements about Social Media

Recently, social media is growing rapidly. Ironically, its use in remote areas has remained relatively low.
Social media has revolutionized communication but it is evenly killing it by limiting face-to-face communication.
Identically, social media has helped make work easier. However,at the same time it is promoting laziness and irresponsibility in society today.
The widespread use of social media and its influence has increased desperation, anxiety, and pressure among young youths.
Social media has made learning easier but its addiction can lead to bad grades among university students.
As a matter of fact, social media is contributing to the downfall of mainstream media. Many advertisements and news are accessed on social media platforms today.
Social media is a major promoter of immorality in society today with many platforms allowing sharing of inappropriate content.
Significantly, social media promotes copycat syndrome that positively and negatively impacts the behavior adapted by different users.
In this affluent era, social media has made life easy but consequently affects productivity and physical strength.
The growth of social media and its ability to reach more people increases growth in today’s business world.
The freedom on social media platforms is working against society with the recent increase in hate speech and racism.
Lack of proper verification when signing up on social media platforms has increased the number of minors using social media exposing them to cyberbullying and inappropriate content.
The freedom of posting anything on social media has landed many in trouble making the need to be cautious before posting anything important.
The widespread use of social media has contributed to the rise of insecurity in urban centers
Magazines and journals have spearheaded the appreciation of all body types but social media has increased the rate of body shaming in America.
To stop abuse on Facebook and Twitter the owners of these social media platforms must track any abusive post and upload and ban the users from accessing the apps.
Social media benefits marketing by creating brand recognition, increasing sales, and measuring success with analytics by tracking data.
Social media connects people around the globe and fosters new relationships and the sharing of ideas that did not exist before its inception.
The increased use of social media has led to the creation of business opportunities for people through social networking, particularly as social media influencers.
Learning is convenient through social media as students can connect with education systems and learning groups that make learning convenient.
With most people spending most of their free time glued to social media, quality time with family reduces leading to distance relationships and reduced love and closeness.

Social Media Thesis Statement: the Impact of Social Media on Mental Health

This essay will present a thesis statement on the impact of social media on mental health. It will explore how social media use correlates with issues like anxiety, depression, and self-esteem, drawing on current research and psychological theories. The piece will discuss both the negative and positive aspects of social media, considering factors such as online connectivity, cyberbullying, and the pressure of social comparison. It will also suggest directions for future research and potential solutions. PapersOwl offers a variety of free essay examples on the topic of Adolescence.

How it works

Most individuals know someone with a mental health problem or addictive behavior, but have they ever thought about where it could have risen from? The rise of anxiety and depression have been believed to drive a child’s life. Feeling driven by a motor and needing to check your phone constantly can result in negative effects. Mental health issues and addictive behaviors stem from a conglomerate of sources, but more directly, have been exasperated by social media in modern society.

1 Social Media, Anxiety, and the ‘Like’ Syndrome
2 Social Media and the Onset of Depression Symptoms
3 The Correlation Between Social Media Usage and Addiction
4 The Social Media Thesis Statement: Balancing the Scale of Positive and Negative Effects
5 References:

Social Media, Anxiety, and the ‘Like’ Syndrome

Mental health disorders can be one of the several negative effects given to a child by their phone.

It has been shown that anxiety is a huge factor coming from social media, “Other studies have shown that people with social anxiety prefer communicating with people via the internet rather than in person, so it would be an ideal way to initiate relationships” (Maldonado). Even some social networking environments, such as Facebook, can cause anxiety. “Recent research has shown that using social networking sites, namely Facebook, can increase people’s stress levels, produce anxiety, and negatively affect a person’s sense of self” (Maldonado). Even if people were to not look at the platforms and just focus on the ‘likes,’ problems would be found throughout. “The need to gain “likes” on social media can cause teens to make choices they would otherwise not make, including altering appearance, engaging in negative behaviors, and accepting risky social media challenges” (Hurley). As Hurley also claimed, “It’s difficult to build empathy and compassion (our best weapons in the war on bullying) when teens spend more time “engaging” online than they do in person.”

Social Media and the Onset of Depression Symptoms

Symptoms of depression are also prevalent in social media. As Hurley once said, “Though many teens know that their peers share only their highlight reels on social media, it’s very difficult to avoid making comparisons. Everything from physical appearance to life circumstances to perceived successes and failures is under a microscope on social media.” Most teenagers have gullible minds, so when they see someone more physically fit or even happier than they are, they automatically get down on themselves. Seeing somebody live a better life hurts most people, but some make the most of it by turning that into an encouraging way to get that body or make more money. Even though to some observers, it seems to be obvious that depression can also be linked to social media. According to Gordon, “Researchers are just beginning to establish a link between depression and social media.” Most say that you could have been raised with depression, which could be true, but that depression would not have flared up as much as it did once they started using these social media platforms. Even stated by a credited author, “From a mental health perspective, concerns have been raised about the negative impact of excessive use of social networking sites on the health and well-being of users, especially that of young people, who are enthusiastic users of this technology” (Griffiths). This quote proves the meaning behind the gullible minds of young ones; it can easily affect them – even causing an addiction.

The Correlation Between Social Media Usage and Addiction

As well as producing anxiety and depression, social media also has a strong link to addiction. “In a study by researchers at the UCLA brain mapping center, they found that certain regions of teen brains became activated by ‘likes’ on social media, sometimes causing them to want to use social media more” (Gordon). This statement shows just how easy it is to become addicted to posting about yourself on social media. Sometimes, this leads to teens posting pictures or captions they should not be. Obsessing over likes can lead to other impulses, such as losing sleep. “Sometimes teens spend so many hours on social media that they begin to lose valuable sleep. Consequently, thus sleep loss can lead to moodiness, a drop-in grades, and overeating, as well exacerbated existing problems like depression, anxiety, and ADD” (Gordon). This obsessive behavior also leads to problems with your brain and body since you are losing sleep time, which also means losing energy. Losing energy can cause a variety of problems, some of which include anxiety and depression. Addictive behaviors do not only just stop at losing sleep but stem all the way to using your phone while driving. “Many people’s social media use is habitual, and it can start to spill over into other areas of their lives and be problematic and dangerous, such as checking social media while driving” (Griffiths). This part of the addictive behaviors could easily be named the most atrocious. This type of behavior could easily kill or seriously harm an individual. Losing a loved one over a Facebook status shows a lot about the state that the human brain is in.

The Social Media Thesis Statement: Balancing the Scale of Positive and Negative Effects

Besides all the negative effects of social media, it also has a few positive effects on the human brain. “Although they can cause problems, these sites also have been shown to have positive effects on people. It can help psychologists monitor the mental health of patients, spread awareness about issues (including mental health disorders), connect people with one another, and make the world a little smaller” (Maldonado). Rewarding your brain with positive upbringings can really determine night or day. If someone reaches a certain level on a game or gets the reaction, they wanted on a certain post, that could easily encourage you to keep positive vibes and continue doing what they love. As Maldonado stated, “The best way for anyone to take advantage of the benefits of these sites while minimizing the downsides is to moderate his or her use and maintain a level of detachment.” Taking time away from social media would help minimize the chances of becoming depressed over a post, which could really help a teenager’s mental health.

By this time, people have probably concluded that several humans on this earth are way too attached to their phones. If people were to see someone prioritize their phone over their communication with the outside world, help them experience life as it is. If social media becomes an addiction, it could eventually lead to anxiety and depression. Even though social media has negative effects, it can also have effects that can help the human brain grow and experience positive thoughts. With that being said, most people would say social media has more negative effects than positive. The addictive behaviors and mental health issues that arise from the internet can cause several problems and become a burden in this society.

References:

Gordon, Sherri. ‘5 Ways Social Media Affects Teen Mental Health.’ very well family, About, Inc (Dotdash), 30 July 2018, www.verywellfamily.com/ways-social-media-affects-teen-mental-health-4144769. Accessed 17 September 2018.
Griffiths, Mark D.’ Addicted to Social Media?’ Psychology Today. Sussex Publishers, LLC, 7 May 2018, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-excess/201805/addicted-social-media. Accessed 17 September 2018.
Hurley, Katie. ‘Social Media and Teens: How Does Social Media Affect Teenagers Mental Health.’ Psycom. Vertical Health LLC, 13 February 2018, www.psycom.net/social-media-teen-mental-health. Accessed 17 September 2018.
Maldonado, Marissa. ‘The Anxiety of Facebook.’ Psychcentral. 16 July 2016, www.psychcentral.com/lib/the-anxiety-of-facebook/. Accessed 18 September 2018.

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How Harmful Is Social Media?

In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he sought to explain, as the piece’s title had it, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anyone familiar with Haidt’s work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media. Although Haidt concedes that political polarization and factional enmity long predate the rise of the platforms, and that there are plenty of other factors involved, he believes that the tools of virality—Facebook’s Like and Share buttons, Twitter’s Retweet function—have algorithmically and irrevocably corroded public life. He has determined that a great historical discontinuity can be dated with some precision to the period between 2010 and 2014, when these features became widely available on phones.

“What changed in the 2010s?” Haidt asks, reminding his audience that a former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision of a four-year-old with a loaded weapon. “A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.” While the right has thrived on conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, the left has turned punitive: “When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And, unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.” Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: the rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”

These are, needless to say, common concerns. Chief among Haidt’s worries is that use of social media has left us particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias, or the propensity to fix upon evidence that shores up our prior beliefs. Haidt acknowledges that the extant literature on social media’s effects is large and complex, and that there is something in it for everyone. On January 6, 2021, he was on the phone with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke and the author of the recent book “ Breaking the Social Media Prism ,” when Bail urged him to turn on the television. Two weeks later, Haidt wrote to Bail, expressing his frustration at the way Facebook officials consistently cited the same handful of studies in their defense. He suggested that the two of them collaborate on a comprehensive literature review that they could share, as a Google Doc, with other researchers. (Haidt had experimented with such a model before.) Bail was cautious. He told me, “What I said to him was, ‘Well, you know, I’m not sure the research is going to bear out your version of the story,’ and he said, ‘Why don’t we see?’ ”

Bail emphasized that he is not a “platform-basher.” He added, “In my book, my main take is, Yes, the platforms play a role, but we are greatly exaggerating what it’s possible for them to do—how much they could change things no matter who’s at the helm at these companies—and we’re profoundly underestimating the human element, the motivation of users.” He found Haidt’s idea of a Google Doc appealing, in the way that it would produce a kind of living document that existed “somewhere between scholarship and public writing.” Haidt was eager for a forum to test his ideas. “I decided that if I was going to be writing about this—what changed in the universe, around 2014, when things got weird on campus and elsewhere—once again, I’d better be confident I’m right,” he said. “I can’t just go off my feelings and my readings of the biased literature. We all suffer from confirmation bias, and the only cure is other people who don’t share your own.”

Haidt and Bail, along with a research assistant, populated the document over the course of several weeks last year, and in November they invited about two dozen scholars to contribute. Haidt told me, of the difficulties of social-scientific methodology, “When you first approach a question, you don’t even know what it is. ‘Is social media destroying democracy, yes or no?’ That’s not a good question. You can’t answer that question. So what can you ask and answer?” As the document took on a life of its own, tractable rubrics emerged—Does social media make people angrier or more affectively polarized? Does it create political echo chambers? Does it increase the probability of violence? Does it enable foreign governments to increase political dysfunction in the United States and other democracies? Haidt continued, “It’s only after you break it up into lots of answerable questions that you see where the complexity lies.”

Haidt came away with the sense, on balance, that social media was in fact pretty bad. He was disappointed, but not surprised, that Facebook’s response to his article relied on the same three studies they’ve been reciting for years. “This is something you see with breakfast cereals,” he said, noting that a cereal company “might say, ‘Did you know we have twenty-five per cent more riboflavin than the leading brand?’ They’ll point to features where the evidence is in their favor, which distracts you from the over-all fact that your cereal tastes worse and is less healthy.”

After Haidt’s piece was published, the Google Doc—“Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review”—was made available to the public . Comments piled up, and a new section was added, at the end, to include a miscellany of Twitter threads and Substack essays that appeared in response to Haidt’s interpretation of the evidence. Some colleagues and kibbitzers agreed with Haidt. But others, though they might have shared his basic intuition that something in our experience of social media was amiss, drew upon the same data set to reach less definitive conclusions, or even mildly contradictory ones. Even after the initial flurry of responses to Haidt’s article disappeared into social-media memory, the document, insofar as it captured the state of the social-media debate, remained a lively artifact.

Near the end of the collaborative project’s introduction, the authors warn, “We caution readers not to simply add up the number of studies on each side and declare one side the winner.” The document runs to more than a hundred and fifty pages, and for each question there are affirmative and dissenting studies, as well as some that indicate mixed results. According to one paper, “Political expressions on social media and the online forum were found to (a) reinforce the expressers’ partisan thought process and (b) harden their pre-existing political preferences,” but, according to another, which used data collected during the 2016 election, “Over the course of the campaign, we found media use and attitudes remained relatively stable. Our results also showed that Facebook news use was related to modest over-time spiral of depolarization. Furthermore, we found that people who use Facebook for news were more likely to view both pro- and counter-attitudinal news in each wave. Our results indicated that counter-attitudinal exposure increased over time, which resulted in depolarization.” If results like these seem incompatible, a perplexed reader is given recourse to a study that says, “Our findings indicate that political polarization on social media cannot be conceptualized as a unified phenomenon, as there are significant cross-platform differences.”

Interested in echo chambers? “Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter,” which seems convincing—except that, as another team has it, “We do not find evidence supporting a strong characterization of ‘echo chambers’ in which the majority of people’s sources of news are mutually exclusive and from opposite poles.” By the end of the file, the vaguely patronizing top-line recommendation against simple summation begins to make more sense. A document that originated as a bulwark against confirmation bias could, as it turned out, just as easily function as a kind of generative device to support anybody’s pet conviction. The only sane response, it seemed, was simply to throw one’s hands in the air.

When I spoke to some of the researchers whose work had been included, I found a combination of broad, visceral unease with the current situation—with the banefulness of harassment and trolling; with the opacity of the platforms; with, well, the widespread presentiment that of course social media is in many ways bad—and a contrastive sense that it might not be catastrophically bad in some of the specific ways that many of us have come to take for granted as true. This was not mere contrarianism, and there was no trace of gleeful mythbusting; the issue was important enough to get right. When I told Bail that the upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear, he suggested that there was at least some firm ground. He sounded a bit less apocalyptic than Haidt.

“A lot of the stories out there are just wrong,” he told me. “The political echo chamber has been massively overstated. Maybe it’s three to five per cent of people who are properly in an echo chamber.” Echo chambers, as hotboxes of confirmation bias, are counterproductive for democracy. But research indicates that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life, where our social networks—in the original use of the term—are rarely heterogeneous. (Haidt told me that this was an issue on which the Google Doc changed his mind; he became convinced that echo chambers probably aren’t as widespread a problem as he’d once imagined.) And too much of a focus on our intuitions about social media’s echo-chamber effect could obscure the relevant counterfactual: a conservative might abandon Twitter only to watch more Fox News. “Stepping outside your echo chamber is supposed to make you moderate, but maybe it makes you more extreme,” Bail said. The research is inchoate and ongoing, and it’s difficult to say anything on the topic with absolute certainty. But this was, in part, Bail’s point: we ought to be less sure about the particular impacts of social media.

Bail went on, “The second story is foreign misinformation.” It’s not that misinformation doesn’t exist, or that it hasn’t had indirect effects, especially when it creates perverse incentives for the mainstream media to cover stories circulating online. Haidt also draws convincingly upon the work of Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, to sketch out a potential future in which the work of shitposting has been outsourced to artificial intelligence, further polluting the informational environment. But, at least so far, very few Americans seem to suffer from consistent exposure to fake news—“probably less than two per cent of Twitter users, maybe fewer now, and for those who were it didn’t change their opinions,” Bail said. This was probably because the people likeliest to consume such spectacles were the sort of people primed to believe them in the first place. “In fact,” he said, “echo chambers might have done something to quarantine that misinformation.”

The final story that Bail wanted to discuss was the “proverbial rabbit hole, the path to algorithmic radicalization,” by which YouTube might serve a viewer increasingly extreme videos. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this does happen, at least on occasion, and such anecdotes are alarming to hear. But a new working paper led by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, found that almost all extremist content is either consumed by subscribers to the relevant channels—a sign of actual demand rather than manipulation or preference falsification—or encountered via links from external sites. It’s easy to see why we might prefer if this were not the case: algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. “These are the three stories—echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms—but, when you look at the literature, they’ve all been overstated.” He thought that these findings were crucial for us to assimilate, if only to help us understand that our problems may lie beyond technocratic tinkering. He explained, “Part of my interest in getting this research out there is to demonstrate that everybody is waiting for an Elon Musk to ride in and save us with an algorithm”—or, presumably, the reverse—“and it’s just not going to happen.”

When I spoke with Nyhan, he told me much the same thing: “The most credible research is way out of line with the takes.” He noted, of extremist content and misinformation, that reliable research that “measures exposure to these things finds that the people consuming this content are small minorities who have extreme views already.” The problem with the bulk of the earlier research, Nyhan told me, is that it’s almost all correlational. “Many of these studies will find polarization on social media,” he said. “But that might just be the society we live in reflected on social media!” He hastened to add, “Not that this is untroubling, and none of this is to let these companies, which are exercising a lot of power with very little scrutiny, off the hook. But a lot of the criticisms of them are very poorly founded. . . . The expansion of Internet access coincides with fifteen other trends over time, and separating them is very difficult. The lack of good data is a huge problem insofar as it lets people project their own fears into this area.” He told me, “It’s hard to weigh in on the side of ‘We don’t know, the evidence is weak,’ because those points are always going to be drowned out in our discourse. But these arguments are systematically underprovided in the public domain.”

In his Atlantic article, Haidt leans on a working paper by two social scientists, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, who took on a comprehensive meta-analysis of about five hundred papers and concluded that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” Haidt writes, “The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.” Nyhan was less convinced that the meta-analysis supported such categorical verdicts, especially once you bracketed the kinds of correlational findings that might simply mirror social and political dynamics. He told me, “If you look at their summary of studies that allow for causal inferences—it’s very mixed.”

As for the studies Nyhan considered most methodologically sound, he pointed to a 2020 article called “The Welfare Effects of Social Media,” by Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow. For four weeks prior to the 2018 midterm elections, the authors randomly divided a group of volunteers into two cohorts—one that continued to use Facebook as usual, and another that was paid to deactivate their accounts for that period. They found that deactivation “(i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use.” But Gentzkow reminded me that his conclusions, including that Facebook may slightly increase polarization, had to be heavily qualified: “From other kinds of evidence, I think there’s reason to think social media is not the main driver of increasing polarization over the long haul in the United States.”

In the book “ Why We’re Polarized ,” for example, Ezra Klein invokes the work of such scholars as Lilliana Mason to argue that the roots of polarization might be found in, among other factors, the political realignment and nationalization that began in the sixties, and were then sacralized, on the right, by the rise of talk radio and cable news. These dynamics have served to flatten our political identities, weakening our ability or inclination to find compromise. Insofar as some forms of social media encourage the hardening of connections between our identities and a narrow set of opinions, we might increasingly self-select into mutually incomprehensible and hostile groups; Haidt plausibly suggests that these processes are accelerated by the coalescence of social-media tribes around figures of fearful online charisma. “Social media might be more of an amplifier of other things going on rather than a major driver independently,” Gentzkow argued. “I think it takes some gymnastics to tell a story where it’s all primarily driven by social media, especially when you’re looking at different countries, and across different groups.”

Another study, led by Nejla Asimovic and Joshua Tucker, replicated Gentzkow’s approach in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they found almost precisely the opposite results: the people who stayed on Facebook were, by the end of the study, more positively disposed to their historic out-groups. The authors’ interpretation was that ethnic groups have so little contact in Bosnia that, for some people, social media is essentially the only place where they can form positive images of one another. “To have a replication and have the signs flip like that, it’s pretty stunning,” Bail told me. “It’s a different conversation in every part of the world.”

Nyhan argued that, at least in wealthy Western countries, we might be too heavily discounting the degree to which platforms have responded to criticism: “Everyone is still operating under the view that algorithms simply maximize engagement in a short-term way” with minimal attention to potential externalities. “That might’ve been true when Zuckerberg had seven people working for him, but there are a lot of considerations that go into these rankings now.” He added, “There’s some evidence that, with reverse-chronological feeds”—streams of unwashed content, which some critics argue are less manipulative than algorithmic curation—“people get exposed to more low-quality content, so it’s another case where a very simple notion of ‘algorithms are bad’ doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It doesn’t mean they’re good, it’s just that we don’t know.”

Bail told me that, over all, he was less confident than Haidt that the available evidence lines up clearly against the platforms. “Maybe there’s a slight majority of studies that say that social media is a net negative, at least in the West, and maybe it’s doing some good in the rest of the world.” But, he noted, “Jon will say that science has this expectation of rigor that can’t keep up with the need in the real world—that even if we don’t have the definitive study that creates the historical counterfactual that Facebook is largely responsible for polarization in the U.S., there’s still a lot pointing in that direction, and I think that’s a fair point.” He paused. “It can’t all be randomized control trials.”

Haidt comes across in conversation as searching and sincere, and, during our exchange, he paused several times to suggest that I include a quote from John Stuart Mill on the importance of good-faith debate to moral progress. In that spirit, I asked him what he thought of the argument, elaborated by some of Haidt’s critics, that the problems he described are fundamentally political, social, and economic, and that to blame social media is to search for lost keys under the streetlamp, where the light is better. He agreed that this was the steelman opponent: there were predecessors for cancel culture in de Tocqueville, and anxiety about new media that went back to the time of the printing press. “This is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, and it’s absolutely up to the prosecution—people like me—to argue that, no, this time it’s different. But it’s a civil case! The evidential standard is not ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ as in a criminal case. It’s just a preponderance of the evidence.”

The way scholars weigh the testimony is subject to their disciplinary orientations. Economists and political scientists tend to believe that you can’t even begin to talk about causal dynamics without a randomized controlled trial, whereas sociologists and psychologists are more comfortable drawing inferences on a correlational basis. Haidt believes that conditions are too dire to take the hardheaded, no-reasonable-doubt view. “The preponderance of the evidence is what we use in public health. If there’s an epidemic—when COVID started, suppose all the scientists had said, ‘No, we gotta be so certain before you do anything’? We have to think about what’s actually happening, what’s likeliest to pay off.” He continued, “We have the largest epidemic ever of teen mental health, and there is no other explanation,” he said. “It is a raging public-health epidemic, and the kids themselves say Instagram did it, and we have some evidence, so is it appropriate to say, ‘Nah, you haven’t proven it’?”

This was his attitude across the board. He argued that social media seemed to aggrandize inflammatory posts and to be correlated with a rise in violence; even if only small groups were exposed to fake news, such beliefs might still proliferate in ways that were hard to measure. “In the post-Babel era, what matters is not the average but the dynamics, the contagion, the exponential amplification,” he said. “Small things can grow very quickly, so arguments that Russian disinformation didn’t matter are like COVID arguments that people coming in from China didn’t have contact with a lot of people.” Given the transformative effects of social media, Haidt insisted, it was important to act now, even in the absence of dispositive evidence. “Academic debates play out over decades and are often never resolved, whereas the social-media environment changes year by year,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting around five or ten years for literature reviews.”

Haidt could be accused of question-begging—of assuming the existence of a crisis that the research might or might not ultimately underwrite. Still, the gap between the two sides in this case might not be quite as wide as Haidt thinks. Skeptics of his strongest claims are not saying that there’s no there there. Just because the average YouTube user is unlikely to be led to Stormfront videos, Nyhan told me, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry that some people are watching Stormfront videos; just because echo chambers and foreign misinformation seem to have had effects only at the margins, Gentzkow said, doesn’t mean they’re entirely irrelevant. “There are many questions here where the thing we as researchers are interested in is how social media affects the average person,” Gentzkow told me. “There’s a different set of questions where all you need is a small number of people to change—questions about ethnic violence in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, people on YouTube mobilized to do mass shootings. Much of the evidence broadly makes me skeptical that the average effects are as big as the public discussion thinks they are, but I also think there are cases where a small number of people with very extreme views are able to find each other and connect and act.” He added, “That’s where many of the things I’d be most concerned about lie.”

The same might be said about any phenomenon where the base rate is very low but the stakes are very high, such as teen suicide. “It’s another case where those rare edge cases in terms of total social harm may be enormous. You don’t need many teen-age kids to decide to kill themselves or have serious mental-health outcomes in order for the social harm to be really big.” He added, “Almost none of this work is able to get at those edge-case effects, and we have to be careful that if we do establish that the average effect of something is zero, or small, that it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about it—because we might be missing those extremes.” Jaime Settle, a scholar of political behavior at the College of William & Mary and the author of the book “ Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America ,” noted that Haidt is “farther along the spectrum of what most academics who study this stuff are going to say we have strong evidence for.” But she understood his impulse: “We do have serious problems, and I’m glad Jon wrote the piece, and down the road I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a fuller handle on the role of social media in all of this—there are definitely ways in which social media has changed our politics for the worse.”

It’s tempting to sidestep the question of diagnosis entirely, and to evaluate Haidt’s essay not on the basis of predictive accuracy—whether social media will lead to the destruction of American democracy—but as a set of proposals for what we might do better. If he is wrong, how much damage are his prescriptions likely to do? Haidt, to his great credit, does not indulge in any wishful thinking, and if his diagnosis is largely technological his prescriptions are sociopolitical. Two of his three major suggestions seem useful and have nothing to do with social media: he thinks that we should end closed primaries and that children should be given wide latitude for unsupervised play. His recommendations for social-media reform are, for the most part, uncontroversial: he believes that preteens shouldn’t be on Instagram and that platforms should share their data with outside researchers—proposals that are both likely to be beneficial and not very costly.

It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. “But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it—a broader impact on trust,” he said. “Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can’t trust anything, and other people are being misled about it—well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself.” Nyhan had a similar reaction. “There are genuine questions that are really important, but there’s a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There’s so much focus on sweeping claims that aren’t actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better.” He added, “We’re years into this, and we’re still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It’s totally wild.”

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Social Media & Society is a captivating and relevant research area, encompassing various aspects from interpersonal relations to global communication dynamics. A well-defined thesis statement is pivotal for delineating your research parameters and objectives in this expansive field. Below, you’ll find insightful examples of both good and bad thesis statements on Social Media & Society, accompanied by comprehensive explanations.

Good Thesis Statement Examples

Good: “This thesis evaluates the correlation between prolonged social media usage and increased levels of anxiety and depression among teenagers in the United States.” Bad: “Social media affects teenagers’ mental health.”

The good statement presents a specific correlation, target demographic (teenagers in the U.S.), and identified outcomes (anxiety and depression levels). The bad example, while correct, is vague and lacks defined variables and demographic focus.

Good: “The proliferation of fake news on social media platforms has discernibly influenced political elections, swaying public opinion and voter behavior.” Bad: “Fake news on social media impacts elections.”

The good statement provides a clear, arguable claim regarding fake news, public opinion, and voter behavior on social media. Conversely, the bad example states a general fact without depth or a specific area of impact.

Good: “Implementing educational programs that promote critical digital literacy can mitigate the negative effects of cyberbullying among middle school students.” Bad: “Education can help reduce cyberbullying.”

The good example is researchable and offers specific solutions (critical digital literacy programs), target demographic (middle school students), and defined problem (cyberbullying). The bad statement lacks detail, specific solutions, and target groups.

Bad Thesis Statement Examples

Overly Broad: “Social media has changed the way people communicate.”

Although true, this statement is excessively general and does not specify which aspect of communication or which demographic is being explored.

Lack of Clear Argument: “Social media is popular among young people.”

While factual, this statement lacks a clear argument or specific research focus, rendering it ineffective as a research guide.

Unmeasurable and Unresearchable: “Life is unimaginable without social media today.”

Although many might agree, this statement is not easily measurable or researchable and does not provide clear directions for academic exploration.

Crafting a compelling thesis statement for research in social media and society is crucial for delineating your investigation and elucidating your academic endeavor’s aims and scope. A good thesis statement should be specific, debatable, and researchable, acting as a sturdy foundation for scholarly inquiry. In contrast, a bad thesis statement is often too general, lacks a clear argument, and is not conducive to empirical exploration. The examples and analyses provided in this guide furnish students with valuable insights for developing thesis statements that are academically rigorous and insightful for exploring the intricate relationship between social media and society.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Social Media — Dangers Of Social Media

Dangers of Social Media

Categories: Social Media

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Words: 544 |

Published: Mar 13, 2024

Words: 544 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Impact on mental health, spread of misinformation and fake news, impact on privacy and security, societal implications.

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How to Write a Thesis Statement About Social Media

writing thesis statement about social media

Writing a thesis statement requires good research and creating a concise yet very informative point. Writing one about social media is no different. Due to the scope of the study, the information to gather and discuss is even more expansive.

What is a Social Media Thesis Statement?

Social Media Essay Outline

Social media essay titles, thesis on social media, argumentative essay on social media, social networking thesis statement, summing up the thesis statement.

Social media uses mobile technologies that are Internet-based to run communication across different parts of the world. It gives people worldwide the opportunity to communicate and socialize, unlike past means of communication which were only one-way.

The evolution of technology has made social media more efficient and prevalent than any other form of communication today. With technology’s continued evolution, social media will continue to evolve, and so will topics and thesis statements about it. A good thesis statement about social media must meet some requirements, and we will look through most of them.

What is a Social Media Thesis Statement Supposed to Look Like?

Before understanding how a thesis statement on social media should look like, we should familiarize ourselves with what thesis statements properly entail. A thesis statement is typically written in the introductory portion of a paper.

It provides an apt and rapid summary of the main point or aim of the research paper or thesis. As the name implies, it is a statement, mainly written in just one sentence.

A thesis statement briefly combines the topic and the main ideas of the paper. Usually, there are two types of thesis statements: indirect and direct. The indirect thesis statements do not mention the core areas or reason of the thesis like the direct statement does.

A direct statement mentions the main topic and discusses the reasons for the paper, while an indirect statement mentions the statement and points out three reasons for it.

For instance, an indirect social media thesis statement could go like this; “Effects of social media on youth and the reasons for its abuse.” Here the topic is clearly stated, along with the central claim of the thesis paper.

Thesis statements are created, backed up, and expatiated in the remaining parts of the paper by citing examples and bringing up other related topics that support their claim. Through this, the thesis statement then goes to help structure and develop the entire body of the writing piece.

A thesis about social media should contain a good thesis statement that would impact and organize the body of the thesis work. Thesis statements do not necessarily control the entire essay but complement it in numerous aspects.

In writing a social media essay, there is a wide variety of topics to talk about. The points are nearly endless, from information collection to technology, its impacts, and adverse effects to its evolution. Nevertheless, there is always a basic outline for an essay, and it will be structured to follow the same format.

Here is an outline for a social media essay;

Introduction

Here, you begin with the topic, state its objective, provide reasons to support its claims and finalize with a precise and accurate thesis statement.

Thesis statement

This statement should support and complement your main topic of discussion. It should provide a concise and cut-out message of the essay.

This section systematically lays out the arguments to support your topic while splitting them into paragraphs. This will gradually develop your points in a structured manner.

Each paragraph in this section must start with the topic sentence which relates directly to the thesis statement. Naturally, a paragraph should focus on one idea and be connected to the essay’s central argument.

Students must also conduct research and provide evidence to support the claims presented in the topic sentence. They can achieve this by using proper explanation methods to merge all their findings carefully.

In the conclusion of the social media essay , you restate your statement in a way that completely complements and brings all your previous arguments together. It must have a concluding paragraph that reiterates the main point discussed in the body of the content. It should also add a call to action to bring the essay into a logical closure that effortlessly lays bare all the ideas previously presented.

The social media field is continuously expanding, and there are various variations to how it can be operated and observed. Choosing a topic is easy, but choosing the right one may not be as unchallenging.

Before you begin writing an essay, the correct approach will be to review as many samples as you can. This way, you can easily understand the general concept and the adequate writing flow required to outline or develop your arguments carefully.

Picking the wrong titles can go on to make your thesis for a social media essay unnecessarily tricky to write. This can occur when you pick a topic too complex or choose one too vaguely and undervalued. This could make you get stuck when writing, so you should always pick titles that are easy to research, analyze and expand upon.

With all these in view, here are some social media essay titles;

Impact of social media on general education
Effects of using social media on businesses
Adverse effects of social media on personal relationships
The effect of government on social media and their potential restrictions
How a thesis about the effects of social media can positively impact society.

A thesis on social media should easily resemble other academic papers and concentrate on various topics in various subjects. Papers like this should take social media as their primary focus.

Keeping that in mind, a compelling social media thesis should contain specific parts like an introduction, thesis statement, body, and conclusion. Each part is essential and has its contribution and functions to the entire content of the thesis. Some students may find writing a thesis statement about social media difficult, so you can always ask our professional writers to “ write my thesis ” and we will be happy to help you.

The introduction usually contains a hook, a summary of the core points, and a concise thesis statement. The body section must carefully develop each argument and idea in a paragraph, while the conclusion should completely close all the arguments.

The tone, style, and approach to each argument should be precise and well laid out to quickly understand the general idea the thesis is trying to build upon. Depending on the level of education you are writing your thesis, you may need to conduct specific direct research on some points and be required to portray them in an encompassing manner.

Generally, thesis writing on any topic requires hard work, extensive research periods, and a good understanding of writing methods. Hence it should be approached with determination and passion. As a student in higher education, you should learn how to improve your writing skills.

An argumentative essay on social media is typically more engaging with active points of discussion and analysis. Communication is an integral aspect of human life when connecting and moving society as a whole forward. Now technology has upgraded communication to a social media age, which has become an advantage and disadvantage in many aspects of life.

An argumentative social media essay generally possesses a strong argument. The essay’s topic must be designed to prompt a person to pick a side or a discussion and provide the necessary support to back up their decision. This type of essay also requires one to research accurate facts for proper argumentative purposes.

Social media argumentative essays target the harmful effects of this brilliant innovation in communication and its uses worldwide. It is only natural as negative discussions might elicit a sense of debate and argumentation. Some examples of argumentative essay topics on social media include;

The negative effects of social media on education in different nations
Effects of social media and its impacts on the older and younger generation
How social media has taken over people
The adverse effects of social media and the digital space on our mental health
The pros and cons of social media in this society.

Social networking is an integral aspect of social media. It uses Internet-based social media sites to create connections and stay connected with friends, customers, family, and even business partners.

Social networking usually performs a primary purpose in communication with actual avenues like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. These sites and applications enable people to connect to develop relationships and share messages, ideas, and information.

Most social networking forms entail developing and maintaining relationships using communication technology, whether it is the relationship between clients, business partners, or even students.

For example, with the development of the Internet, most students can easily find services to help write dissertations on media space, or social media marketing. All you have to do is invite me to write my dissertation and they will immediately find the best service to solve their problem.

Writing is a social networking thesis statement similar to that of a social media thesis statement. They essentially involve rational discussion, and they can be approached in the same manner. The only slight difference will be the particular attention to social media relationships. How they are developed, what it takes to maintain them, and the various merits they could provide. These would typically form the structure of a social networking thesis statement.

Writing a good thesis statement on social media involves a good understanding of the topic chosen and an accurate idea of the reasons, factors, and discussions that impact the main idea of the thesis. With all these discussed, you should be well on your way to writing good thesis statements on social media.