Social Media use has rapidly increased since the turn of the century.

With social media

sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, social media use has
constantly rose, especially among the teen population. Ninety four percent of teens use social
media daily and seventy one percent use more than one social media website. With the use of
social media increasing, cyberbullying has also increased and in turn has also increased teen
suicide.
Teen suicide is an increasing issue in the United States. Suicide is the second leading
cause of death for ages ten to twenty-four, behind accidents or unintentional injuries, and
accounts for more deaths than cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia,
influenza, and chronic lung disease combined. Every day in the United States, about three
thousand teens in high school attempt to commit suicide. One reason for the rise in teen suicide
attempts inside the United States is social media as it is the home of cyberbullying, and can
affect teens’ depictions of their lives.
Social Media websites are the home of cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is the use of the
electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or
threatening nature. Cyberbullying allows teens to anonymously bully each other online as they
can create private accounts that hide their identities that bullying in person does not allow. With
sites like Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram, cyberbullying as rapidly increased as you can post
anything anonymously about someone. Social media can also cause trolling and body shaming.
Trolling can be defined as leaving an insulting message on the internet in order to annoy
someone. Body shaming is the action or practice of humiliating someone by making mocking or
critical comments about their body shape or size. Trolling has become more popular over the
past few years as many teens troll each other as jokes until they take it too far. Body shaming
has also steadily increased over the years especially with the rise of Instagram and Snapchat
where people post pictures of themselves and compare with others. With the rise of body
shaming, there has also been an increase in self-esteem issues as girls tend to compare
themselves to models on Instagram and Snapchat and cause themselves to be self-conscious
and depressed. Depression is also another reason why teen suicide has increased over the
years.
Social media is not the only issue to blame with the rise of teen suicide, physical and
sexual abuse, drug and alcohol use, family issues, and the rise of mood disorders are also to
blame. Although it is not the other issue, it has the greatest correlation. As teen suicide has
increased over the years, so has social media use among teens. Teens who use social media
more than five hours per day are seventy percent more likely to have thoughts of suicide than
the thirty percent that do not use social media more than five hours a day. Social media has
become an enabler of suicide. It has become more common to hear about “live suicides” that
are streamed on social media or about suicide pacts made between people on social media.
Social media has also began to romanticize teen suicides as being the easy way out of issues
instead of trying to get help with their struggles. The teen tv series “Thirteen Reasons Why”,
based on the same title by Jay Asher has been criticized for romanticizing the suicide of Hannah
Baker, a teen that faced bullying throughout her two years at her new high school. The Netflix
series depicts Hannah as a teen that struggled with her new school and peers as they bullied
her to the point of suicide, although they show her as trying to get help for her issues to no avail.
The series was criticized because it justified Hannah’s suicide because she was not offered the
help she desired, instead of sending the message to keep trying to get help, even if you’re
unsuccessful the first time. Social media has also helped encourage copycat suicides, mostly
because any truly gruesome or tragic suicide is likely to go viral online, like Hannah Baker’s
bathtub suicide in the season finale of the first season of Thirteen Reasons Why.
Cyberbullying and other social factors, such as gender identification and sexual
orientation account for fifty-three percent of suicidal thoughts in teens. Teens who identify with
the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) community are four times more
likely to attempt suicide than teens who identify are straight or not a part of the community. The
LGBTQ community accounts of thirty percent of all teenage suicides.
While social media may be a main cause of teen suicide, it also does its part in trying to
combat teen suicide. There are multiple hotlines and chat rooms online for teens to attempt to
get help or to have someone to talk to about what they are going through as a way to save them
from making the horrible mistake of taking their lives. The use of social media by teenages can
lead to a drop in suicide rates if teens use the platforms to raise awareness and attempt to
change the tides as well as stop cyberbullying each other, stop justifying and glorifying suicide,
and try to raise awareness to help prevent teenage suicide.