ABSTRACT
This chapter considers issues around online social media usage and young people’s mental health. Many people today experience ‘digital’ lives that run alongside and intertwined with the ‘real’ lives. Young people are particularly influenced by their digital lives and for many of them the line between the two is growing increasingly blurred. Youth are exposed from a young age to ideas, images, beliefs and ideologies that earlier generations would probably not have encountered until adulthood, if at all. The chapter explores a range of potential negative impacts on young people of social networking sites (SNS) and digital technologies. SNS are designed to encourage the sharing of personal information. This provides a way for online ‘groomers’ to target young people who make themselves more vulnerable, for example by leaving privacy settings open on their profile.
