The Harm of Social Media
By Ariel Knaster
For some time now social media has had a strong grasp on the teenage community. While the manipulative strategies used by companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat have been known for several years, the recent discovery of the secret surveys that Facebook conducted has left many teenagers speechless.
For the past two years, Facebook has been facilitating studies about how its most popular application, Instagram, affects its teenage users. The teenagers participating in the survey blamed Instagram for their increased anxiety, increased depression, and worsened body image. These effects were found to impact females in particular.
Senior Maggie Levine has similar feelings. She said, “Seeing people that are skinnier and prettier than me makes me jealous and makes me feel bad about myself because I don’t look as good as them. Even though I am completely aware of the fact that everyone edits their Instagram pictures and doesn’t necessarily look like that in real life, sometimes it can still be hard to look at.”
Many girls, both in our school and beyond, feel the same way. Constantly having to look at “flawless” women on the internet without any context of their lives can be detrimental to teenagers’ mental health. Upon hearing the results of Facebook’s survey, many students are alarmed about never having known it was conducted.
Senior Halia Frishman stated, “I was very surprised that I didn’t know this survey existed. I completely agree with its results, and I think it’s really horrible that Facebook didn’t publish their findings, considering Instagram has inflicted the same negative effects on so many people. I strongly believe that it was Facebook’s responsibility to share this information and I think it should be significantly more widespread.”
Similar to Halia, many have been taken aback by Facebook’s secretiveness and by the way it neglected to spread awareness of the survey’s findings. While it is understandable that the company wants to continue its economic growth, teenagers have claimed that Instagram’s success should not come at the expense of young girls’ mental health. The main concern for most app users now is how, or if, Facebook will try to change in order to improve the results of future surveys.
Thousands March in 2021 NYC Global Climate Strike
By Chloe Luterman
On September 24, more than 800,000 climate activists across the world participated in the Global Climate Strike to raise awareness and demand government action on climate issues. This included 2,000 protestors in New York City, who gathered in City Hall Park and marched to a rally in Battery Park. This event was organized by youth-led climate-advocacy group Fridays For Future and was scheduled to take place at the same time as the United Nations Climate Week.
The Global Climate Strike began in August of 2018 when 15-year-old Greta Thunberg staged a school strike for climate change outside of the Swedish parliament. By September 2019, this solo protest had grown into the largest climate protest in history, with 6 million people participating across 4,500 synchronized and coordinated international locations in 150 countries. This annual event encourages people to walk out of their homes, schools, and workplaces to draw attention to the climate crisis.
The theme of this year’s Global Climate Strike was #UproottheSystem, which called for intersectional climate justice. Intersectionality means that global crises like the climate and COVID go hand in hand with systemic patterns of inequality and injustice. According to their Mission Statement, “overexploited countries and marginalized sectors of society” experience the worst climate effects, “but are systematically left behind to fend for themselves.” Instead of individual actions, the organization is pushing world leaders to enact policies that address the inequalities that were created by colonialism, industrialism, and capitalism.
At the rally, climate leaders criticized the inequality of climate change which forces low-income people and communities of color to bear the brunt of climate change. Kathryn Gioiosa of TREEage, a youth climate-justice coalition, spoke against a North Brooklyn natural gas pipeline that is routed through the predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods of Brownsville, Ocean Hill, Bushwick, and East Williamsburg. She said, “Black and Brown New Yorkers are disproportionately impacted by poisonous fossil fuel infrastructure being built in their backyard.”
Further, 18-year-old Tibetan climate activist, Tsela Zoksang, spoke of the climate refugee population created by mining, industrialization, and glacier melt in Tibet and the Himalayas. Additionally, Jerome Foster II, the youngest member of Biden's Environmental Justice Advisory Council, spoke to encourage an end of subsidies for fossil fuel industries, the adoption of the Green New Deal, and the passage of the Climate Change Education Act. He said, “Civil rights are human rights, and human rights are environmental rights.” Other Global Climate Strike leaders called for drastic emission cuts, COVID vaccine equity, cancellation of debt, climate finance, and “a future where people and planet are prioritized.”
Although strikes, marches, and protests like the Global Climate Strike draw attention to the climate crisis, many activists believe that real progress cannot be achieved until governments make fundamental changes to legislation and policy. Organizers are hopeful this will occur when global leaders from over 200 countries meet at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow this month. The goal of this conference is to secure global net-zero carbon emissions by mid-century and keep 1.5 degrees within reach by phasing out coal, curtailing deforestation, switching to electric vehicles, and investing in renewables. However, unless top carbon emitters China and USA fully commit to the proposed measures, these policies are unlikely to have their desired impact.
