Celebrities and Influencers

Social media influencers and celebrities constantly post images and updates of their polished and edited lives, creating a ‘perfect’ and ideal life which is almost impossible to match.

These unrealistic online accounts can create a serious problem for susceptible teenagers, setting impossibly high expectations of what they believe they should look like, how they should live, what they should eat, where they should work and so on.

The pressure of comparing their lives with others can cause them to feel depressed, jealous or even suicidal if their life doesn’t seem as picture-perfect as theirs (Fader, 2016).

This pressure is stronger than ever, as well, due to the incredibly high volume of online posting through social media. On average, around 350,000 Tweets are posted per minute (David Sayce, 2016) and about 95 million Instagram posts each day. These inescapable posts are bombarding teenagers with deceitful images, ideas, and expectations every single day, and unfortunately - whether they are aware of it or not - some of them have the capacity to have quite damaging effects.