With the rapid growth of social media in the past few years, more and more influential and violent messages and images are being projected to certain target audiences: children and teenagers. These social media platforms are hurting young kids and teenagers all for their own personal gain. This needs to stop. Social media platforms shouldn’t be targeting young kids with violent or harmful images.

Oberlo, a site that shares statistics on ages on social media, says that 24.6% of Generation Z, ages 11-23, are consistently on social media. The human brain doesn’t develop fully until age 25, so anyone under this age is easily influenced and people under 25 don’t often make smart choices. When the media pushes certain images or ideas that seem to be socially acceptable, children and teenagers are much more susceptible to falling victim to those ideas and therefore try to change themselves to fit into society. This can be very detrimental to their mental health, and will just end in a spiral of faults. Teenagers and children should not be spending their time worrying, obsessing, or nitpicking their looks. Each person is born, raised, and grown to be the person they’re supposed to be. No one should have to change for anyone else or to fit in with anyone’s supposed idea of perfection. The unachievable images and messages that society and social media is pushing out to these children is unacceptable. They have no right to attempt to change anyone's view of themselves.

Also, social media platforms are projecting many violent or aggressive images for people to see. With the growth of video games, there are more and more advertisements persuading people to play those games. A large quantity of video games show violent or suggestive content, content that children should not be exposed to. Since these kids are so young, the things they see in those games are influencing and teaching them things that may not be morally correct. Kids play video games or even watch TV shows, and become exposed to aggression, fear, and violence, and they become desensitized to all of it. It becomes common and they no longer become affected by the things they see. These things might start to seep into their everyday lives. They might become more violent or aggressive, or they might not register certain behaviors as unacceptable. Kids are supposed to be kids. By showing them these things, they are changing the normal idea of what a child is supposed to be. 

In order to attempt to fix this problem, parents should try and restrict the use of certain sites, or restrict the things that their kids see. Another solution would be to not allow the use of social media among teens, at least until they’re older and will not be as affected by certain images.