Mental Health is anyone’s emotional, psychological, or social well-being. This is the way that a person thinks, feels, behaves and handles stressful situation. Many factors affect ones mental health. Negative external factors can cause anxiety, depression, and stress. Mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses, occur when changes in thinking, mood, or behavior are significant enough to interfere with a person’s daily functioning.
Social media refers to digital platforms and technologies that enable users to create, share, and interact with content or with other users online.
Social media plays a complex role in influencing mental health. While it offers opportunities for social connection, information sharing, and emotional support, it can also contribute to negative psychological outcomes such as depression, anxiety, and loneliness through mechanisms like social comparison, cyberbullying, and information overload. Understanding the dual nature of social media’s impact is critical for developing healthier usage patterns and interventions. It allows for the rapid sharing of information, ideas, personal messages, and content like photos and videos, building virtual communities and networks.
I have chosen to collect my data using a YouTube API key to extract secondary data from the comments of the video. the code for this can be shown below.
library(vosonSML)
library(tidyverse)
youtubeAuth <- Authenticate("youtube", apiKey="AIzaSyC_79XTcJknsbmzCCz8F-FqEboxiE8-Jt0")
videoID <-"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E7hkPZ-HTk"
youtubedata <-youtubeAuth %>% Collect(videoID, maxcomments=1000, verbose=F, writeToFile=F)My ultimate goal for this project was to collect YouTube comments from a video talking about the effects of social media. From these comments I chose negative words to express the negative way social media effects people. The words that I chose were deleted, delete, addicted, anxiety, fake, negative, depression, sad, and depressing. The word deleted was the highest number counted comment. one of the comments for example went on to discuss how after watching this video they decided to delete all social media. They were unable to get out of bed and were over thinking a lot. This is very common due to people comparing themselves to unreal standards on social media due to face tune and body editing apps. Fake was also another common word used in the YouTube video comments.
The below graph shows some of the positive words that i have selected that are significantly lower than the negative words.
Based on the data I have collected I can infer that social media does negatively affect ones mental health. Social media should be used limited if at all to lower the chances of negative effects of social media.