Case Study in North Macedonia: Social Media Usage in Youth

Abstract

This study aims at showing the positive and negative impacts of social media usage in youth. Social websites have achieved a phenomenal global growth over the last decade. Using social media web sites is the most common activity of today's children and adolescents. Researchers have explored the consequences of such an overuse and impact on daily activities, such as learning, mutual communication as well as their ethical behaviour. The research was conducted among more than 500 scholars aging from 10 to 16, provides an insight of the social networking influence on the behaviour and the lifestyle of the youngsters in North Macedonia. The findings show that the majority of the youngsters use social media on a large scale, mainly for communication purposes. Beside the positive effects, like faster and easier communication, the results of the research show that there are several negative impacts. Namely, many young people place too much emphasis on the virtual interaction and ignore the real world. Moreover, the findings show that most of the young people are not aware that the social media usage can diminish their privacy and thus make them vulnerable to various negative virtual impacts. The results show that habitual social media use is the single biggest predictor of individual victimization in such influence. Thus, this paper suggests that frequent social media use among young people shall be monitored by the adults in order to avoid negative impacts like cyber bullying, “social media depression” and exposure to inappropriate content.