Cassandra+Editorial

Facebook Suicide

By: Cassandra Gonzalez

 Facebook, along with other social networks, can become very addicting. Something about them makes us want to keep going back to them. Social networks are like drugs: you feel a need to have even a small dose of it at least once a day. And as crazy as it may sound, there are people out there who become obsessed with these sorts of things. The social networks of today can not only lead to bad relationships, but it can also lead to something more serious such as kids committing suicide. It might sound a bit crazy, but these things happen. Facebook, as you might say, has a negative effect on our society.

 According to an article on [|The Times] by Emma Justice, Stephanie Painter deactivated her Facebook account due to the problems it was bringing into her relationship with her boyfriend. It was slowly making their relationship worse, but once she deactivated her account, her relationship improved tremendously. Painter might be just one person, but the fact that 31 million users are committing what is known as “Facebook suicide” must tell you something. So many people wouldn’t deactivate their accounts just because; it must be affecting them in order to take such actions.

The way people choose to use their Facebook account is completely up to the individual. Cyber-bullying, which is a completely different topic, goes on in Facebook. Now, Facebook isn’t responsible for all the cyber-bullying that goes on in the web, the individuals, or rather the “bullies,” are the ones responsible for such thing, but the fact that cyber-bullying is easily done on pages such as Facebook doesn’t give Facebook a great name. Sure, Facebook is a great social network, but that doesn’t mean cyber-bullying won’t happen. Many people, in particular kids and teens, have committed suicide due to the bullying that happens. According to an online article on The Telegraph, “[|Facebook and Myspace can lead children to commit suicide, warns Archbishop Nichols],” by Jonathan Wynne-Jones, Archbishop Nichols shares his opinion and says that Facebook and Myspace can lead to children to commit suicide. ”I think there's a worry that an excessive use or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we're losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that's necessary for living together and building a community,” says Nichols.A good social network would be one that's still great like Facebook, but it would stop or at least keep cyber-bullying under control somehow or another. Maybe this could decrease the number of people committing suicide. Facebook could, for example, automatically delete hateful comments. If Facebook could somehow identify these sorts of comments, many things would be prevented.

Cases such as that of teenagers committing suicide are becoming more and more common due to all the cyber-bullying going on in these social networks. It's becoming more obvious every time that Facebook has a negative effect on society. Maybe one day we will see the day when Facebook is used for good instead of evil, but until then it’s something we must put up with.