Adithya Sripada

Social media impact/risks for young people

Started June 8, 2023

Abstract or project description

The role of social media in adversely impacting mental health has been previously established in many studies. In this study, we examine the impact on teenagers. Most social media access is available at thirteen years of age. This can expose adolescents to bullying and other forms of harassment at a very young age. While the coping mechanisms mature over age and the impact is mitigated, the effects of this sort of harassment can be long lasting if exposed to at a young age. A dataset containing tweets was analyzed using Natural Language Processing (NLP) based sentiment analysis. The tweets were then categorized as depressed and not depressed using a classification system. It was observed that the tweets exhibiting depression are longer on average and most of them have the word depression in them. Another dataset of tweets by confirmed high school students was analyzed to detect common language usage patterns of teenagers. Using this analysis, we will continue to examine whether or not the tweets labeled as exhibiting depression contain a larger proportion of teenagers compared to Twitter as a whole.