For Youth

I constantly see people using AI to plagiarize assignments and it becomes tempting because ‘everyone else is doing it.

Social media reinforced any insecurity that I had when I got it. At first, I just felt not good enough, not cool enough, etc. It felt like everyone around me was better than me. Soon though, it started to feed into depression, anxiety, and an eating disorder that almost landed me in hospitals on multiple different occasions. Seeing how other people looked/acted made me desperate to change. I genuinely believe that I would have been better off never getting in the first place. I wish more than anything that i hadnt, and i wish that for all the little kids around me too.

Me and my friends, no matter our age, receive solicitations from older men we do not know. I personally was harassed online by a person using multiple usernames as they repeatedly asked me (13 at the time) for explicit images. Social media can be scary.

Fear of missing out was my primary reason for getting social media, and now it makes that fear worse.

At 11 years old, because of following workout influencers, my For You Page showed me diets and eating disorders, which I fell into in the coming years. I later became bulimic. The idea of body image was so out of reach. I was severely depressed, unhealthy mentally and physically.

My friend had to go to the hospital twice for doing a TikTok challenge. I was so scared and think about it everyday. Sometimes I can’t get anything done because I am so scared.