
Adolescent teens are growing up in an era that highly revolves around online social networking. Social media is sought to be one of the main reasons young teens are introduced to substances like alcohol, drugs, and tobacco. At an adolescent age, kids are highly vulnerable to being addicted to these types of substances (O'Keefe). High School students are an age group that seems to be abusing these addictions the most (O'Keefe). According to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, seventeen percent of students are smoking, drinking, or doing drugs on school grounds during the school day. This may not seem like a lot but it is more than what there should be. How do children find out about these life-threatening addictions? These children are learning these habits from older students who post their substance use online. Social media is one of the main reasons or "Gateways" leading adolescents to drink, smoke, use drugs, or even go into depression. Students, who want to fit in with a certain group or feel the need to exploit these addictive activities, would see a picture posted onto Facebook or Instagram by someone they envy (O'Keefe). This is a huge issue to deal with because this increases the chances for the youth of our nation to fall into depression or become addicted to illegal, life-threatening drugs especially because of how highly influential social media is on them. 

Ramasubbu states in his article, "Influence of Social Media on Teenagers", that "Adolescents today are among the heaviest users of social networking" (Ramasubbu). This was supported by a report from the Common Sense Media, "seventy-five percent of teenagers in America currently have profiles on social networking sites, of which sixty-eight percent use Facebook as their main social networking tool" (Ramasubbu). Due to the high percentage of teenagers using social media this causes them to become reliant on it, which therefor influences their behavior online and offline. Adolescents then become highly susceptible to peer pressure, which makes them more vulnerable to Facebook depression, sexting, cyber-bullying, and substance abuse (Ramasubbu). Ramasubbu is particularly bias on the fact that social media is a large reason for adolescent's substance abuse and depression. These harmful effects on children can drastically change their behavior. They mainly come from the posts of the adolescents' peers. Their peer's posts have a large influence on their offline behavior.

In my experience with social media and from the perspectives I have heard from others, online social networking is a major cause of how adolescents change their behaviors. Social media also plays a huge factor in adolescent's addiction to substance abuse. In the article, "Peer Influences: The Impact of Online and Offline Friendship Networks on Adolescents Smoking and Alcohol Use", Grace Huang discusses that when a kid is growing up they learn and study from their peers (Huang). Majority of adolescent's peers is the age group above theirs. For example, when an adolescent becomes a freshman in high school the peers they focus on the most is the upperclassman because they believe that those students know how to have fun through high school. Therefore they are learning and studying their online and offline habits, such as posting pictures or tweets, which are comments posted on twitter, online of them doing drugs and drinking. This article claims that social media is a big influence on adolescent teens and that it can cause them to have unhealthy behaviors. 

Teens try to figure their identity by how their friends act, thinking it is the norm. Around ninety percent of teenagers are logging into social media like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter every day(Lenhart). With these online social networks kids can post images of what they are doing or how they are feeling at any point and time in the day. The peers of the adolescents could be posting inappropriate images containing sexual activity, drugs, and alcohol (Huang). The behavior of the adolescents who view them can be harshly affected due to these images or tweets. Since kids are trying to become part of the social norm they follow what others are doing. If they see posts from other students drinking alcohol then they begin to believe that drinking is apart of the social norm (Huang). A study showed that out of four hundred MySpace profiles, fifty-six contained alcohol posts and forty-nine percent of the profiles had comments and conversations about alcohol (Huang). Today MySpace is not as popular as it used to be but since the downfall of MySpace; Twitter has become the new popular social network where conversations containing substance abuse take place. This is based off experience because I have a Twitter profile and I have seen what my friends and others around the world have tweeted. The content that half of the teenage users display on their profiles can highly affect the other kids who see these posts and cause them to do the same. This is due to peer influence that plays a significant role on adolescents (Huang). The author of this article, Grace Huang, believes that social media perceives what the norm is for young adolescent teens and also believes that it increases teen drinking and smoking. An increase of substance abuse at young adolescent ages can harshly damage their health. 

Since social media is one of the major issues for young children to become addicted to substance abuse, it is then also a major reason for their depression. The article, "The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families", claims that social media is like a gateway for teen depression. It also states that social media consists of the same behaviors kids have offline like bullying, sexual conduct, and cliques. Online social networks put young teenagers at risk for being cyber-bullied, which can lead to depression (O'Keefe). Teens can post false information about another kid also known as a rumor, which can cause embarrassment for that kid when people see him or her in public. There is a new term that Gwen O'Keefe explains in her article known as "Facebook Depression". This is when a young child spends too much time on social media such as Facebook and they begin to experience depression from not being in contact with peers in the outside world (O'Keefe). O'Keefe claims that this causes them to research websites on how to get help. Some of these risky sites convince them that alcohol and substance abuse is the way to go (O'Keefe). Adolescents who experience depression from social media could look up on Google, How to relieve depression or stress, this can bring them to a website like yahoo answers. This is a site where people can comment and promote that smoking marijuana or drinking alcohol is the only way to relieve any depression. O'Keefe seems biased towards social media causing teen depression. With Adolescents being depressed it leads them to substance abuse. As first hand experience myself, back in high school a friend of mine came up to me and a few other guys saying he was depressed and did not know what to do. Our first solution or advice to him was that he needed to go out and drink, then he would not feel depressed. 

Social media is an incredibly large gateway for adolescents to learn and study new behaviors. In my conclusion from these three articles, social media is a major influence on their mental health and their well-being. As young kids start to grow up they are easily influenced by the peers around them, causing them to be at risk with the inappropriate content that they come across on social media. Because of such a large percentage of adolescents having social media profiles, adults, friends, and families should be more aware and interactive with young children on social media. 

