Chapter 11: A Clinical Perspective On Social Media: Opportunities and Risks for Users, Patients, and Psychologists

When we talk of social media, we are talking about online platforms that allow users to create and share content with virtual communities and networks, facilitating a two-way interaction with the virtual audience. In fact, “social media” is an umbrella term that includes a variety of platforms such as social network sites (e.g., Facebook), microblogs (e.g., Twitter), blogs (e.g., LiveJournal), content-sharing sites (e.g., YouTube), virtual communities (e.g., Second Life), and many others, which constitute different social media sub-genres (Stoycheff, et al., 2017; Wong, et al., 2021).

The current world of social media is quite large and rich. After all, humans are social animals, and “throughout much of human history, we’ve developed technologies that make it easier for us to communicate with each other” (Carton, 2009, para. 10). Nowadays, there is an uncountable number of social media, the estimated number of social media users worldwide is 4.55 billion—which is more than half of the world population—and this number is expected to grow year after year. These users spend a mean number of about 2.5 hours each day using social media, and they use them for very different reasons: from filling up spare time to doing work-related activities, from staying in touch with family and friends to knowing new people and creating new relationships, but also to reading the news, staying up-to-date, entertaining themselves, shopping, and so on (DataReportal, n.d.). In other words, thanks to their great development and to the increase in their features, social media are currently used for both social and individual purposes, they have entered many areas of human existence changing how they are experienced, and they have become an integral part of our lives. This can open up some opportunities, lead to some risks, and, in any case, this implies changes, as it will be discussed by the following.