Which social media platforms are bad for your mental health?

Report suggests Intagram is the most negative form of social media when it comes to mental health

A fascinating report put together by Royal Society for Public Health and the Young Health Movement (YHM) has studied the effect social media platforms have on users mental health. The focus has been specifically on the impact on young people.

YouTube came out on top as the most positive medial platform whereas somewhat surprisingly Snapchat and Instagram fared rather worse being perceived as having the most negative influence across the user base.

In an era where revenge porn and other media related bullying tatcics are being tackled by the police, it is disappointing to see that users of social media can still be targeted leading to serious issues with their mental health. Here at the Criminal Claims Bureau we deal with many cases where victims of crime are subjected to further trauma as perpetrators use social media as a weapon. The key issue from our perspective is that the big media organisations need to do more to ensure that their users are fully protected and that steps can be taken to report abuse when it happens.

Facebook which owns Instagram, has a "report abuse" function that is pretty effective and can result in posts being taken down or accounts being removed where abuse is known to have occurred.

For more insight about the report issued by the RSPH please visit their press release page.