By /

Jeffrey Zhang

How Social Media Leads to the Normalization of Toxicity in Youths

Biography

Hello! It has been a long and interesting journey but I am now in my final year of Professional Communication. Most of my time has been spent working on this project, whether it be research, editing, or visual design. I have a few interests, mainly playing the guitar, exercising, and learning other languages (Japanese and Korean). I don’t have any specific goals for the foreseeable future besides getting a foothold in either the HR, PR, or marketing industry.

Details of Project

My research revolves around toxic social media culture on platforms like TikTok and the normalization of toxicity within youths. On TikTok, negative comments are framed as humor whereas on X, toxic comments carry visible negative intent. When negativity is found funny by young impressionable minds, they are more likely to mimic that behavior which leads to a spread of toxicity online. For the research, I created a spreadsheet and manually scrolled through TikTok’s recommended page in chronological order with a brand new account. For X, I used an AI tool that searches for keywords on different platforms and I actively targeted negative words that couldn’t be used in a positive context. After analyzing the content on the two platforms, I was able to derive a few findings which showcase a distinct difference between the negativity used on TikTok as compared to X. This research serves as a proof of concept that this problem does exist on social media and its effects could have a very negative impact on how youths think about toxicity.

Lightning talk

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