Well-being Strategies Protecting against Harmful Social Media Environment

The rise of social networking sites has opened up new opportunities regarding social relationships, social interaction and self-presentation. Women specifically have fallen victim to the impact of social networking sites by having overwhelmingly negative experiences on platforms such as Instagram. Specifically, women are now faced with immense amounts of potential for comparison, self-objectification and heightened insecurities, all these factors harming their psychological well-being. This highlights the importance to understand digital well-being especially in today’s social media centered society. As a result of the negative impacts of social networking, women have started to become aware of their power and influence online and use their agency to exercise change in the harmful social media environment. Women are now curating personal strategies which help them navigate around the Instagram environment all in effort to create a sustainable and healthy relationship. This research is based off of 14 different interviews with 7 different female participants surrounding the topic of personal strategies, digital well-being and social media usage. Specifically, trying to understand how female university students implement personal strategies in efforts to protect their well-being on the Instagram platform. Through the implementation of abductive thematic analysis, three main themes emerged from the data, namely: avoidance, seeking positive reinforcement and acceptance. The main theme of avoidance showcased how participants choose to actively avoid content that negatively serves their psychological well-being to still use the platform for entertainment, whilst the second main theme, seeking positive reinforcement, did the opposite through actively following accounts that bring the participants joy. Lastly, the third main theme of acceptance displayed participants contentment with Instagram and all the complexity it brings and particularly refocused their usage in creating an uplifting platform benefitting their well-being. All of these strategies were utilized by the participants in an attempt to protect their well-being, allowing for an answer to the posed research question.