Social media is a rather extreme medium, oscillating from potential to catastrophe. On the one hand, you see content creators being awarded for their creativity, ingenuity, and sheer hard work. Well, the National Creators Awards 2024 offered to 23 digital influencers in the field of storytelling, social change, travel creator, agri creator, creative creators, best creator in education, etc. by PM Modi himself in March 2024, is a testimony to that. But on the other end of the spectrum, one sees the disturbing trend of the Bharatiya youth getting hooked on the trend of making mindless reels, much to the detriment of their moral values, self-worth, emotional equilibrium, and mental health.
This isn’t about embarking on a soppy and self-righteous “moral shaming” spree of the Bharatiya youth. Far from that. What compels me to write this piece is what I call the alarming levels of emotional and intellectual bankruptcy that social media trends like “reels” are producing in today’s youth.
If the trend goes on unabated, we will very soon have a society that’s altogether lost its moral compass, and all sense of social and psychological order, plunging into an extreme abyss of downright and mindless hedonism that the West has already encountered ages back and has now gotten wary of.
It’s perhaps the curse of colonialism that any trend that the West has gotten done and dusted with, arrives on Bharatiya shores much later. What’s worse is that we fail to learn anything from the experience of Western countries and embrace these trends mindlessly. We also fail to recognize that the resultant impact of such trends is going to be far more catastrophic in the case of Bharat as unlike the West, we still grapple with problems like lack of education, poverty, and adequate employment opportunities.
Also, with the sudden proliferation of social media networks, it seems modernity has been speed-fed to us. We haven’t quite had the time to find our sense of balance in making the transition from a traditional to a somewhat modern society. The neck break speed at which the modern woke culture has landed at our doorstep via social media has made us simply unequipped to find that point of fine balance between tradition and modernity, our sweet spot, so to speak.
That’s precisely why a huge chunk of Bharatiya youth seems to think the best thing they can do with their lives is put on some blingy and flashy outfits, slather themselves in makeup, start pouting stupidly in front of their mobile phone cameras, and make an Instagram or Facebook reel!
For all the intelligent and creative social media influencers out there, if you scroll through the likes of Instagram and Facebook, you will realize that the majority of so-called content being created by Bharatiya content creators is absolutely cringeworthy. You see 15–20-year-old boys and girls making obnoxious song and dance reels, some of these bordering on vulgarity. What’s even more shocking is that you see young girls making suggestive reels bordering on soft pornography. Many of these accounts have millions of followers which means the social media algorithm rewards them handsomely, enabling them to make money, thus further “inspiring” them to continue with this degrading cringe.
It’s sad to see that in a culture and civilization that prides itself on worshipping its women and where every girl and woman is considered the manifestation of Devi (Goddess), a huge chunk of young female social media influencers seem to think objectifying themselves and presenting themselves as a ‘commodity” to be fetishized by the male gaze is the pinnacle of women’s liberation and progress.
The sad thing is it’s not. It’s actually the exact opposite of that. The hedonistic world of social media pleasures deludes the youth of Bharat, taking them away from the path of hard work and making them take all sorts of shortcuts for “success”. Yet, the “success’ as measured through social media is in itself nothing short of a joke. Bharatiyas from lower middle-class families are immediately thrust into the middle of this social media paradise as they seem to gain millions of subscribers overnight, and the social media companies begin paying them “handsomely” for their hard work.
But once the good luck phase is over and the adulation comes toppling down, these influencers don’t quite know what to do with their life. Lacking a decent education, they don’t have many opportunities out there in the real world, and the real world with all its struggle and grind can barely afford them the kind of lifestyle they have gotten used to through the social media lottery ticket. This makes a lot of them go down the path of depression.
One comes across so many incidents of Bharatiya social media influencers committing suicide. In December 2022, Leena Nagwanshi, a social media influencer, who had over 11,000 followers on Instagram, was found hanging at her home in Chhattisgarh. Leena who allegedly died by committing suicide was a B Com student and also had a YouTube channel with 700 subscribers.
In a recent incident that took place in June 2024, 18-year-old Aditya, a social media influencer from Kerala, attempted suicide on June 10 and was taken for treatment to a local medical college where she eventually died. As per media reports, Aditya shared a close relationship with someone from Kerala she met through Instagram. However, she reportedly started facing cyber-attacks, once the relationship ended. It is suspected that the cyber-attacks led the student to take the drastic step.
In another such incident in April 2024, two social media influencers jumped to death from the 7th floor in Bahadurgarh, Haryana. A young man and a woman, living in a rented flat on the seventh floor of a housing society were found in a pool of blood on the ground floor, as per media reports.
In 2020, 16-year-old TikTok influencer Siya Kakkar committed suicide in New Delhi. In another such incident in 2023, Pratiksha, a nine-year-old Class IV student from Tamil Nadu, who was very popular on Instagram for her reels, committed suicide after her parents asked her to study. Pratiksha had created 70 reels in the previous six months and was lovingly referred to as “Insta queen” and “reels queen” by her followers, friends, and neighbors. In yet another disturbing incident in 2023, a 25-year-old man from Delhi reportedly attempted to “live stream” his suicide from somewhere in north-east Delhi on Facebook. Thankfully, his life got saved due to prompt intervention by the local police.
These are just a few examples. If you google the term “Indian social media influencer suicides”, you will come across many such harrowing tales. The very idea of a 9-year-old committing suicide due to social media influence breaks one’s heart. Also, the majority of these suicide victims fall in the age range of 16 to 25, thus proving the point that the glitzy and glamorous world of social media influencers has a rather dark and seamier side to it, when it comes to young influencers.
For the young Bharatiya social media influencers, it’s a whole new world out there. Just imagine yourself in that vulnerable age category. If you posted a reel and you got 100 likes, you’d be over the moon. This encourages you further and you start posting more. This becomes a vicious cycle and gets to the point where your self-esteem gets contingent on the views and likes your social media reels garnered. This becomes an unhealthy trend, further distancing you from reality and your school or college education. You start living in a delusional dream world wanting more and more followers, and fame and if that doesn’t happen at the speed, you’d like it to, you get depressed and contemplate extreme measures.
This pretty much sums up the dark side of social media stardom. So it’s not just about moral degradation but the complete loss of one’s identity. It leads to the loss of normal childhood and youth experiences where one bonds with family, and friends, and also sets benchmarks in real life for educational and extra-curricular achievements. Instead, the hedonistic world of social media takes over where it seems that all it takes to get famous overnight is to film yourself doing something provocative, or dramatic. Alas, only if it was as simple as that.
When Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s movie Heeramandi was released on Netflix a couple of months back, reels based on the dialogues and provocative gestures of the characters of the “courtesans” or “prostitutes” (to be more precise) portrayed in the movie became a rage across social media.
No offence to the wonderful and talented actresses who essayed those characters, but I am trying to critique a larger trend here; the youth of Bharat goes berserk over a movie glorifying prostitution, and young Bharatiya women and girls spend their precious time making provocative reels and posting pictures of themselves, based on the movie. It’s a disturbing premonition on where we are headed as a society – Bollywood is grooming young Bharatiya women to idolize prostitution, and the world of social media is amplifying that trend.
Social media algorithms promote crass and sensational content. The finer points of society and culture are the least of their concerns. Their primary concern is to promote clickbait content that titillates the audience. Thus, reels of young women posing and pouting and presenting themselves as an object of attraction form the ideal clickbait content. Thus, it’s no wonder that the algorithms make such content viral and this leads to the rise of more and more young Bharatiya social media female influencers whose claim to fame is pretty much being pretty and provocative.
How to rescue Bharatiya youth from the clutches of the lure of the reelwood? There are no easy answers out there. But here are a couple of suggestions I’ll leave you with:
- Parental advice and control – Bharatiya teenagers are major stakeholders in reelwood. In some cases, the parents are aware of their children’s activities on social media. But sometimes, they are clueless. It’s important that parents initiate a healthy dialogue with their children on this subject. The point is to have a frank discussion on the pros and cons of social media and help them make an informed choice. Diktats never work with teenagers. If parents prohibit something, chances are the child will go out of his/her way to accomplish that thing. Therefore, the idea is to have a healthy debate and discussion and get the confidence of children so that they don’t end up in depression or other troublesome scenarios.
- Schools and colleges should conduct social media awareness sessions – This needs to become a regular feature. The youth in Bharat are most vulnerable to the detrimental effects of social media. Therefore, schools and colleges must conduct regular information sessions to make students aware of the pros and cons of social media platforms.
- Massive improvement in educational standards and job prospects required – One of the reasons why many young people take to becoming social media influencers is simply because they don’t have any other career option. With the changing requirements of the workplace, more and more youth are becoming unemployable despite having a college degree. It’s simply because they don’t have the required skills. Thus, a massive overhaul is required in Bharat’s education system to make education more hands-on and skill oriented. The New Education Policy already has many provisions regarding this. What needs to be seen though is how the government goes about implementing these. Becoming a social media influencer is not a viable career option. Let’s be clear on that. It’s a wildly unregulated world with no rules and regulations; being dependent on social media for your livelihood is the worst of gambles which is already having such a detrimental impact on the mental health of Bharatiya youth. Thus, young Bharatiyas need real opportunities and viable career options.
- Regulation of social media platforms – It’s true that social media platforms can’t be banned in the 21st century. Such measures simply wouldn’t work. But they can certainly be regulated. Many Western countries, for example, have regulated the use of social media for children. Bharat should put similar guidelines in place to protect kids and teenagers from the dangers of social media. There must be adequate safeguards and regulations to ensure that social media algorithms don’t get a free playground to recommend users whatever they deem click-worthy. They shouldn’t be able to get away with just recommending mostly “sensational entertainment-oriented” content. Equal weightage should be given to educational and other types of constructive content so that the content basket users get exposed to is diverse.
