Negative Impacts of Facebook Social Media of Younger Generation’s Social Life; A Case from Sri Lanka

Abstract

The study reveals some of the negative impacts of Facebook social media for youths and their social life. This study has achieved three main objectives; (1) to identify the correlation between Facebook social media and, suicides, abuses, rapes and other crimes among youths in Sri Lanka; (2) to examine the real impact of Facebook for the crimes and abuses; (3) to suggest possible solution to minimize negative impacts of Facebook social media. Facebook is the most popular social networking website in the world. Social networking websites are specialized websites where people meet other people online and interact. They interact mostly in terms of sharing photos, videos and information about their day to day activities. The current Facebook statistics shows that the service has been used by more than 300 million users around the globe and 6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day. Even in Sri Lanka Facebook is the most popular social media. Unfortunately, according to the media reports, the Facebook is becoming a major reason for suicides, sexual abuses and other crimes in Sri Lanka. Therefore, some of community organizations and people requests to ban the Facebook in Sri Lanka. On the other side, some of intellectuals argue that there is no close relationship between these crimes and Facebook. The study is based on 06 most popularized cases which were happened in 2014 and 2015 in Sri Lanka. The both public and private media has reported that the major cause of these 06 cases is Facebook related incidents. The study has clearly pointed out that there is very law relationship between the cases and the Facebook. Final argument of the research is no significant negative impact between these two variables