It was the summer of 1991, when the biggest catastrophe imaginable, for myself and my siblings, transpired. Our only window to the world and sole means of leisure, the coveted National Panacolor 150-pound state-of-the-art 18-inch TV with a full-on wooden enclosure, stopped working. It was a dark day. Although we only had two channels that operated between 8 am and 11 pm, we were allowed to watch enough programming a week, totaling 2 hours at least, that the prospect of losing that was worse for us kids than death itself. My dad was out of the country on an assignment for 6 months, so getting a replacement was out of the question. My mom was not an avid TV watcher, so she didn’t care that we lost our only source of entertainment. In fact, for her, it was a good thing. At least we would get to spend those two extra hours a week doing more homework or spending more time training at our sporting club for our Karate tournaments. But my siblings and I were not prepared to accept that bleak reality without a fight. I worked up the confidence to tell my mom, firmly: “Mom, I collected money from us kids, and we will hire a technician to fix the TV, so you don’t have to worry about a thing. We’ll pay for it ourselves!” With the most dismissive look, my mom glanced at me for a second, before getting back to preparing her upcoming lesson plan, being the avid geography teacher that she was, and told me nonchalantly: “No. We won’t do that. But I’ll tell you what, if you can fix it yourself, I’ll let you guys watch it again.” Fix it myself? What kind of crazy talk is this? What do I know about televisions to fix it myself? I’m a high school student, for heaven’s sake! Why do you have to be so difficult? If Dad were here, he would have taken care of this right away! This is simply unfair! Of course, none of these colliding thoughts made it past my lips. All my mom saw was me looking at her with wide eyes and quivering lips, so she took another glance at me and asked, disinterestedly: “Are we good here?” I replied promptly, without hesitation: “Yes, Mom! This sounds like a great plan! I’ll work on it!” 

And so it began. The quest to revive our beloved TV was underway. Looking back, I realize that the best part turned out to be that I had to do it myself. I worked with my brother and my sister, and we came up with an airtight plan. My sister’s job was to ask family members if they had any experience or knowledge about this stuff. My brother’s job was to ask our friends for tips. My job was to visit our local library and sweet-talk the librarian into suggesting all books and manuals that could possibly help me get enough information to fix the TV. The task was arduous, and the path was considerably grueling, but the incentive was compelling: our favorite soccer final was creeping up, and fixing the TV before then was an absolute must! The three of us spent many long days and sleepless nights gathering every bit of information that we could find to diagnose the ailment of our old friend. After lengthy hours of research, phone calls, and visits to the library, it was suggested that we needed to change the TV’s cathode-ray tube. It took me 3 visits to different electronic parts stores, and the equivalent of about $100 until I found the coveted component. With great anticipation, the three of us sat around Mr. Panacolor, praying to All-Mighty God to grant us success in the impending delicate procedure. I carefully replaced the cathode-ray tube with the new one, put the screws of the TV’s back panel back on, asked my sister to connect the power, and while turning the TV on, anxiously murmuring “Bismillah” with a shaky voice. Lo and behold, the TV came back to life and the procedure was a success! Allah helped us restore our TV’s health! Mom looked at us with a straight face and said: “This was not entirely disastrous!” 

Now imagine that your TV broke today. Aside from the fact that most people would prefer to buy a new one, those of us who still have an ounce of curiosity left, or some DIY spirit, would opt for fixing it. And the first thing most people are going to do, without much thinking or planning, is to log into a social media platform to get information. Instead of going to the library to check out books and periodicals, they’ll most certainly go on YouTube, Facebook, Quora, or Reddit. They’ll ask friends on Discord or Instagram, and search for relevant videos on TikTok. It's difficult to imagine what we could possibly do about anything, without social media. If you want to learn how to bake, do woodworking or crochet, you go on social media. If you want to do research about an item to purchase, you go on social media. If you want to get the news or engage in activism, you go on social media. If you want to get married, you go on social media. If you need to take an unfortunate shortcut towards Islamic knowledge, you, purportedly, go on social media. Our ideas, feelings, emotions, appearances, and consumer behavior are all shaped by social media. Our social interactions, daily experiences, and worldviews are formed on social media. Our perceptions of history, political views, and economic perceptions are determined by social media. Even our entertainment can now be fully provided by the platforms of social media. If our TV broke in the year 2024, we might not have noticed; and if we did, it would have taken us 2 hours, not 2 weeks, to either fix it or replace it. No human invention in the history of the world took more hold, exercised more sway, and dictated as much of our existence as social media has. It exposed us to what used to be inaccessible knowledge and connected us with people we would have never met. It made everything easier, faster, and more efficient. Essentially, it brought the world to our fingertips, so to speak. The question we raise here is simple: Was this transformation healthy for us? 

The purpose of this essay is to assert an emphatic NO to this question. What follows is why. 

There are a few things I need to clarify at the onset. First, what do I mean by social media? It's simply a technology that “employs mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms via which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content." This includes platforms similar to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, SnapChat, X, etc. Second, the thoughts articulated in this essay are those of a concerned father and mentor and not the abstract contentions of someone who possesses an academic proclivity. The impact of social media affects everyone’s kids, including my own. This matter is personal to me, and I write about it with my children in mind. Third, it may occur to those who have heard me express critical views about social media in the past that I’m opposed to it only on religious or behavioral grounds, or even for health reasons. This essay, hopefully, will demonstrate that my opposition to social media is absolute, and rests inherently on philosophical grounds. Fourth, the ideas in this essay take for granted the instructiveness and authoritativeness of Islamic law. Once a certain quality or ramification of social media is established to be antithetical to Sharia, it will be assumed to be harmful in and of itself and no further discussion will be offered to use other means to prove why it is harmful. Fifth, I do not strive here to prove that social media is unqualifiedly bad. Honest assessment entails an acknowledgment that there are ostensibly useful functions of social media platforms that many might find beneficial. Be that as it may, this essay attempts to confirm beyond doubt that any pro of social media is far outweighed by severe cons. It will also attempt to show that most possible pros are essentially cons when understood profoundly. For some, this will prove to be most difficult to accept, not for the lack of evidence to support my thesis, for it's quite ubiquitous, but rather as a result of people’s emotional attachment to and dependence on social media. No child wants to give up their toy, after all. 

The way this essay is organized is as follows. After this introduction, I will highlight the statistics of social media usage across genders and age groups. Second, I will examine the state of ongoing research and will cite academic articles, surveys, and peer-reviewed studies to assess the impact of social media consumption on our interpersonal behavior, mental health, social experience, and overall wellness. Third, I will then switch gears to substantiate the claim that social media is diametrically antagonistic to basic Islamic teachings, and therefore must either be abandoned or extremely restricted in its consumption to minimum, intentional usage. This will be achieved by analyzing the most common features of social media and cross-examining them against basic tenets of Islamic law, to evidence their incompatibility. Fourth, the essay will culminate with a theoretical discourse to highlight its main thesis: that social media platforms are philosophically irreconcilable with Islamic teachings at the most fundamental level. The ethos in which social media thrives as a means of communication is one that is not only different but entirely clashing with the core objectives of Shariah. Last, we will dedicate the last section of this essay to sharing possible recommendations on how to address the ailments of social media within the Islamic context, as individuals, parents, mentors and concerned citizens.

The numbers are actually quite staggering. If you thought you had any accurate ideas about how pervasive the social media phenomenon actually is, think again. According to the Global Web Index or GWI, one of the largest internet research and marketing companies in the world, the average internet user spends an average of 2.5 hours a day on social media. This constitutes one-third of the time we spend on the internet daily. At this average time per user, the world spends 720 billion minutes per day using social media platforms. Over a full year, that adds up to more than 260 trillion minutes, or 500 million years of collective human time! Of course, these numbers look worse when adjusted for age and gender. Among GWI’s survey respondents, women between the ages of 16 and 24 spend the greatest amount of time using social media, at an average of almost 3 hours per day. It's also telling to examine social media consumption per country. Internet users in Kenya spend the most time in the world using social media each day, at an average of 3 hours and 45 minutes per user. Japan ranked lowest, at about 50 minutes a day per user. Bear in mind that these numbers published by GWI do not include time spent on other social media apps not included in the survey, such as TikTok and Instagram! Should these other apps be accounted for in terms of time spent daily on social media, the numbers will become drastically bleak, considering the explosion of their usage in recent years. Furthermore, for the purposes of this essay, multiplayer games are considered social media. According to Statista, online gaming has grown to surpass one billion users by the year 2021, and the average time spent on online gaming per day per user is about 2 hours! Additionally, it is also noteworthy to mention that there are a little over 5 billion active social media user identities in the world. While the number of individual users is likely less than that, it's still an absolutely staggering figure. 

This data is extremely relevant for the purposes of our essay. If social media was a marginal phenomenon that is only being used by a marginal group of individuals, it would not have warranted any concern. And if the average individual spent a negligible amount of time using social media platforms, it would not have necessitated any analysis of the possible impact. But it is precisely because most people in the world spend more than one-fifth of their waking hours using social media apps, that one must first question the motives and the consequences of such platforms. Furthermore, there are about 8 billion people on the planet. If the above numbers are accurate, one might safely assume that the number of unique social media users exceeded 4 billion, which is still about half of the world population. We might still be okay, one might ask, right? Wrong. We ’are not okay. The number of people in the world who could possibly afford an internet connection or a smartphone are the ones who have both time and resources to sign up for a social media account. The rest likely struggle with a debilitating type of poverty that leaves them facing a more menacing threat. So if my assessments are correct, half of the world is crippled by poverty, and the other half is crippled by social media! In other words, the minute a human receives fair manumission from the shackles of indigence, he or she is indentured again by the captivity of modern-day social media slavery. 

I know this sounds hyperbolic to some. But it isn’t. Let the facts be the judge.

The link between high rates of social media consumption and poor mental health has become simply undeniable. In 2023, the United States Surgeon General released an advisory called Social Media and Youth Mental Health, in which he documents the growing evidence that social media is causing harm to young people’s mental health. Soon after, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued its own similar health advisory. A year later, in June 2024, the Surgeon General called for a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, which would require an act of Congress to implement. The connection between a deteriorated state of mental health and the usage of social media has nearly become an accepted fact. What remains is political action that leads to useful policy. Considering the fact that social media companies have evolved into major corporations with a colossal impact on the economy and a strong influence on government, it is not clear when any regulating legislation will become imminent. At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, I would not be exaggerating if I went as far as equating social media conglomerates with Big Tobacco in the phase leading up to the modest wins of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement.

But as they say, the devil is in the details. It is easy to get caught up in the sentiment of legal battles and the nuances of activism, and gradually lose sight of the real human cost of social media consumption. The impact on mental health is quite staggering, ranging from increased likelihood of anxiety, depression, and suicidality, to adverse effects on sleep, body image and exacerbated feelings of loneliness and dispensability. MIT researchers have now linked the usage of Facebook among college students with increased rates of depression and argued verbatim that their “.. results are consistent with the hypothesis that social media might be responsible for the recent deterioration in mental health among teenagers and young adults.” More ominously, according to data from the Center for Disease Control, the suicide rate among 10 to 24-year-olds was stable from 2000 to 2007; it then increased by 57% between 2007 and 2017 and continues to rise, coinciding with the pervasive rise in social media usage. Academic research has shown with increasing degrees of certainty that a high level of social media use in early adolescence followed by a marked increase over time was most predictive of suicide risk in emerging adulthood. 

But statistics are mere numbers, after all. They only have meaning to the extent that we can make sense of them. With or without comprehensive statistics, we would still be able to logically ascertain the dire consequences of social media. The human mind is not designed to process this massive number of pictures, videos, colors, events, stimulants, and occurrences, hours and hours on end, every day: A hundred new waffle recipes, earthquakes in China, random pictures posted by 45 friends, floods in Brazil, the news of political oppression in Egypt, 67 videos of friends pranking one another, snippets of Biden-Trump debates, 139 funny memes, 83 videos on how to do deadlifts the right way, warning posts on global warming, arguments and counterarguments followed by refutations of the counterarguments, more videos on making espresso, images of war and carnage in Gaza, followed by Pro-Palestine and Pro-Israel commentary, and all of this is interlaced by videos of young girls dancing to famous songs or lip-syncing to them, just to lighten up the mood a bit. We get exposed to all of this, literally, during a 30-minute period, and the worst part is that we’ll do that 10 times or more every day. How can we not feel mental health struggles over time, when our minds get overwhelmed by this flood of information about events we are not connected to and can’t do anything about? When social media stimulation cannot be possibly matched by the relatively mundane nature of our day-to-day existence? When we are tethered to people we do not know, places we haven’t been to, and events we cannot influence?