Stars Criticize Need for Social Media Validation

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By: Jessica Cherok

It seems like everyone is quitting social media lately. Well, not really, but a couple of celebrities have ditched social media with claims that it's ruining lives.

Superstar Kate Winslet stated recently in an interview with The Sunday Times that she doesn't allow her children to use social media and attempts to keep their device usage to a minimum. "It has a huge impact on young women's self-esteem, because all they ever do is design themselves for people to like them," Winslet said.

The actress went on to say that this desire for online validation leads to issues like eating disorders, something the actress has been very outspoken about in recent years.

Also ditching social media is 18-year-old Australian beauty blogger Essena O'Neill. O'Neill made a name for herself on YouTube, Instagram, and Tumblr, but recently decided that social media portrayed life in a far too contrived and unrealistic way, and that this fakery was harmful to herself and others.

O'Neill deleted nearly all of her social media posts and edited the captions of the ones that were left to more accurately convey what was actually happening in the photo. Instead of hashtags like #perfect, O'Neill details the painstaking effort taken to make the perfect photo and how none of it just occurred naturally.

For more information about O'Neill's move to make social media postings more realistic, check out her new website.