Is Social Media Killing Empathy in Gen-Z?

In this new digital age I’m sure we’ve all seen a meme or two in our lives. Whether it’s a meme about how much you like coffee, or how your hair doesn’t cooperate in the morning. But what happens when these memes extend beyond that and start to poke fun at homeless people, or overweight individuals, or anyone deemed unattractive or weird by society’s standards? This new trend of ostracizing anyone outside of our norms is one of the main problems caused by the technological era. Social media has made it extremely easy to make fun of others, and has effectively ruined empathy in my generation.

Let me start off by saying that I’m not perfect, I definitely have hundreds of nasty posts liked, making fun of someone and their struggles. But I began to notice all the hate being spewed around me, and once that happened, it was very hard to go back to that ignorantly blissful state of making fun of others that I was just at. But not everyone is like me, where I stopped joining the crowd of hatred surrounding these pariahs we created online, most other people didn’t and continue to shun them. But why is this? Why do people feel so comfortable tearing one another down over the internet, when the words they say would hardly be acceptable in any real-life situation? Take, for example, in an article for Upworthy, Tod Perry wrote about actress Julia Roberts’s reaction when she received a haul of hateful comments on her appearance. “In a later post, she explained how shocked she was by the amount of people who felt absolutely required to talk about how terrible I looked.” This is a crazy thing to consider when you think about how nobody would even think about saying this to her in real life, all of us on the internet have reached uncomfortable levels of comfortability regarding how we communicate with others. Julia Roberts said “My feelings got hurt … and I thought, ‘God, what if I was 15?” This highlights the issue with being hateful online, it affects the victim just the same as if that were said to them face-to-face. An article made by three BMC Psychiatry writers about the negative impacts of cyberbullying states, “Adolescents who experienced cyberbullying at wave 2 had higher prevalence of depressive symptoms (males: 27.8% and females: 49.1%) and higher suicidal ideations (males: 7.8% and females: 12.1%). It was found that depressive symptoms were significantly more prevalent among females who were ever cyberbullied at both waves.” Both of these articles show how the concept of telling someone to “just log off” when they’re faced with cyberbullying doesn’t work because the insults still stick, and lead to longer lasting issues like depression and suicidal thoughts. And it’s impossible to stay off the internet nowadays without being left-out from all the news, fashion, and jokes that are trending. 

Another problem that arose with social media is the lolcows. A lolcow is a person that people give platforms to only to make fun of them. Lolcow’s are used as constant meme sources and are usually struggling in life, whether it’s from learning disabilities, mental illness, poverty, external abuse, or a combination of any of these factors. This makes it extremely easy for anyone to make fun of them, they’re only known through the internet and have all these problems in their life, separating them from us and therefore erasing so much of our empathy for them because it’s quite easy to disregard anyone we can’t relate to. Being a lolcow is detrimental to anyone’s mental health, because it’s basically bullying on a global scale, and this only makes it easier for people to make fun of them. Amal Jama wrote an article for Very Well Mind on this very issue, and how lolcows are problematic. It states, “I don’t think it’s okay for people to be watching lolcow content because it negatively affects the person who’s making it and being exploited,’ Rahma Mohamoud (12) said. ‘But I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t see the appeal to a certain extent because it’s entertaining to watch people do irrational things on the internet. But when it gets to people like ‘World of T-Shirts’ who are being encouraged to drink, that’s too far.” Many fans of lolcows admit they know it’s terrible to support them, and understand how inhumane it is to put these people on display like zoo animals and make fun of them, but they simply don’t care. This supports my claim that it’s easy to attack someone when you don’t relate to them, especially with lolcows because their lifestyles seem so crazy and removed from reality that they don’t even feel human anymore. 

My personal view on the situation is that our interactions through the internet is similar to barrier aggression seen in dogs. People we wouldn’t laugh at in real life, or things we wouldn’t have problems with in real life, suddenly become the most insane, infuriating, or hilarious things through the internet. It’s because we can’t see the other parties faces or body language. A key part in all communication is being able to look at the person you’re talking to and gauge how they feel through their tone, movements, and facial expressions. This is all lost when we communicate through the internet, only being able to read each other through our words which can be received differently by everyone. Ben Rein and Maria Tavares researched this topic for Brainfacts, all the science behind how we interact with people on the internet versus in real life. “When people bicker with others online, they see no facial expressions and hear no tone of voice. There is no body language or eye contact, as all social cues are removed. However, neuroscience research has shown those precious social cues activate the brain areas thought to be responsible for empathy, like the anterior cingulate cortex, insula, and prefrontal cortex. This leads everyday people to commit acts of unusual hostility.” This goes directly in hand with everything I said about how people act unusually online compared to real life, how people call others ugly and tear them down on the internet but wouldn’t even consider that offline. Its a psychological response to being unable to truly understand other’s tones on the internet, and that’s why we respond so defensively, or go on the offense, is because our senses are removed and we act on instinct, not considering anyone else’s thoughts or feelings. The article describes this phenomenon as virtual disengagement hypothesis, where being online severely distorts our ability too communicate with others.

Furthermore, a student at the University of Tennessee researched this exact phenomenon, and found that prolonged social media usage actually can result in slight brain damage. She says that this comes from many different aspects of social media, for example that when we scroll through TikTok, our emotions are rapidly changing with every video, shifting from funny to upsetting on a loop. This raises our general stress levels which harms the brain. Social media also has a direct link to sleep loss, as it keeps people up at night. The paper states, “This is significant because a damaged hippocampus can lead to apathy due to the proven association the hippocampus, along with the prefrontal cortex, has with social cognition, cognitive empathy, and emotional empathy (Nowacki et al., 2020). Hence, social media is harmful because it decreases empathy through multiple factors, as proven by different research tested and supported by a wide variety of disciplines and research methods.” This shows a direct causational relationship between social media and a lack of empathy. Brain damage caused by social media decreases our general level of empathy.

The combination of lolcows, people the internet decided were too weird and subhuman so they decided to mock them to extreme points of no return. An example of this is Worldoftshirts, an outgoing autistic man who’s been groomed to fuel his ongoing alcohol addiction and is currently running around New York City licking floors and doing whatever to keep his viewers high, in hopes of pleasing an audience who’ll never accept him and view him as an equal. And the virtual disengagement theory, the thought that interacting with people online is vastly different than real-life interactions because of our inability to read body language, vocal tone, or facial expressions. Makes it very easy to leave nasty comments on a video, or promote bullying of hundreds or thousands of people who deviate from the norm. It’s important to remember to stay kind, and put yourself in others shoes before you spread hate. Because it’s easy to hate and forget about it, but its rare that you’ll be hated on and forget about it. 

Bibliography

Ben Rein, Maria Tavares. “How Social Media May Be Affecting Our Empathy.” BrainFacts.Org, www.brainfacts.org/neuroscience-in-society/tech-and-the-brain/2025/wired-for-connection-cursed-by-computers-how-social-media-may-be-affecting-our-empathy-100125. Accessed 19 Nov. 2025. 

Maurya, C., Muhammad, T., Dhillon, P. et al. The effects of cyberbullying victimization on depression and suicidal ideation among adolescents and young adults: a three year cohort study from India. BMC Psychiatry 22, 599 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-022-04238-x 

Perry, Tod, and Upworthy Staff. “‘God, What If I Was 15?’: Julia Roberts Responds to Being Shamed in Photo with Niece Emma Roberts.” Upworthy, Upworthy, 3 Sept. 2025, www.upworthy.com/julia-roberts-responds-to-bodyshaming-on-instagram-ex1. 

Salgado, Mayra E. “Multidisciplinary Literary Review: The Relationship between Social Media and Empathy.” UTC Scholar, scholar.utc.edu/honors-theses/460/. Accessed 19 Nov. 2025. 

Jama, Amal. When 15 Minutes of Fame Goes Wrong: The Troublesome Trend of “Lolcows,” heightsherald.org/7237/opinion/when-15-minutes-of-fame-goes-wrong-the-troublesome-trend-of-lolcows/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2025.