Prediction and Prevention of Addiction to Social Media Using Machine Learning

Abstract

In today’s world, social media websites have become a huge part of people’s lives. Although social media provides the power of communication and content sharing, it has the potential to harm its users in magnitude greater than its power to benefit its users. The negative effects of social media have become more and more prevalent and there does not seem to be any kind of precautionary actions being carried out by the creators of social media platforms. These social media platforms have great potential to cause harm, and in a way that is not entirely obvious. They tend to harm a person’s mind by making them feel insecure, exposed and even exploited because of the misuse of user’s personal information. The main objective of this paper is to find out how social media users in the age group of 17–23 years are being affected by these platforms. For this purpose, data has been collected by reaching out to people in above-mentioned age group and asking them questions related to their social media usage. This paper also tries to suggest mitigation strategies to the negative effects of social media being faced by someone by creating an application that evaluates their current social media usage and gives back responses based on the usage data of other users.