The Impact of College Students' Using TikTok on Their Mental Health from the Perspective of Media Society

Abstract

Along with the rise of online social networking, social media is reshaping people's lives. The influence of TikTok, as a representative of short-video social media, on the different groups of people cannot be ignored. This paper aims to investigate the behavioral performance of college students' active and passive use of TikTok and the psychological impact brought by different use behaviors from the perspective of media society theory. This paper chooses college students as the research object and adopts questionnaire survey method. The results show that, on the one hand, college students' active and passive use of TikTok was positively correlated with self-esteem, but the correlation with subjective well-being was not yet significant; there was also a significant positive correlation between active and passive use. On the other hand, gender, household income, active use, and subjective well-being can positively predict self-esteem, with active use and subjective well-being having the strongest predictive power. This study can help to improve the research on the impact of social media use on users, as well as provide a new basis for improving college students' self-esteem level from a media perspective.