Social Media Benefits and Problems — Band 8 Model Answer

Social media is perhaps the defining infrastructure of twenty-first century public life, and evaluating it as simply "beneficial" or "harmful" is about as illuminating as evaluating electricity on those terms.Examiner noteAnalogy used to expose the limitations of the question's framing — confident and intellectually sophisticated. Band 8 TA. The platform is neutral; the outcomes depend entirely on its design and governance.

The benefits are genuine and historically unprecedented. Social movements from the Arab Spring to #MeToo have demonstrated that social media can shift power in ways that were structurally impossible in the broadcast eraExaminer noteHistorical examples used analytically rather than decoratively — Band 8 TA. . For diaspora communities, marginalised voices and people with rare medical conditions, the ability to find community online has been transformative. The democratisation of information production — whatever its costs — has permanently disrupted elite control of public narrative.

The harms, however, are not incidental but architectural.Examiner noteShort, punchy sentence — deliberate rhythm contrast after a long one. Band 8 GRA. The advertising-based business model creates financial incentives to maximise engagement, and engagement is reliably maximised by content that triggers fear, outrage and tribalism. The downstream consequences — political polarisation, epistemic fragmentation, and a documented mental health crisis among adolescent girls — are not bugs but predictable outputs of the system's design.Examiner noteThree-part list in em-dashes with a sharp evaluative conclusion. Sophisticated Band 8 syntax.

Given this analysis, the question of whether benefits outweigh harms is less important than the question of whether the harms are remediable. I believe they are, through reformed platform business models, algorithmic transparency regulation and stronger digital literacy curricula — and that a well-governed social media ecosystem would be an unambiguous net positive.