Social Bearings

People use social media on a daily basis, this is obvious and is why is it has a huge impact on our lives. A benefit of social media is that it lets people express their opinions freely, and makes it easier to connect with friends and family from home. But those benefits do not come without costs; I will discuss in full to show you why social media can be a bad influence on the mannerism of corporate businesses, and the public interaction of our society.

First, we should go over why social media has had a positive impact on our lives. Social media connects people, and enables people to talk publicly or privately without needing to go the distance to reach the person they wish to speak with physically. Social media also makes it easier for people to stay informed, without having to wait for news platforms to post an update on the story. News platforms may not even consider some events relevant to the public, in which social media takes care of. Social media has helped people stay informed. But you will see why a lot of these benefits quickly become undermined.

Here are some of the ways that social media hurts our society. Anybody who uses Twitter would know that there is no limit to what people can post, and when there are fact checks for statements, Twitter gets sued. This means that the public can post false information and sway the internet with propaganda like QAnon. This group influences people to believe in un-grounded statements, and thus politically steers them to believe whatever they are told. Twitter as well has unfettered arguing, where people with different opinions can attack others, without being face to face. This issue has negatively impacted the Black Lives Matter movement and the LGBT (Q+), simply because the groups argue against themselves for their own opinions. This inhibits the cause of these groups.

The companies that own these social media platforms also have a negative impact on society. For instance, Facebook since 2007, has had data breaches at least every 3 years. Starting in 2017, there has been a data breach every 4-8 months. Well, what type of data is leaked when there is a data breach? Personal information which is dangerous in the wrong hands: “personal information of users exposed, including their full name, date of birth, gender, email address, phone number, Facebook IDs, Facebook bios, location and job status (iTMunch).” This has affected the people who use these social platforms negatively, and even results in the loss of other accounts linked to the user’s email address, because hackers were able to get access to this information.

It is clear that although social media in premise is a perfect form of communication for the general public, that there are too many real world drawback for it to succeed other than on paper. It now influences people to discredit and verbally attack others, and it risks the public’s private information. Overall, it hurts the people the most, and is a negative impact on our society. Limitations must be made for social media to become a truly positive influence on our everyday lives.

Works Cited

Jain, Riddhi. “A Complete Facebook Data Breach & Privacy Leak Timeline (2005 to 2021).” ITMunch, IT Munch, 14 Apr. 2021, itmunch.com/facebook-data-breach-timeline-2005-2021/.

“Social Media Keyboard” by Shahid Abdullah is marked with CC0 1.0