Is Social Media really that good?

Social media has existed since 1997, with a website called “Six Degrees”, a platform where you can put up a profile of yourself, construct a friend list, and even have school affiliations. It came out roughly a decade after NSFNET, a nationwide digital network. Nowadays, social networks exist across the world, from Facebook to Reddit, virtually any online website that gives you the direct ability to communicate with other people, and share videos and pictures, is a social network, and they can connect millions of people across the world to each other. That begs the question though, “Is social media really that good?”

First, with my stance. I am rather indifferent, though I would say I lean more towards good than bad, as I believe the pros outweigh the cons, and most cons can be prevented. I believe the fact that something like Youtube™, which can allow over 200 million people to talk together in the comment section of one video is great! People across the planet, from all different walks of life, can talk together, albeit the comments aren’t necessarily a place to do that, it is still hypothetically possible. Allowing people borderline unrestricted communication isn’t always great though, as dangerous people can lurk on social media. Kidnappers and stalkers trying to find your address, and creepers who do not do great things are unfortunately all too common on every social media platform.

To start with, as I said earlier, I believe that the pros of social media outweigh the cons by a good margin. Connecting millions of people, allowing people to display arts and achievements, allowing people to learn things, make friends, and talk with hundreds of people about things they enjoy is great, and Google’s Discord is a great example of this. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit all do virtually the same thing, with some differences. Facebook has way more options than the other two and even has over 2 billion active accounts, around 5 times as many as Reddit, clocking in at 430 million. All three websites do pretty much the same thing though, at their core. You post a picture or video or statement, and people following you, or in Reddit’s case, in the same sub-Reddit group, can see what you posted and can comment and the post.

Discord is different. It is one of the only social networks I have seen that doesn’t have a comment section. It has communities, and those communities have groups that pretty much anyone can access. In those groups, people can talk and post pictures and videos. Think of it like talking in person, face to face with 827,000 people, who can all talk over each other, in the case of the largest Discord server, the Fortnite server. This is not without its problems though.

I hear of situations of predators and general creeps on the internet all the time, and in most cases, on Discord, which has a Direct Message function. This is why I am indifferent, along with just not liking some social networks, because anybody can talk to anybody, pretty much no matter what. The reason I lean more towards the good side though is these cases can be avoided somewhat. Parents can monitor their child’s online usage, and take any proper actions to protect them from creeps, and anybody can block, or report anybody on any social media platform I have heard of. Doing this prevents them from messaging you, some websites may straight up to prevent them from seeing anything you post, and reporting, with enough reports, could get their account banned or deleted.

Another negative of connecting millions of people together is the language used. Not like English and Russian, but foul language, like slurs. Not everyone wants to see this, and as far as I know, some websites can ban you from their platform for saying something, some, like Discord, have a chat filter you can activate, but also have bots that can go onto servers that can ban someone for saying something registered that the bot sees, and flags as a bannable offense. Games like Roblox and Minecraft can also be considered social networks, with open servers that can connect hundreds of people in Minecraft, or Roblox, which does have smaller server sizes, which maxes at 100. Both games have a chat function, which is like discord, everybody can talk over each other. Both games have a censor function, both might filter different words, but it is generally and curse and slur.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to keep the internet clear of any creeps, and foul language can be anywhere, like Reddit, which I don’t believe has a curse/slur filter. The internet will never be clean and pure, but with countermeasures that we currently have, I believe that social networks are ultimately good. Addiction to social media is another matter altogether, but it is not something that affects everyone. I myself use only Reddit and Discord, but I don’t interact much with anyone on Reddit, and I barely touch Discord.

“social media” by Sean MacEntee is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/?ref=openverse&atype=rich