Social Media: Friend Or Foe
Social media is powerful. Some people depend on it for their income, some use it to communicate with friends and family, and some use it for entertainment, but it’s hard for us to imagine just how powerful it is. Every day more than 67.3 million photos and videos are posted on Instagram, users watch more than 5.9 billion YouTube videos. People make more than 656 million Tweets a day. It’s so powerful that in June 2013, they added the word tweet in the context of Twitter to the Oxford English dictionary. But is power always good?
As Uncle Ben from Spiderman said: “With great power comes great responsibility.” I may have lost a few people by quoting Spiderman, but it’s true. Anyone on social media has immense power. They can post anything on social media and have it reach a billion people. There are two sides to this coin. The first side is that people can use social media for things like fundraising and social awareness. Platforms like Instagram were/are instrumental in movements like Black Lives Matter. The other side is that because social media has such a broad reach, people use it to spread fake news and hate. Communities like the and Anti-Vaccination community are using social media to preach concepts that can lead to serious harm for some people.
The first thing to look at is the positive impact of social media. Social media can provide places for people to find friends and meet people with similar hobbies. People use Reddit to talk to people with similar interests, and a ton of people have found friends through social media like Reddit. Platforms like YouTube and TikTok are now norms in entertainment, with television and radio growing more obsolete. People also use social media to spread important social messages, such as LGBTQ+ rights, gender equality, and anti-racism.
The issue is that there is no light without shadows. People also use social media to spread racist, anti LGBTQ+ and other negative messages. One example is how Apple and Google had to suspend the social media app Parler from their stores because people were using it to spread violent messages in light of the incident at the Capitol building. We can’t discuss the cons of social media without bringing up one key point: hackers. No matter how secure companies make their apps, there will always be hackers. And hackers can use social media to gather information about us as well as spread fake information. One example is the infamous bitcoin scam on Twitter. In July of 2020, somebody hacked into 45 Twitter accounts belonging to high-profile individuals and corporations and tweeted a message saying if anyone sent some bitcoin to an address, they would send double the amount back. Of course, this was a scam. Even though it seems obvious now, people trusted these accounts and over 400 transactions with a total value of 121,000 US Dollars.
The main issue with social media is that we trust people based on their follower count. Somebody with a million followers could post or support some fake news, and there is a high chance people will see their post and start to believe it themselves.
Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide whether you trust social media and the people on it. There are pros and cons to it. If you do use social media, you have to know when to stop.
