Drawbacks of Social Media

Drawbacks of social media platforms include:

1. Since users share their data publicly, their privacy is restrained.
2. Since users share their private data, their security and safety may be compromised if they publish personally identifiable information.
3. There is always the risk of user’s data being leaked or hacked into by persons with malicious intentions.
4. It can be used for what is called ‘social media mining’ wherein behaviour of users is observed & analysed and then targeted content may be presented to the users based on such mining. Polarization of users on certain belief can be done by presenting users targeted material.
5. It has the notoriety of allowing false content to be shared. Incidents of such content going viral are numerous.
6. The menace of cyber-bullying is widely prevalent wherein kids are harassed or embarrassed through such platforms.
7. Some people tend to replace their real relationships with online relationships on social media and hence their personal life suffers.
8. It can become a distraction due to users getting addicted to always being online.
9. Incidents of users getting scammed online are a always heard.
10. Some users glamorize alcohol and drugs, which might lead other users, especially youngsters, into glamorizing them too.
11. Vulgar and pornographic content often gets posted on such platforms which can be offensive to some people.
12. It also leads to stereotyping wherein users may form opinions about a category of people based on the content they share on such platforms.
13. In extreme cases, physical and mental health of users can be affected by giving too much time to such platforms and not enough time to physical health & personal relations.
14. Trustworthiness of social media content is always doubtful.
15. It can be censored anytime.

For Wikipedia entry on Social Media, click here.

For more posts on Social Media, click here.

For more posts in The Cyber Cops project, click here.