As we discussed in previous posts, there are benefits and drawbacks of social media. Its misuse may lead to wrecking havoc on someone’s online presence or physical and mental state also. Thus, it is to the user to use social media to his or her advantage or disadvantage.
- Even though it helps us share content with our near ones online, it leads to loss of privacy and even safety & security at times.
- Even though it helps us build new relations online, it may lead to us losing touch with our real relationships if we spend too much time on it.
- Even though we get quality content on social media, there is lot of fake and misleading content too.
- Even though it helps us in shopping, it may lead to various online frauds too.
- Even though we may be a part of some online community on social media, the members of such community may do cyber-bullying of its members.
- Even though it helps us gather analytics (i.e. patterns about the behaviour of people), the same analytics may be used to send targeted content to the users so as to influence their behaviour.
- Even though it is a good way to pass time, spending too much time on it leads to loss of productive time.
- Even though it helps with making a positive reputation, bad reviews or negative feedback may lead to negative reputation too.
- Even though social media websites may try hard to secure their servers and data, hackers still get into their systems and steal data.
Thus we see that its benefits and drawbacks are the two sides of the same coin. Too much addiction and browsing it insecurely will lead to more of drawbacks and doing it under moderation and safely will have positive effects.
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.