ESSAY: THE RISKS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

         There is no doubt social media has made the world a more connected place, but all those connections also create unprecedented access to people’s information. Back in 2012, Facebook said that around 8.7% of the accounts on their platform were fake, which, at that time, equated to around 83 million accounts. Social networking can be great experience for us but also has clear risk. Social media is harmful because it invades people’s privacy, causes addiction and affects social skills.

        Invasion of privacy is a serious issue concerning the Internet. It occurs when individuals cannot maintain a substantial degree of control over their personal information and it’s usage. The more personal and professional information you include on your public profile, the easier it is for a hacker to exploit that information to gain your trust. Hackers can use your information to pose as someone else.

          The number of human who are addicted to social media is increasing. They spent ample hours of looking at other people’s life when they could be doing other productive activity. When they are addicted to people’s life, they tend to become more competitive as they like to compare their lifestyle with other people that they saw on social media. This will lead into a negative addiction and it is not intellectual at all. People should be more infatuated with reading informational articles on the internet

          Apart from privacy invasion and addiction, poor social skills has also undoubtedly become one of the inevitable contributing risks of social media. Once they become totally absorbed in playing social media, they will give their utmost focus on it and have little time to make interactions with real friends. Hence, they prefer to stay in the shadows and be alone. This has truly become a setback for them and that they should be given extra attention in order to eliminate this risk.

          In conclusion, social media risks people’s privacy, cause addiction and results to poor social skills. There should be restrictions for certain people to access social media. This action will prevent people from watching inappropriate videos such as those that contain violence and sexual contents. Therefore, people will not be exposed to improper contents that lead to bad behavior.

- by The GoldenFive