Danger of Social Media

Running head: DANGER OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Danger of Social Media
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Notes

1DANGER OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Social Media: Problems and Danger
Over the years, the world has progressed significantly in terms of communication and
networking as with time technologies have helped immensely in decreasing the barriers of
distance and time among the different countries. There are, however, several crucial issues of
concern and danger in the usage of social media.
The invention of internet and its widespread usage across the globe has facilitated
profusely in making the communication channels even easier and efficient. This can be seen
from the popularity of what is known as the “Social Media” in the contemporary global
framework. The term “Social Media”, in the essence of the term itself refers to the websites and
the online applications, which can be availed with the help of internet and which provides its
users the facility to communicate with the every corner of the world1. It helps the users to create
and share their creations with whomever they want and also to convey their thoughts and
feelings to the world. With time the usage of this social media platform has increased
significantly due to its immense popularity, which can be attributed to the advantages it creates
in terms of both personal and professional contact establishment across the world. Websites like
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram have gained significant attention from all the age groups and
socio-economic strata of the world2. The youth, especially, are the most frequent users of these
websites, which attract them with their global exposure and limitless exploring opportunities.
However, not all aspects of this social media and its usage are positive as with great exposure,
the same also increases the scope of malpractices and infiltration of the negative attributes too, to
which the users often fall vulnerable, the situation being even more acute in case of children and
1 Gerbaudo, Paolo. Tweets and the streets: Social media and contemporary activism. Pluto Press, 2012.
2 Couldry, Nick. Media, society, world: Social theory and digital media practice. Polity, 2012.

2DANGER OF SOCIAL MEDIA
adolescent population. The essay takes into account these negative implications of the
continuously expanding usage of social media in almost every domain of human life in the
contemporary period3.
The social media, as discussed above, has gradually entered in the everyday life of people
and has become one of the necessities of life for a major population due to its exposure to the
happenings all over the world and facility of easy communication. However, this ease and
unrestrained global exposure many a times leads to adverse effects, having negative implications
on the life of the users. One of such primary issues of concern is the issue of privacy and security
of the users. In the contemporary periods, with the huge global exposure to the worldwide people
and phenomena, the users of the social networking sites enjoy immense freedom of expressing
their thoughts, interests and establishing communication4. Often this leads to sharing of personal
details of the users on these social media platforms. This is a matter of huge concern as it
becomes immensely convenient for the hackers and internet frauds to exploit these personal
details, thereby harming the users in concern. Apart from frauds and scams, there also lies the
risk of infiltration of viruses and malwares which often causes widespread trouble in terms of
breach of security and compromising of the security of the huge numbers of users. Financial
frauds and scams have been increasing in numbers as well as in magnitude with every passing
day due to this easy of infiltrating social media and networking platforms by the hackers from all
over the world5.
3 Boyd, Danah. It's complicated: The social lives of networked teens. Yale University Press, 2014.
4 Oboler, Andre, Kristopher Welsh, and Lito Cruz. "The danger of big data: Social media as computational social
science." First Monday 17.7 (2012).
5 Fuchs, Christian. Social media: A critical introduction. Sage, 2017.