Social Media Privacy and Security: A Case Study Analysis

This case study examines the state of social media privacy in America, highlighting key issues and incidents. It begins by presenting statistics from a 2014 Pew Research Center study, revealing that while 70% of Americans use social media, a significant majority (91%) believe they have lost control o...Read More

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It is seen that a total of 70% Americans have been using Social Media. Again it is noted
that majority of the social media breaches occur in America itself. The percentage of social
media data breaching has been ranging up to 59% of the total social media breach has occurred
in America itself. It is also seen that the percentage of compromised data has been very high as
72% (Fox & DeLateur 2014). Despite this numbers it is very high there has been a decrease in
number of the number of incidents. There has been a decrease in social media security breach
issue by 17%.
A major incident regarding security issue had taken place in the platform of Facebook.
There were a 10 million people who suffered due to the Facebook security issue that took place.
It was seen that America has been one of the most highly affected place. There were 3 major
bugs that were present in the functional processing of Facebook (Mazer et al. 2015). These bugs
that were present were effecting the entire process and hence the attacker was able to peep into
the data that were generated and hence the data were breached easily.
Another social media incident that is needed to be focussed on is that in the year 2016,
social media, namely the platforms of Facebook, Watsapp, Skype, Instagram and Youtube
played an important role in the radicalizing of the mobilizing a total of 90% lone actors (De
Choudhury et al, 2016). It is seen that Islamists including the white nationalists were the ones
who got radicalized due to the platform of social media. Hence it can be stated that social media
has increased the overall speed at which the people were getting radicalized. Hence wise it was
seen that developing violent theme based posts for others and hence conflicts were on verge of
increasing until proper steps were taken. In this case social media was acting as the terror
magnifier.

Another incident that is to be considered includes the fact that due to involvement of
Twitter and data generated via Twitter has been acting responsible for the mass public attacks in
United States. Hence it led to increase in the number of homicide.
The biggest concern here is that confidentiality rules in the United States are presently
too feeble to avoid misuses of social media. The social media statistics by intelligence activities,
law implementation, supporters that involve in inequitable outlining (Marwick & Boyd, 2014).
Americans critically necessity congressional exploit to accept more robust legal defences for
their records. Social media is very much standard in the whole of the United States. According to
the PRC, there are 70% of American people use social media platform for communication
purpose. 91% of American believes and firmly believes that people have lost control over how
private data is used and collected. There are some issues related to the privacy concern of US
social media. 74% of US citizen believes that social media is very much important, but the data
collection strategy must be controlling. 65% believes that it is very significant to them to regulate
what data is composing about them. Many researchers forecast that there are insufficient persons
will have the properties to defend themselves from dataveillance in the future.

Marwick, A. E., & Boyd, D. (2014). Networked privacy: How teenagers negotiate context in
social media. New media & society, 16(7), 1051-1067
Fox, J. A., & DeLateur, M. J. (2014). Mass shootings in America: moving beyond
Newtown. Homicide studies, 18(1), 125-145.
Mazer, J. P., Thompson, B., Cherry, J., Russell, M., Payne, H. J., Kirby, E. G., & Pfohl, W.
(2015). Communication in the face of a school crisis: Examining the volume and content
of social media mentions during active shooter incidents. Computers in Human
Behavior, 53, 238-248.
De Choudhury, M., Jhaver, S., Sugar, B., & Weber, I. (2016, March). Social media participation
in an activist movement for racial equality. In Tenth International AAAI Conference on
Web and Social Media.