Social Media Can Cause Harm

Social media has become a platform that provides services to people especially youths. Social network sites typically converged different relationship types into one group of “friends.” I agree, with such vast interconnectivity, convergence of relationships, and information sharing by individual users comes an increased risk of privacy violations. The main reasons to online privacy invasions today are the improper use of technology, the need youths to follow trends, too much information being shared to gain attention, lack of knowledge on privacy on social networks and cluelessness on identity theft. These reasons put them at risk of privacy invasions.

Social media is not only widely used and very easy to get comfortable with, using it has also become a “trend” (Lapenta, 2015). A very good example would be Facebook, brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook had become the primary channel of social information and the most utilized way to organize and spread information. Facebook is a platform for people to share whatever information on their virtual wall just by a few clicks. Preadolescents and adolescents who lack an awareness of privacy issues often follow the trend post inappropriate messages, pictures, and videos without understanding that “what goes online stays online.” Very often people are unaware of how these functions work. If the privacy settings are not set to a stricter level everybody that comes across your wall will be able to retrieve your information, even your future employer. As a result, future jobs and college acceptance may be put into jeopardy by inexperienced and rash clicks of the mouse.

It has kind of become a common tendency among the youngsters of posting as many pictures and personal updates as possible to gain attention from peer groups (Gangopadhyay, 2014). Obviously, youth are caught in the sad treadmill of trying to be the popular kid in school or in their community for whatever reason. Many teens use social media to gain popularity, which is very addictive when attained to any measure. While posting so much information about yourself can gain you attention from your peers, it could also gain attention from people with ill intentions and lead to cyberstalking. Little did they know, a person’s social and intellectual activities can be distributed and found across multiple search engines scattered across the Web. Stalking and going through their profiles with tons of personal information on teen social media without the consent of the victim has become a skill that stalkers have mastered.

There is no harm in giving limited personal facts as long as it is made secured with the best possible privacy settings. It has been seen among the young social media users, that there is a propensity of sharing however much data as could be expected to whatever number individuals as could be allowed. It is seen that most students did not change their privacy settings on Facebook, even after they had been taught about the ways they can do as such (Debatin, 2009). while some social networking users are concerned about privacy, but most fail to act on it. A study on Facebook users found that users are unaware of the privacy features and quite a number did not changed their default privacy preferences set by operators. Many users think that publishing personal information has many benefits that they can survive the consequences. Hackers are always on the prowl, watching and waiting for chances for them to make a move. If the privacy settings are not set to a stricter level everybody that comes across your wall will be able to retrieve your information and professional hackers are able to hack into people’s accounts easily.