Human beings are naturally in pursuit of validation and have this need to be involved. Social media makes this process easier.
Human beings are naturally in pursuit of validation and have this need to be involved. Social media makes this process easier.
Every time you receive a notification about someone liking your latest post, you feel inclined to open the application and check it out. Making you scroll, while using the app to reach the content you are interested in is a way of making you use the app for a greater amount of time.
Social media helps people interact with others with similar views. This was the fundamental reason why social media was created. However, nowadays, more often than not, it is just a means by which users can be exploited to make money.
Social media and privacy:
Everyone leaves a data trail on the internet. By the time you have completed creating your social media account, your personal information like birthday, place of residence, phone number, etc., is not private anymore.
Have you ever found that the advertisements on the websites you visit 'coincidentally' are related to what you like?
Advertisers would even break your online privacy, just to market their products. It is quite simple for them to find out about your preferences by watching your social media activity. Businesses have realised that social media can be used as a tool to target customers and generate demand.
You might think that you are the consumer when it comes to a social media platform. Actually, you are the product. The advertising companies are the consumers. Social media companies sell our information to advertisers who use it to target us.
Facebook has been alleged with tracking their user's internet activity without them realising.
When you install the app, you are requested to accept some terms, and by clicking 'allow', you are giving the application an access token. These tokens may be provided to advertisers. This allows these advertisers to access your chats and photos. Furthermore, Facebook does not inform you about this transfer of data. This may be prevented by changing your privacy settings.
Facebook even keeps log histories of your phone calls and texts. With this information, Facebook segregates you depending on a database of about 52,000 attributes. They target us with ads which they think would most likely capture our attention or curiosity.
Data scraping is also prevalent when it comes to collecting personal information. It is tracking a person's online activities and obtaining personal data and conversations. Most often, it is done by research companies which have information knowingly shared by users.
However, even though it is willfully disclosed to the website, the site does not ask for the user's permission for a third party to use this information.
Most of the times, users post things on the internet that they should be posting and hence need to take a bit of the blame. Plus, everyone must realise that nothing is only private on social media or even the internet.
Phishing is one of the most common ways a person can gain access to confidential information. Hackers usually target people through social media platforms. It might be a text, email or any sort of communication from an organisation that looks authentic.
Malware is a software built to obtain access to a computer and the data within. Social media can be exploited by criminals to distribute malware.
There are different kinds of malware. It can steal confidential information (spyware). Otherwise, it can encrypt your information and to obtain the key for it you will need to pay a ransom (ransomware). There is no guarantee that they will actually keep their word though. Sometimes, they can force advertising and thus benefit from it (adware).
As Sean Parker, Facebook's founding president said: "The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?' "That means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you more likes and comments."
Likes and retweets on social media act as a positive stimulus that encourages people to use the platform.
Although social media can be a tool used to spread awareness about good things, it is misused by many in addition to gaining a profit, to corrupt and influence a person's decisions and thoughts negatively. We mustn't let social media control us, instead, control our usage of it.
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