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Amer, K., Noujaim, J. (Directors). (2019). The Great Hack [Film]. The Othrs.

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The Cambridge Analytica scandal is examined through the roles of several affected persons. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is examined through the roles of several affected persons. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is examined through the roles of several affected persons.

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The Cambridge Analytica scandal is examined through the roles of several affected persons.

Nothing New, though we'd sooner not look.

Read the critical reviews here and ask yourself to what use we have put the hyper powerful computing power ,infinite memory storage and vast amounts of OUR DATA controlled by , literally, a handful of people. Granted it's mostly for commerce, selling us stuff, until it becomes selling our data to people or entities who clearly don't have our best interests in mind or at heart. And this handful of people cares not one wit to whom they are selling our data or what their ultimate aims might be. ??? leftist propaganda??? One need only look at the decidedly anti democratic trends sweeping the globe to understand how powerful the manipulation of people through the use of the data they surrender, either willing or not is. This film attempts to illuminate the dangers of weaponizing our data and using it against us to undermine democracy and how vulnerable we are to that sort of manipulation. There are real world consequences , Myanmar for one and those are bloody consequences. Propaganda is certainly the familiar domain of the fascists who currently hold sway. across the globe. Despite what the reviews on offer here proclaim this film is hardly propaganda , far from it.

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By what name was The Great Hack (2019) officially released in Canada in French?

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The Cambridge Analytica scandal is examined through the roles of several affected persons. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is examined through the roles of several affected persons. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is examined through the roles of several affected persons. Videos1 The Cambridge Analytica scandal is examined through the roles of several affected persons.

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Anderson, M. (2018). A Majority of Teens Have Experienced Some Form of Cyberbullying. Pew Research Center.

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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For the latest survey data on teens and cyberbullying, see "Teens and Cyberbullying 2022."
Name-calling and rumor-spreading have long been an unpleasant and challenging aspect of adolescent life. But the proliferation of smartphones and the rise of social media has transformed where, when and how bullying takes place. A new Pew Research Center survey finds that 59% of U.S. teens have personally experienced at least one of six types of abusive online behaviors.

The most common type of harassment youth encounter online is name-calling. Some 42% of teens say they have been called offensive names online or via their cellphone. Additionally, about a third (32%) of teens say someone has spread false rumors about them on the internet, while smaller shares have had someone other than a parent constantly ask where they are, who they're with or what they're doing (21%) or have been the target of physical threats online (16%).

While texting and digital messaging are a central way teens build and maintain relationships, this level of connectivity may lead to potentially troubling and nonconsensual exchanges. One-quarter of teens say they have been sent explicit images they didn't ask for, while 7% say someone has shared explicit images of them without their consent. These experiences are particularly concerning to parents. Fully 57% of parents of teens say they worry about their teen receiving or sending explicit images, including about one-quarter who say this worries them a lot, according to a separate Center survey of parents.

The vast majority of teens (90% in this case) believe online harassment is a problem that affects people their age, and 63% say this is a major problem. But majorities of young people think key groups, such as teachers, social media companies and politicians are failing at tackling this issue. By contrast, teens have a more positive assessment of the way parents are addressing cyberbullying.

These are some of the key findings from the Center's surveys of 743 teens and 1,058 parents living in the U.S. conducted March 7 to April 10, 2018. Throughout the report, "teens" refers to those ages 13 to 17, and "parents of teens" are those who are the parent or guardian of someone in that age range.

Similar shares of boys and girls have been harassed online - but girls are more likely to be the targets of online rumor-spreading or nonconsensual explicit messages

When it comes to the overall findings on the six experiences measured in this survey, teenage boys and girls are equally likely to experience cyberbullying. However, there are some differences in the specific types of harassment they encounter.

Overall, 60% of girls and 59% of boys have experienced at least one of six abusive online behaviors. While similar shares of boys and girls have encountered abuse, such as name-calling or physical threats online, other forms of cyberbullying are more prevalent among girls. Some 39% of girls say someone has spread false rumors about them online, compared with 26% of boys who say this.

Girls also are more likely than boys to report being the recipient of explicit images they did not ask for (29% vs. 20%). And being the target of these types of messages is an especially common experience for older girls: 35% of girls ages 15 to 17 say they have received unwanted explicit images, compared with about one-in-five boys in this age range and younger teens of both genders.

Online harassment does not necessarily begin and end with one specific behavior, and 40% of teens have experienced two or more of these actions. Girls are more likely than boys to have experienced several different forms of online bullying, however. Some 15% of teen girls have been the target of at least four of these online behaviors, compared with 6% of boys.

In addition to these gender differences, teens from lower-income families are more likely than those from higher-income families to encounter certain forms of online bullying. For example, 24% of teens whose household income is less than $30,000 a year say they have been the target of physical threats online, compared with 12% whose annual household income is $75,000 or more. However, teens' experiences with these issues do not statistically differ by race or ethnicity, or by their parent's level of educational attainment. (For details on experiences with online bullying by different demographic groups, see Appendix A.)

The likelihood of teens facing abusive behavior also varies by how often teens go online. Some 45% of teens say they are online almost constantly, and these constant users are more likely to face online harassment. Fully 67% of teens who are online almost constantly have been cyberbullied, compared with 53% of those who use the internet several times a day or less. These differences also extend to specific kinds of behaviors. For example, half of teens who are near-constant internet users say they have been called offensive names online, compared with about a third (36%) who use the internet less frequently.

A majority of teens think parents are doing a good job at addressing online harassment, but smaller shares think other groups are handling this issue effectively

Today, school officials, tech companies and lawmakers are looking for ways to combat cyberbullying. Some schools have implemented policies that punish students for harassing messages even when those exchanges occur off campus. Anti-bullying tools are being rolled out by social media companies, and several states have enacted laws prohibiting cyberbullying and other forms of electronic harassment. In light of these efforts, Pew Research Center asked young people to rate how key groups are responding to cyberbullying and found that teens generally are critical of the way this problem is being addressed.

Indeed, teens rate the anti-bullying efforts of five of the six groups measured in the survey more negatively than positively. Parents are the only group for which a majority of teens (59%) express a favorable view of their efforts.

Young people have an especially negative view of the way politicians are tackling the issue of cyberbullying - 79% of teens say elected officials are doing only a fair or poor job of addressing this problem. And smaller majorities have unfavorable views of how groups such as social media sites (66%), other users who witness harassment happening online (64%) or teachers (58%) are addressing harassment and cyberbullying.

Teens' views on how well each of these groups is handling this issue vary little by their own personal experiences with cyberbullying - that is, bullied teens are no more critical than their non-bullied peers. And teens across various demographic groups tend to have a similar assessment of how these groups are addressing online harassment.

About six-in-ten parents worry about their own teen getting bullied online, but most are confident they can teach their teen about acceptable online behavior

Parents believe they can provide their teen with the appropriate advice to make good online decisions. Nine-in-ten parents say they are at least somewhat confident they can teach their teen how to engage in appropriate online behavior, including 45% who say they are very confident in their ability to do so.

But even as most parents are confident they can educate their child about proper online conduct, notable shares are concerned about the types of negative experiences their teen might encounter online. Roughly six-in-ten parents say they worry at least somewhat about their teen being harassed or bullied online (59%) or sending or receiving explicit images (57%). In each case, about one-in-four parents say they worry a lot about one of these things happening to their child.

These parental concerns tend to vary by race and ethnicity, as well as by a child's gender. Among parents, whites and Hispanics are more likely than blacks to say they worry about their teen being cyberbullied. Hispanic parents also are more inclined than black parents to say they worry about their child exchanging explicit images. At the same time, parents of teen girls are somewhat more likely than those with a teenage boy to say they worry about their teen being bullied online (64% vs. 54%) or exchanging explicit images (64% vs. 51%). (For details on these parental concerns by demographic group, see Appendix A.)

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A Majority of Teens Have Experienced Some Form of Cyberbullying

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59% of U.S. teens have been bullied or harassed online, and a similar share says it's a major problem for people their age. At the same time, teens mostly think teachers, social media companies and politicians are failing at addressing this issue.

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Gordon, S. (2019). Excessive social media use comparable to drug addiction. Verywell Mind.

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Social media originated as a way for people to connect with family and friends, even if they were thousands of miles apart. But over the years, it has transformed. Now, social media is used in a variety of different ways and a lot more frequently. For instance, businesses, non-profit organizations, and even politicians use it as a way to reach a very targeted market.

Meanwhile, teens and young adults use social media as a virtual scrapbook to document every detail of their life as they are living it. There are even "influencers" with large social media followings, that use their following as a way to promote a product, service, or group through social media and gain support for it. Social media is even a valuable resource for and a means of connecting isolated populations with other parts of the world.

In many ways, social media has enriched our lives by connecting and inspiring people. But there is a dark side as well. Aside from all the negative posts on social media, the cyberbullying, and the FOMO ( fear of missing out) that exists, recent studies indicate that excessive social media use not only leads to poor decision-making, but people who use social media incessantly often have attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors that mimic those of a drug addict.

Social Media and Addiction

Researchers at Michigan State University have found that people who report using social media a lot tend to struggle with decision-making. As part of their study, participants answered questions about their social media use. The questions were tailored to see how dependent people were on social media, as well as how they felt when they couldn't use it and how they would feel about never using it again.

After the survey, the participants completed a common psychological task known as the Iowa Gambling Task, which helps gauge value-based decision-making skills. During the task, the goal is for the participants to collect as much money as possible. The researchers found that those participants who spent more time on social media were likely to have less money at the end of the task. Meanwhile, those who spent less time on social media finished the task with more money.

Because this type of deficit in decision-making skills often goes hand-in-hand with drug addiction as well as a gambling addiction, the researchers likened the results of excessive social media use to aspects of an addiction.

In another study, researchers explored what it would "cost" for certain participants to deactivate their Facebook profiles for up to one year. Consequently, experimental auctions revealed that it would anywhere from $1,000 to more than $2,000 for participants to cancel their Facebook profiles for that length of time.

Still, some users refused to bid at all, which researchers believe signaled their dependence on Facebook and their unwillingness to even consider deactivating their accounts. These results show just how dependent, or addicted to, social media some people are that they would not even consider deactivating their accounts for a year, despite being paid.

Other Issues With Excessive Social Media Use

For some people, the thought of not being able to check their social media accounts causes them to break out in a cold sweat. They get nervous and anxious and are not sure how to handle the situation. When this occurs, therapists often refer to this as social media anxiety disorder, which may share similarities to social anxiety disorder.

This connection is not surprising given that anxiety disorders are the most common mental health disorder in the United States; and technology seems to be making things worse. In fact, appears that the more technology people acquire, the more stressed out they become.

For instance, researchers estimate that 20 percent of people with social media accounts cannot go more than three hours without checking them; and for people with social media anxiety disorder, just being away from their social media accounts for just a few minutes can cause severe anxiety.

Signs You (or Your Teen) Are Hooked

Aside from the obvious anxiety and nervousness that being away from social media can cause some people, there are some other telltale signs that they may have an addiction to social media. These include everything from isolating themselves from others, losing interest in activities they once found enjoyable, and getting agitated, angry, or anxious when they are unable to check social media. Following is a closer look at some of the signs that you (or your teen) may be hooked on social media:

Anxiety, agitation, or anger when you cannot check social media. Not being able to check social media is not a life-threatening situation. But, for some people, not being able to get online and check their status and their updates can feel like one. Even though they may feel embarrassed or confused by their reactions, they often feel like they cannot control their feelings or their situation.

Interrupt conversations to check social media. Sometimes people can be so obsessed with the online world that they have trouble staying in the moment or paying attention to what others are saying. Consequently, their faces are often buried in their phones; or, they may appear distracted and constantly check their phones.

Lie to others about how much time is spent online. Most people who struggle with social media addiction are embarrassed by how much time they spend online. So, they lie to their loved ones about how much they are scrolling social media. They know they should not be online so much, but they just cannot help it.

Withdraw from family and friends. When social media addiction progresses, it can become consuming of a person's time and energy. As a result, a person with an addiction to social media will withdraw from family and friends and spend most of their time in the virtual world.

Lose interest in other activities. As social media takes up more and more time, it becomes the most important thing in a person's life. Consequently, the addicted person will spend the bulk of their time on social media and very little time doing the things they once loved.

Neglect school or work in favor of social media. One hallmark of addiction, is the way that it consumes a person's time, energy, and attention. For this reason, many people with social media addiction often neglect their schoolwork or their work assignments because they cannot tear themselves away from social media.

Experience negative impacts to your personal or professional life. One of the biggest indicators that you or your teen has a problem with social media is when it starts interfering with your life in a negative way. For instance, grades start dropping and deadlines are missed for school or work are definite indicators that there is a problem.

Feel stressed and that your life is lacking. It is important to remind yourself (and your teen) that what you see on social media is just another person's highlight reel. They have normal, boring days filled with work and obligations just like everyone else. Remind yourself that if social media makes you think that your life is boring, it is not going to get any better sitting there obsessing about it. You have to get out and enjoy your life - experience it - not just document it.

Practical Ways to Monitor Social Media Use

Whether you want to monitor your social media use, your teens' use, or both, there are a number of steps you can take to see not only how often you are using social media, but also to determine if you are using it in healthy and productive ways.

Manage Notifications

When notifications from social media ping on your phone all day, every day, it can be challenging not to toggle over to your social media accounts and see what is happening.

For this reason, it can be extremely useful, and preventative, to turn off the notifications on your social media accounts. This way, instead of social media beckoning you to check out what people are posting or saying, you are in control. As a result, you are free to check social media at times that are convenient for you rather than feeling you should check right away when your phone pings.

Meanwhile, you may want to turn on notifications for when your kids post to their social media accounts.

In other words, you can set up notifications on your account to notify you know anytime your teen posts something on their social media account. This way, you can see what they are posting, how often they are posting, and determine if they need some tips on digital etiquette or to take something down.

With notifications, hopefully you see a questionable post before too many other people do.

See Certain Posts First

On some social media accounts, like Facebook, you can set guidelines that allow you to see certain social media posts first. What's more, you also can indicate who your "close friends" are so that you get notifications when they post. (You can still get notifications when they post that do not alert your phone immediately. Instead, these notifications are only listed in the notifications tab.)

When you set up these types of parameters on social media, you are making it work for you instead of allowing it to push you into behaving or interacting in a certain way. Additionally, these types of parameters make it much easier to just see what you want on social media rather than scrolling through every post in your feed. This way, it is much easier to limit the time you spend on social media.

Conduct a Social Media Audit

One of the best ways to get a picture of how you or your teen is using social media, is to conduct a social media audit. Take a look at the posts, photos, and comments. Then consider what these things say about you and your social media use.

For instance, are you posting every day, multiple times a day? Or do you go days or even weeks without posting? If you find that you are posting every day, multiple times per day, you may want to take a closer look at how much time you are spending on social media.

Your social media audit could be your first clue that things are starting to go off the tracks somewhat.

Track Your Time on Social Media

Whether you use your phone's settings or get a free app like Quality Time, there are countless ways to manage your time and track how much time you are spending not only on your phone but also on social media, Netflix, and online gaming.

Once you know how you are spending your time, you will be able to set goals and limits for your social media use. Additionally, some apps allow you to add family members so that you can all disconnect or unplug together as well as keep one another accountable.

A Word From Verywell

Social media is a fun way to document and share your life, especially with friends or relatives that live far away. But just as with anything else in life, there is such a thing as too much. If you find that you (or your teen) are spending a lot time on social media, and it makes you anxious when you cannot check your posts or see what others are doing, then that is a red flag that something is wrong. It is time to take some steps to cut back and truly experience life around you rather than just document it.

Additionally, if you are showing signs of social media anxiety, or if you feel like social media is impacting your decision-making, you may want to schedule some time with a counselor or therapist. They can help you work through your anxiety and make sense of your feelings as well as provide you with ideas on how to make healthy changes in your life.

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Excessive Social Media Use Comparable to Drug Addiction

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Social media originated as a way for people to connect with family and friends, even if they were thousands of miles apart. But over the years, it has transformed. Now, social media is used in a variety of different ways and a lot more frequently.

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Healey, J. (2011). Social Impacts of Digital Media. The Spinney Press.

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Smartphones, social media use and youth mental health

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Smartphones, social media use and youth mental health

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Abi-Jaoude, E., Naylor, K. T., Pignatiello, A. (2020).

Smartphones, social media use and youth mental health. CMAJ, 192(6), 136-141.

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KEY POINTS

Evidence from a variety of cross-sectional, longitudinal and empirical studies implicate smartphone and social media use in the increase in mental distress, self-injurious behaviour and suicidality among youth; there is a dose-response relationship, and the effects appear to be greatest among girls.

Social media can affect adolescents' self-view and interpersonal relationships through social comparison and negative interactions, including cyberbullying; moreover, social media content often involves normalization and even promotion of self-harm and suicidality among youth.

High proportions of youth engage in heavy smartphone use and media multitasking, with resultant chronic sleep deprivation, and negative effects on cognitive control, academic performance and socioemotional functioning.

Clinicians can work collaboratively with youth and their families, using open, nonjudgmental and developmentally appropriate approaches to reduce potential harms from social media and smartphone use, including education and practical problem-solving.

There is a need for public awareness campaigns and social policy initiatives that promote nurturing home and school environments that foster resilience as youth navigate the challenges of adolescence in today's world.

In the last decade, increasing mental distress and treatment for mental health conditions among youth in North America has paralleled a steep rise in the use of smartphones and social media by children and adolescents.

In Ontario, the proportion of teenagers reporting moderate to serious mental distress increased from 24% in 2013, to 34% in 2015 and to 39% in 2017, 1 with parallel increases in health service utilization. Inpatient hospital admissions of children and adolescents for mental health reasons increased substantially across Canada between 2007 and 2014, while admissions for other medical conditions in this age group decreased by 14%. 2 Between 2009 and 2014, admissions to hospital for intentional self-harm increased by 110% in Canadian girls. 3 Suicide is now the second leading cause of death for Canadian youth. 4 A recent analysis of survey data found the 12-month prevalence of suicidal ideation, attempts and nonsuicidal self-injury to be 8.1%, 4.3% and 8.8%, respectively, among adolescents aged 14 to 17 years, with all rates being higher in girls. 5 Similarly, administrative data in the United States show that presentations to hospital for suicidal ideation or attempts among children and adolescents almost doubled between 2008 and 2015, with the highest increase for adolescent girls. 6 Self-poisoning rates among 10- to 18-year-olds, which had declined in the US since the turn of the century, increased substantially from 2011 to 2018, primarily among girls. 7 Surveys of high school students in the US have shown a similar pattern for self-reported symptoms of depression, major depressive episodes and suicidality over the last 2 decades. 8,9

At the same time, social media use has increased markedly. In the US, the proportion of young people between the ages of 13 and 17 years who have a smartphone has reached 89%, more than doubling over a 6-year period; moreover, 70% of teenagers use social media multiple times per day, up from a third of teens in 2012. 10 The percentage of Ontario's teenagers who reported spending 5 or more hours a day on social media increased from 11% in 2013, to 16% in 2015 and to 20% in 2017. 1 An analysis of Australian longitudinal data found that 86% of students owned smartphones in grade 8, increasing to 93% by grade 11, with increased use of social media communication with age. 11

We review the evidence that links smartphone and social media use with mental distress and suicidality among adolescents. We do not review evidence for online gaming. Although most existing data are observational, making causality difficult to establish, findings from a few longitudinal, randomized and controlled studies suggest that social media and smartphone use may be contributing to the rising burden of mental distress among youth. We consider the clinical implications of existing evidence, to help practising clinicians to work collaboratively with youth and families to mitigate potential negative effects of social media and smartphone use on mental health.

How has use of social media been shown to affect adolescents' sense of self?

Two cross-sectional surveys of American and German university students, respectively, 12,13 found that students who spent more time on the social media platform Facebook were more likely to endorse feeling envy or sensing that others in their social network were better off than they were. The term "FOMO" - fear of missing out - has been defined as "a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent," 14 and has been associated with increased stress related to Facebook use. 15

A systematic review of 20 studies found that use of social media was associated with body image concerns and disordered eating. 16 In a randomized study, female participants reported more negative mood after just 10 minutes of browsing their Facebook account compared with those who browsed an appearance-neutral control website. 17 Moreover, participants who were high in appearance comparison tendency reported an increased desire to change the appearance of their face, hair or skin after spending time on Facebook, in comparison with those who browsed the control website. 17

The nature of social media interactions, which are arm's length, makes negative commenting both easy and more frequent than in-person interactions with peers. An Ontario survey of middle- and high school students showed that the odds of suicidal ideation, plans and attempts were all significantly higher among those who had experienced cyberbullying, even after controlling for a range of potential confounders. 18

Does social media addiction exist and can it affect mental health?

One study of repeat survey data from 2013, 2014 and 2015 associated the extent of self-reported use of Facebook with subsequent poor self-reported mental health and life satisfaction. 19 Concerns have been raised about social media platforms having been deliberately designed - in highly sophisticated ways that use behavioural psychology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence - to promote behavioural reinforcement and behavioural addiction. 20,21 Several cross-sectional studies have shown that high proportions of youth appear to be addicted to their smartphones, 22,23 but there is no standard or agreed-upon definition of smartphone or Internet addiction; studies have used different definitions and scales, varying from those that rely on behavioural addiction criteria, to measurement of the extent of functional impairment and level of device use. 24,25 As such, reported prevalence rates are highly variable. 25

A systematic review identified Internet addiction as being particularly associated with self-harm or suicidal behaviour based on 7 included studies, all of which were cross-sectional school-based surveys that used validated outcome measures and were rated as high or medium to high quality. 24 A recent large prospective study of senior high school adolescent students in Taiwan found that youth classified as experiencing Internet addiction had a significantly increased risk of having newly emerged self-harm or suicidal behaviour or both when re-evaluated 1 year later. 26

Two systematic reviews have shown that media multitasking is associated with negative effects on cognitive control, academic performance and socioemotional functioning in youth. 27,28 Most existing studies, however, are cross-sectional, and measures are heterogenous across studies with limited attempts to consider individual and contextual differences, making it impossible to establish causality. Youth with lower impulse control may be more susceptible to deleterious effects of media multitasking. A large longitudinal study of adolescents who did not have significant symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) at baseline found that high-frequency digital media use was positively associated with emergence of symptoms meeting Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-4th Edition (DSM-IV) criteria for ADHD over a 2-year follow-up period, even after adjusting for known confounders. 29

Can social media promote self-harm?

Youth communicate thoughts of suicidality and self-harm behaviours online, including sharing images of self-inflicted injuries. Explicit depiction of self-injury - particularly cutting - on social media is common, as shown by site content studies 30,31 that found photographs or live videos of self-injurious behaviour, many of which had no warnings about graphic content. Of particular concern were viewers' comments, which typically contained positive feedback or personal disclosures about self-injury experiences, and rarely offered encouragement or discussion of recovery. Such findings show the potential for mental illness romanticizing and messaging that normalizes self-harm among youth. Indeed, a systematic review that included 26 studies (using qualitative, descriptive or cross-sectional methodology) found that social media platforms included normalization of self-harm behaviour, discussions about practical issues regarding suicidality and live depictions of self-harm acts. 32 At the same time, there were also positive elements, including providing a sense of community, suggestions for seeking treatment and advice on stopping self-harm behaviour.

Do the effects of smartphones on social skills affect mental health?

An observational study showed that spending more than a few hours per week using electronic media correlated negatively with self-reported happiness, life satisfaction and self-esteem, whereas time spent on nonscreen activities (in-person social interactions, sports or exercise, print media, homework, religious services, working at a paid job) correlated positively with psychological well-being, among adolescents. 33 Other observational studies have linked spending more than 2 hours a day on social networking sites and personal electronic devices with high rates of suicidality and depressive symptoms among adolescent girls, although youth who sustained high levels of face-to-face socializing were relatively protected against the negative consequences of too much time online. 13,34

Youth do increasingly interact online rather than in person, and smartphones can interfere even with face-to-face interactions via what has been termed "phubbing": attending to one's phone when in the presence of others. 35 A recent empirical field study using experience sampling in 304 participants showed that even the mere presence of phones on a table caused participants who were randomly assigned to that condition to feel more distracted and have lower enjoyment during social interactions compared with those who were randomized to putting their phone away. 36 Phone use was also found to predict distraction, which in turn predicted greater boredom and worse overall mood. 36

Does sleep-loss associated with use of social media affect mental health?

An analysis of US annual survey data found an abrupt increase in the proportion of adolescents getting insufficient sleep after 2011-2013, with more than 40% sleeping less than 7 hours most nights in 2015. 37 The study also showed an exposure-response relationship between daily electronic media use beyond 2 or more hours per day, and insufficient sleep. 37 An analysis of survey data from Ontario found that 63.6% of 5242 students aged 11-20 years slept less than recommended, 38 also showing a significant relationship between use of social media beyond 1 hour a day and odds of insufficient duration of sleep. 38

In a 14-day, randomized, crossover experimental study under well-controlled conditions, use of electronic screens before bedtime was shown to disrupt sleep in multiple ways: longer time to fall asleep and decreased evening sleepiness, reduced melatonin secretion, circadian clock delay, reduced amount and delay in rapid eye movement sleep, and reduced next-morning alertness. 39 A systematic review and meta-analysis that included 20 studies on the association between portable screen-based media devices and sleep outcomes found that use of media at bedtime was associated with decreased duration and quality of sleep and excessive daytime sleepiness. 40 Of note, the mere presence of portable screen-based media devices in the bedroom was shown to disrupt sleep, 40 possibly related to the temptation to check media devices when they are present or owing to a conditioned response involving increased arousal.

Data from a longitudinal study of 1101 adolescents in Australia showed that poor sleep mediated the relationship between nighttime mobile phone use and subsequent depressed mood, externalizing behaviours and decline in self-esteem and coping based on various validated scales. 11 In another longitudinal study involving 2286 adolescents in Europe, magnitude of Internet use in general had a negative impact on mental health, but the most robust effects came from the consequences - in particular, lack of sleep from Internet use had a notable adverse effect on mental health on 4-month follow-up based on measures from a validated depression, anxiety and stress scale. 41

Are some individuals more susceptible to mental health effects than others?

Although population-based studies suggest a link between social media use and mental distress among youth, the impact of these technologies may vary among individuals - and some may be less susceptible to harm, as indicated by an emerging literature of experimental studies. Girls and young women tend to spend more time on social media than boys do, have more exposure to cyberbullying and show tendency to experience more mental health effects, 10,34 which is consistent with recent epidemiologic trends indicating that depressive symptoms, self-harm and suicidality have increased among young females in particular. 5⁻9

The context of social media use may mediate its effects. A structural equation modelling analysis of a cross-sectional survey of 910 high school students in Belgium found that, among girls, passive use of Facebook had a negative impact on mood but active use had a positive impact on perceived online social support, which in turn had a positive impact on mood. 42 However, for boys active site use had a negative effect. A systematic review of 70 studies found that while social media use was correlated with depression, anxiety and measures of well-being, effects could be both detrimental (such as from negative interactions and social comparison) and beneficial (such as through social connectedness and support) depending on the quality of interactions and individual factors. 43 Certain cognitive styles, such as those that involve rumination and brooding, appeared to exacerbate negative effects of social media. 43 Moreover, the negative impact of social media on depressive symptoms appears to be much greater for adolescents with low levels of in-person interaction; in contrast, youth with high levels of face-to-face socializing appear to be relatively protected against the negative consequences of too much time online. 34 A recent survey of 1124 college students found that while social media contact in the absence of a face-to-face relationship was associated with depressive symptoms, the proportion of social media contacts with whom participants had a close face-to-face relationship was negatively associated with depressive symptoms. 44 In addition, the challenges associated with social media may be especially risky for young people who are already experiencing mental health difficulties, as suggested by the bidirectional relationship between use of electronic media and decrease in psychological well-being. 33 Of particular concern for such vulnerable individuals is that educational or even promotional content about suicide and self-harm is readily available and widely accessed online. 30,31

The role of individual differences in terms of the effects of social media is a topic of active investigation. Recent experimental studies have shown relationships between individual characteristics and social media experiences. In a randomized study of 120 college students, those who scored highly on the tendency to engage in social comparison based on measures from a validated scale had poorer self-perceptions, lower self-esteem and more negative affect after browsing the Facebook profile of an acquaintance, relative to those randomized to the control conditions, an effect not seen among students who scored low on social comparison traits. 45 In another empirical study, 102 college students who were asked to take a selfie were randomized to either of 3 conditions with different numbers of "likes" (average, above average and below average); those rated as having a greater sense of purpose in life based on measures from a validated scale had lower sensitivity to feedback (based on number of "likes") on their self-photograph posts. 46 A study that categorized participants by social comparison orientations ("ability-based" versus "opinion-based") found that different orientations showed different emotional responses to being compared with others, which in turn was related to life satisfaction. 47 These early findings offer some insights for the individualized care of youth presenting with emotional and mental distress.

How might physicians use this evidence to inform their practice?

Despite the limitations of the evidence base at this time, clinicians may be able to use currently available knowledge in their practice, combined with evidence on effecting behavioural change in youth.

Clinicians treating youth with mental illness and those at risk of mental distress can discuss with adolescents and their families the known risks of social media and smartphone use to mental health. Clinicians may choose to advocate for a harm reduction approach, suggesting reduced use of social media and the Internet rather than abstinence for youth, given evidence that suggests prolonged use is associated with poorer mental health. A recent large systematic review found that communication with adolescents is most effective in the context of a therapeutic alliance that is open and nonjudgmental, elicits trust and emotional safety, and offers a sense of inclusion and autonomy. 48

Encouraging parents to be proactively involved in limiting children's and teens' use of smartphones and social media may be helpful, given that social media use appears to become problematic when it surpasses 1 to 2 hours daily. 34,38 Results from a recent meta-analysis suggest that while parental limits may be effective at reducing the amount of media use by younger children, open discussion focused on positive engagement and guidance might be best for reducing media-related risks for adolescents; however, only 5 of the 52 included studies pertained to social media, all of which were based on cross-sectional surveys. 49 It is also worth reminding parents that they model smartphone use with their own behaviour; a randomized study showed that heavy parental smartphone use was associated with poorer quality of interactions with their children. 50 Youth and their families can be encouraged to set boundaries for smartphone and social media use. These could include such measures as using social media only for set times, and preferably only in common living areas in the home. A further motivator may be to discuss evidence showing an adverse impact of smartphones on learning, 51 and the benefit on academic outcomes when phones are put away when studying, preferably in another room. 52

A qualitative study that collected data via focus groups with adolescent girls found that high levels of confidence, high media literacy and sound appreciation of individual differences appeared to mitigate negative effects of social media on body image. 53 The participants reported that "these characteristics were nurtured by positive parental influence and a supportive school environment." 53 These findings underscore the importance of a nurturing home and school environment in fostering resilience as youth navigate the challenges of adolescence. An empirical study of the effect of Instagram browsing on affect in just more than 500 adolescents found that randomization to conditions that provided greater contextual awareness regarding posts by others mitigated against postbrowsing negative affect in teens who reported higher levels of negative social comparison. 54

Sleep hygiene measures specific to social media and smartphone usage are crucial, as several studies have shown that increased smartphone use can disrupt sleep and shorten sleep duration. These would include avoiding use of electronic screens within 1 to 2 hours before bedtime, and not having portable, screen-based media devices in bedrooms overnight.

The American Academy of Pediatrics provides a number of useful health and safety tips to support youth regarding the use of social media, 55 as well as a Family Media Use Plan that offers structure to the recommendations related to limiting use and having discussions regarding appropriate use. 56 Further, the American Academy of Pediatrics has partnered with Common Sense Media to produce a Family Media Toolkit that has useful information for parents. 57 Other practical strategies to mitigate negative effects from using smartphones and related media are offered by the Center for Humane Technology ( http://humanetech.com/), an organization developed by former technology industry members out of concern for the potential deleterious effects of new media on psychological states.

A motivational interviewing approach may be useful to help young people start to make changes in their pattern of online behaviour. Motivational interviewing is an intervention with established effectiveness for adolescents with substance use, which could be useful for youth who appear to have poor self-control in their use of social media or smartphone. 58 This approach should involve open, nonjudgmental exploration of all aspects of a youth's digital life, including positive and negative. Some youth might benefit from habit reversal training to address compulsive use, including having daily "nonscreen time" that can be progressively increased. Sharing evidence that a randomized controlled trial found that participants assigned to not using Facebook reported significantly greater "life satisfaction" and positive emotions after 1 week, compared with controls who were told to continue using the site as usual, 59 may be helpful in effecting change. Youth might be encouraged to inform their friends that they are taking a break from, or otherwise limiting, their social media use. Talking with youth about alternative ways to connect, including meeting in person or even talking directly by phone, could help with strategies to fill the social media gap, reinforced by discussion of evidence that in-person interaction may protect mental health.

At the system level, school and community-based programs can institute limits on social media and smartphone use, along the lines of those that have recently been shown to have a positive effect on healthy behaviours. 60 However, such interventions should be developmentally appropriate and aim to respectfully ensure adolescents' autonomy. 61 Mobile-phone policies at the school and classroom level have been implemented in several jurisdictions, with mixed results. 62 Enforcement of blanket bans is often a challenge; rather, a more productive approach involves negotiation between teacher and students, as developmentally appropriate, in the context of a relationship built on mutual trust and respect for autonomy. 63,64

More broadly, public awareness campaigns can provide education on the impact of problematic use of digital media and promote healthy behaviours in this regard. Various social media platforms have placed bans and restrictions on content related to self-harm. 24 A qualitative study of focus groups involving a total of 66 adolescents found that while adolescents valued freedom and privacy, they recognized a need for protection and most were in favour of automatic monitoring in situations that were beyond their control. 65 Finally, there should be public discussion about the extent to which social media companies can use features that are deliberately designed to promote behavioural reinforcement and addiction, 20,21 particularly on platforms used primarily by youth.

Encouragingly, youth are increasingly recognizing the negative impact of social media on their lives and starting to take steps to mitigate this. 66 According to a recent poll, 54% of teens felt they spend too much time on their cell phone, and about half reported cutting back on the time they spend on it. 67

Conclusion

Given the importance of engaging youth in mitigating potential harms from social media, a prohibitionist approach would be counterproductive. The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests that online relationships are part of typical adolescent development. 55 Indeed, for adolescents today, who have not known a world without social media, digital interactions are the norm, and the potential benefits of online access to productive mental health information - including media literacy, creativity, self-expression, sense of belonging and civic engagement - as well as low barriers to resources such as crisis lines and Internet-based talking therapies cannot be discounted.

However, today's youth could benefit from proven individual and systemic interventions to help them navigate the challenges brought about by use of smartphones and social media, protect themselves from harm and use social media in a manner that safeguards their mental health, against a background of policy initiatives aimed at addressing the social, environmental and economic factors that underpin family well-being and nurture youth resilience. 68

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the valuable contributions of the anonymous reviewers and journal editors.

Footnotes

CMAJ Podcasts: author interview at https://soundcloud.com/cmajpodcasts/190434-ana

Competing interests: None declared.

This article has been peer reviewed.

Contributors: All of the authors contributed to the conception and design of the work. Elia Abi-Jaoude and Karline Treurnicht Naylor drafted the manuscript. All authors revised the manuscript critically for important intellectual content, gave final approval of the version to be published and agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Smartphones, social media use and youth mental health

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KEY POINTS In the last decade, increasing mental distress and treatment for mental health conditions among youth in North America has paralleled a steep rise in the use of smartphones and social media by children and adolescents. In Ontario, the proportion of teenagers reporting moderate to serious

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Social media addiction: Its impact, mediation, and intervention

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Social media addiction: Its impact, mediation, and intervention

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Hou, Y., Xiong, D., Jiang, T., Song, L., & Wang, Q. (2019). Social media addiction:  Its impact, mediation, and intervention. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 13(1), Article 4.

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Abstract

This research examined the relations of social media addiction to college students' mental health and academic performance, investigated the role of self-esteem as a mediator for the relations, and further tested the effectiveness of an intervention in reducing social media addiction and its potential adverse outcomes. In Study 1, we used a survey method with a sample of college students (N = 232) and found that social media addiction was negatively associated with the students' mental health and academic performance and that the relation between social media addiction and mental health was mediated by self-esteem. In Study 2, we developed and tested a two-stage self-help intervention program. We recruited a sample of college students (N = 38) who met criteria for social media addiction to receive the intervention. Results showed that the intervention was effective in reducing the students' social media addiction and improving their mental health and academic efficiency. The current studies yielded original findings that contribute to the empirical database on social media addiction and that have important theoretical and practical implications.

Bibliographic citation

Hou, Y., Xiong, D., Jiang, T., Song, L., & Wang, Q. (2019). Social media addiction: Its impact, mediation, and intervention. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 13(1), Article 4. doi: https://doi.org/10.5817/CP2019-1-4

Keywords

Social media addiction; mental health; academic performance; self-esteem; intervention

https://doi.org/10.5817/CP2019-1-4

Crossref Cited-by (24)
The listed references are provided by Cited-by (Crossref service) and thus do not represent the full list of sources citing the article.

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social media addiction; mental health; academic performance; self-esteem; intervention

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Social media addiction: Its impact, mediation, and intervention | Hou | Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Abstract This research examined the relations of social media addiction to college students' mental health and academic performance, investigated the role of self-esteem as a mediator for the relations, and further tested the effectiveness of an intervention in reducing social media addiction and its potential adverse outcomes.

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Orlowski, J. (Director). (2020). The Social Dilemma [Film]. Exposure Labs; Argent Pictures; The Space Program.

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Set in the dark underbelly of Silicon Valley, The Social Dilemma fuses investigative documentary with enlightening narrative drama. Expert testimony from tech whistle-blowers exposes our disturbing predicament: the services Big Tech provides-search engines, networks, instant information, etc.-are merely the candy that lures us to bite. Once we're hooked and coming back for more, the real commodity they sell is their prowess to influence and manipulate us. - Sundance Film Festival

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Set in the dark underbelly of Silicon Valley, The Social Dilemma fuses investigative documentary with enlightening narrative drama. Expert testimony from tech whistle-blowers exposes our disturbing predicament: the services Big Tech provides-search engines, networks, instant information, etc.-are merely the candy that lures us to bite.

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A Study on Positive and Negative Effects of Social Media on Society

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A Study on Positive and Negative Effects of Social Media on Society

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Akram, W., Kumar, R. (2017). A Study on positive and negative effects of social media on society. International Journal of Computer Sciences and Engineering, 5(10), 351-354.

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A Study on Positive and Negative Effects of Social Media on Society

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International Journal of Computer Sciences and Engineering

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International Journal of Computer Sciences and Engineering (A UGC Approved and indexed with DOI, ICI and Approved, DPI Digital Library) is one of the leading and growing open access, peer-reviewed, monthly, and scientific research journal for scientists, engineers, research scholars, and academician…

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Social media are interactive technologies and digital channels that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of social media arise due to the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some common features:

1. Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.

2. User-generated content-such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions - is the lifeblood of social media.

3. Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.

Users usually access social media services through web-based apps on desktops or download services that offer social media functionality to their mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets). As users engage with these electronic services, they create highly interactive platforms which individuals, communities, and organizations can share, co-create, discuss, participate, and modify user-generated or self-curated content posted online. Additionally, social media are used to document memories; learn about and explore things; advertise oneself; and form friendships along with the growth of ideas from the creation of blogs, podcasts, videos, and gaming sites. This changing relationship between humans and technology is the focus of the emerging field of technological self-studies. Some of the most popular social media websites, with more than 100 million registered users, include Facebook (and its associated Facebook Messenger), TikTok, WeChat, Instagram, QZone, Weibo, Twitter, Tumblr, Baidu Tieba, and LinkedIn. Depending on interpretation, other popular platforms that are sometimes referred to as social media services include YouTube, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, LINE, Snapchat, Pinterest, Viber, Reddit, Discord, VK, Microsoft Teams, and more. Wikis are examples of collaborative content creation.

Many social media outlets differ from traditional media (e.g., print magazines and newspapers, TV, and radio broadcasting) in many ways, including quality, reach, frequency, usability, relevancy, and permanence. Additionally, social media outlets operate in a transmission system, i.e., many sources to many receivers, while traditional media outlets operate under a transmission model (i.e., one source to many receivers). For instance, a newspaper is delivered to many subscribers and a radio station broadcasts the same programs to an entire city.

Since the dramatic expansion of the Internet, digital media or digital rhetoric can be used to represent or identify a culture. Studying how the rhetoric that exists in the digital environment has become a crucial new process for many scholars.

Observers have noted a wide range of positive and negative impacts when it comes to the use of social media. Social media can help to improve an individual's sense of connectedness with real or online communities and can be an effective communication (or marketing) tool for corporations, entrepreneurs, non-profit organizations, advocacy groups, political parties, and governments. Observers have also seen that there has been a rise in social movements using social media as a tool for communicating and organizing in times of political unrest.

The PLATO system was launched in 1960, after being developed at the University of Illinois and subsequently commercially marketed by Control Data Corporation. It offered early forms of social media features with 1973-era innovations such as Notes, PLATO's message-forum application; TERM-talk, its instant-messaging feature; Talkomatic, perhaps the first online chat room; News Report, a crowdsourced online newspaper, and blog; and Access Lists, enabling the owner of a note file or other application to limit access to a certain set of users, for example, only friends, classmates, or co-workers.

ARPANET, which first came online in 1967, had by the late-1970s developed a rich cultural exchange of non-government/business ideas and communication, as evidenced by the network etiquette (or ' netiquette') described in a 1982 handbook on computing at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ARPANET evolved into the Internet following the publication of the first Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) specification, RFC 675 ( Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program), written by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine in 1974. This became the foundation of Usenet, conceived by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, and established in 1980.

A precursor of the electronic bulletin board system (BBS), known as Community Memory, appeared by 1973. True electronic BBSs arrived with the Computer Bulletin Board System in Chicago, which first came online on February 16, 1978. Before long, most major cities had more than one BBS running on TRS-80, Apple II, Atari, IBM PC, Commodore 64, Sinclair, and similar personal computers. The IBM PC was introduced in 1981, and subsequent models of both Mac computers and PCs were used throughout the 1980s. Multiple modems, followed by specialized telecommunication hardware, allowed many users to be online simultaneously. Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL were three of the largest BBS companies and were the first to migrate to the Internet in the 1990s. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, BBSes numbered in the tens of thousands in North America alone. Message forums (a specific structure of social media) arose with the BBS phenomenon throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. When the World Wide Web (WWW, or 'the web') was added to the Internet in the mid-1990s, message forums migrated to the web, becoming Internet forums, primarily due to cheaper per-person access as well as the ability to handle far more people simultaneously than telco modem banks.

Digital imaging and semiconductor image sensor technology facilitated the development and rise of social media. Advances in metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) semiconductor device fabrication, reaching smaller micron and then sub-micron levels during the 1980s-1990s, led to the development of the NMOS (n-type MOS) active-pixel sensor (APS) at Olympus in 1985, and then the complementary MOS (CMOS) active-pixel sensor ( CMOS sensor) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1993. CMOS sensors enabled the mass proliferation of digital cameras and camera phones, which bolstered the rise of social media.

The development of social media began with simple platforms. GeoCities was one of the earliest social networking services, launched in November 1994, followed by Classmates.com in December 1995 and SixDegrees.com in May 1997. Unlike instant-messaging clients (e.g., ICQ and AOL's AIM) or chat clients (e.g., IRC, iChat, or Chat Television), SixDegrees was the first online business that was created for real people, using their real names. As such, according to CBS News, SixDegrees is "widely considered to be the very first social networking site," as it included "profiles, friends lists and school affiliations" that could be used by registered users. Research from 2015 shows that the world spent 22% of their online time on social networks, thus suggesting the popularity of social media platforms. It is speculated that the increase in social media's popularity is due to the widespread daily use of smartphones. As many as 4.08 billion social media users worldwide were found active on smartphones as of October 2020.

The idea that social media are defined simply by their ability to bring people together has been seen as too broad, as this would suggest that fundamentally different technologies like the telegraph and telephone are also social media. The terminology is unclear, with some early researchers referring to social media as social networks or social networking services in the mid 2000s. A more recent paper from 2015 reviewed the prominent literature in the area and identified four common features unique to then-current social media services:

Users create service-specific profiles for the site or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.

In 2019, Merriam-Webster defined social media as "forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)."

Mobile social media refers to the use of social media on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. Mobile social media are useful applications of mobile marketing because the creation, exchange, and circulation of user-generated content can assist companies with marketing research, communication, and relationship development. Mobile social media differ from others because they incorporate the current location of the user (location-sensitivity) or the time delay between sending and receiving messages.

Social media promotes users to share content with others and display content in order to enhance a particular brand or product. Social media allows people to be creative and share interesting ideas with their followers or fans. Certain social media applications such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are places where users share specific political or sports content. Many reporters and journalists produce updates and information on sports and political news. It can truly give users pertinent and necessary information to stay up to date on relevant news stories and topics. However, there is a down side to it. Users are advised to exercise due diligence when they are using social media platforms.

1. Space-timers (location and time-sensitive): Exchange of messages with relevance mostly for one specific location at one specific point in time (e.g. Facebook Places, WhatsApp, Foursquare)

2. Space-locators (only location sensitive): Exchange of messages with relevance for one specific location, which is tagged to a certain place and read later by others (e.g. Yelp, Qype, Tumblr, Fishbrain)

3. Quick-timers (only time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media mobile apps to increase immediacy (e.g. posting on Twitter or status updates on Facebook)

4. Slow-timers (neither location nor time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media applications to mobile devices (e.g. watching a YouTube video or reading/editing a Wikipedia article)

Some social media sites have the potential for content posted there to spread virally over social networks. The term is an analogy to the concept of viral infections, which can spread rapidly from individual to individual. In a social media context, content or websites that are 'viral' (or which 'go viral') are those with a greater likelihood that users will re-share content posted (by another user) to their social network, leading to further sharing. In some cases, posts containing popular content or fast-breaking news have been rapidly shared and re-shared by a huge number of users.

Businesses have a particular interest in viral marketing tactics because a viral campaign can achieve widespread advertising coverage (particularly if the viral reposting itself makes the news) for a fraction of the cost of a traditional marketing campaign, which typically uses printed materials, like newspapers, magazines, mailings, and billboards, and television and radio commercials. Nonprofit organizations and activists may have similar interests in posting content on social media sites with the aim of it going viral.

Many social media sites provide specific functionality to help users re-share (also known as re-blogging) content, such as Twitter's ' retweet' button, Pinterest's 'pin' function, Facebook's 'share' option, or Tumblr's 're-blog' function. Re-sharing (or, in this case, retweeting) is an especially popular component and feature of Twitter, allowing its users to keep up with important events and stay connected with their peers, as well as contributing in various ways throughout social media. When certain posts become popular, they start to get retweeted over and over again, becoming viral. Hashtags can be used in tweets, and can also be used to take count of how many people have used that hashtag.

Chatbots and social bots are programmed to mimic natural human interactions such as liking, commenting, following, and unfollowing on social media platforms. As companies aim for greater market shares and increased audiences, internet bots have also been developed to facilitate social media marketing. With the existence of social bots and chatbots, however, the marketing industry has also met an analytical crisis, as these bots make it difficult to differentiate between human interactions and automated bot interactions. For instance, marketing data has been negatively affected by some bots, causing "digital cannibalism" in social media marketing. Additionally, some bots violate the terms of use on many social media platforms such as Instagram, which can result in profiles being taken down and banned.

' Cyborgs'-either bot-assisted humans or human-assisted bots-are used for a number of different purposes both legitimate and illegitimate, from spreading fake news to creating marketing buzz. A common legitimate use includes using automated programs to post on social media at a specific time. In these cases, often the human writes the post content and the bot schedules the time of posting. In other cases, the cyborgs are more nefarious, e.g., contributing to the spread of fake news and misinformation. Often these accounts blend human and bot activity in a strategic way, so that when an automated account is publicly identified, the human half of the cyborg is able to take over and could protest that the account has been used manually all along. In many cases, these accounts that are being used in a more illegitimate fashion try to pose as real people; in particular, the number of their friends or followers resemble that of a real person. Cyborgs are also related to sock puppet accounts, where one human pretends to be someone else, but can also include one human operating multiple cyborg accounts.

There has been rapid growth in the number of U.S. patent applications that cover new technologies that are related to social media, and the number of them that are published has been growing rapidly over the past five years. As of 2020, there are over 5000 published patent applications in the United States. As many as 7000 applications may be currently on file including those that have not been published yet; however, only slightly over 100 of these applications have issued as patents, largely due to the multi-year backlog in examination of business method patents, i.e., patents that outline and claim new methods of doing business.

As an instance of technological convergence, various social media platforms of different kinds adapted functionality beyond their original scope, increasingly overlapping with each other over time, albeit usually not implemented as completely as on dedicated platforms.

Examples are the social hub site Facebook launching an integrated video platform in May 2007, and Instagram, whose original scope was low-resolution photo sharing, introducing the ability to share quarter-minute 640×640 pixel videos in 2013 (later extended to a minute with increased resolution), acting like a minimal video platform without video seek bar. Instagram later implemented stories (short videos self-destructing after 24 hours), a concept popularized by Snapchat, as well as , for seekable videos of up to ten minutes or one hour depending on account status. Stories have been later adapted by the dedicated video platform YouTube in 2018, although access is restricted to the mobile apps, excluding mobile and desktop websites.

Twitter, whose original scope was text-based microblogging, later adapted photo sharing functionality (deprecating third-party services such as ), later video sharing with 140-second time limit and view counter but no manual quality selection or subtitles like on dedicated video platforms, and originally only available to mobile app users but later implemented in their website front ends. Then a media studio feature for business users, which resembles YouTube's Creator Studio.

The discussion platform Reddit added an integrated image hoster in June 2016 after Reddit users commonly relied on the external standalone image sharing platform Imgur, and an internal video hoster around a year later. In July 2020, the ability to share multiple images in a single post ( image galleries), a feature known from Imgur, was implemented. Imgur itself implemented sharing videos of up to 30 seconds in May 2018, later extended to one minute.

Starting in 2018, the dedicated video platform YouTube rolled out a Community feature accessible through a channel tab (which usurps the previous Discussion channel tab), where text-only posts, as well as polls can be shared. To be enabled, channels have to pass a subscriber count threshold which has been lowered over time.

The following is a list of the most popular social networking services based on the number of active users as of January per Statista.

A study from 2009 suggests that there may be individual differences that help explain who uses social media and who does not: extraversion and openness have a positive relationship with social media, while emotional stability has a negative sloping relationship with social media. A separate study from 2015 found that people with a higher social comparison orientation appear to use social media more heavily than people with low social comparison orientation.

Data from Common Sense Media has suggested that children under the age of 13 in the United States use social networking services despite the fact that many social media sites have policies that state one must be at least 13-years-old or older to join. In 2017, Common Sense Media conducted a nationally representative survey of parents of children from birth to age 8 and found that 4% of children at this age used social media sites such as Instagram, Snapchat, or (now-defunct) Musical.ly "often" or "sometimes." A different nationally representative survey by Common Sense in 2019 surveyed young Americans ages 8-16 and found that about 31% of children ages 8-12 ever use social media such as Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook. In that same survey, when American teens ages 16-18 were asked when they started using social media, 28% said they started to use it before they were 13-years-old. However, the median age of starting to use social media was 14-years-old.

In June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a nationally representative survey by Cartoon Network and the Cyberbullying Research Center surveyed Americans tweens (ages 9-12) found that the most popular overall application in the past year was YouTube (67%). (In general, as age increased, the tweens were more likely to have used major social media apps and games.) Similarly, a nationally representative survey by Common Sense Media conducted in 2020 of Americans ages 13-18 found that YouTube was also the most popular social media service (used by 86% of 13- to 18-year-old Americans in the past year). As children grow older, they utilize certain social media services on a frequent basis and often use the application YouTube to consume content. The use of social media certainly increases as people grow older and it has become a customary thing to have an Instagram and Twitter account.

While adults were already using social media before the COVID-19 pandemic, more started using it and for additional reasons, particularly to stay socially connected and to get updates on the pandemic.

"Social media have become popularly use to seek for medical information and have fascinated the general public to collect information regarding corona virus pandemics in various perspectives. During these days, people are forced to stay at home and the social media have connected and supported awareness and pandemic updates."

This also made healthcare workers and systems more aware of social media as a place people were getting health information about the pandemic:

"During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media use has accelerated to the point of becoming a ubiquitous part of modern healthcare systems."

Though this also led to the spread of disinformation, indeed, on December 11, 2020, the CDC put out a "Call to Action: Managing the Infodemic". Some healthcare organizations even used hashtags as interventions and published articles on their Twitter data:

"Promotion of the joint usage of #PedsICU and #COVID19 throughout the international pediatric critical care community in tweets relevant to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and pediatric critical care."

However others in the medical community were concerned about social media addiction, due to it as an increasingly important context and therefore "source of social validation and reinforcement" and are unsure if increased social media use is a coping mechanism or harmful.

Governments may use social media to (for example):

inform their opinions to public

interact with citizens

foster citizen participation

further open government

analyze/monitor public opinion and activities

educate the public about risks and public health.

Social media has been used extensively in civil and criminal investigations. It has also been used to assist in searches for missing persons. Police departments often make use of official social media accounts to engage with the public, publicize police activity, and burnish law enforcement's image; conversely, video footage of citizen-documented police brutality and other misconduct has sometimes been posted to social media.

In the United States U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement identifies and track individuals via social media, and also has apprehended some people via social media based sting operations. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (also known as CPB) and the United States Department of Homeland Security use social media data as influencing factors during the visa process, and continue to monitor individuals after they have entered the country. CPB officers have also been documented performing searches of electronics and social media behavior at the border, searching both citizens and non-citizens without first obtaining a warrant.

As social media gained momentum among the younger generations, governments began using it to improve their image, especially among the youth. In January 2021, Egyptian authorities were found to be using Instagram influencers as part of its media ambassadors program. The program was designed to revamp Egypt's image and to counter the bad press Egypt had received because of the country's human rights record. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates participated in similar programs. Similarly, Dubai has also extensively relied on social media and influencers to promote tourism. However, the restrictive laws of Dubai have always kept these influencers within the limits to not offend the authorities, or to criticize the city, politics or religion. The content of these foreign influencers is controlled to make sure that nothing portrays Dubai in a negative light.

Businesses can use social media tools for marketing research, communication, sales promotions/discounts, informal employee-learning/organizational development, relationship development/ loyalty programs, and e-Commerce. Companies are increasingly using social-media monitoring tools to monitor, track, and analyze online conversations on the Web about their brand or products or about related topics of interest. This can prove useful in public relations management and advertising-campaign tracking, allowing analysts to measure return on investment for their social media ad spending, competitor-auditing, and for public engagement. Tools range from free, basic applications to subscription-based, more in-depth tools. Often social media can become a good source of information and/or explanation of industry trends for a business to embrace change. Within the financial industry, companies can utilize the power of social media as a tool for analyzing the sentiment of financial markets. These range from the marketing of financial products, gaining insights into market sentiment, future market predictions, and as a tool to identify insider trading.

To properly take advantage of these benefits, businesses need to have a set of guidelines that they can use on different social media platforms. Social media can enhance a brand through a process called "building social authority". However, this process can be difficult, because one of the foundational concepts in social media is that one cannot completely control one's message through social media but rather one can simply begin to participate in the "conversation" expecting that one can achieve a significant influence in that conversation. Because of the wide use of social media by consumers and their own employees, companies use social media on a customer-organizational level; and an intra-organizational level. Social media, by connecting individuals to new ties via the social network can increase entrepreneurship and innovation, especially for those individuals who lack conventional information channels due to their lower socioeconomic background.

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service and also to establish a connection with its customers. Social media marketing has increased due to the growing active user rates on social media sites. Though these numbers are not exponential. For example, as of 2018 Facebook had 2.2 billion users, Twitter had 330 million active users and Instagram had 800 million users. Then in 2021 Facebook had 2.89 billion users and Twitter had 206 million users. Similar to traditional advertising, all of social media marketing can be divided into three types: (1) paid media, (2) earned media, and (3) owned media. Paid social media is when a firm directly buys advertising on a social media platform. Earned social media is when the firms does something that impresses its consumers or other stakeholders and they spontaneously post their own content about it on social media. Owned social media is when the firm itself owns the social media channel and creates content for its followers.

One of the main uses is to interact with audiences to create awareness of the company or organization, with the main idea of creating a two-way communication system where the audience and/or customers can interact; e.g., customers can provide feedback on the firm's products. However, since social media allows consumers to spread opinions and share experiences in a peer-to-peer fashion, this has shifted some of the power from the organization to consumers, since these messages can be transparent and honest. Or at least appear so (more on this at influencers).

Social media can also be used to directly advertise; placing an advert on Facebook's Newsfeed, for example, can provide exposure of the brand to a large number of people. Social media platforms also enable targeting specific audiences with advertising. Users of social media are then able to like, share, and comment on the advert; this turns the passive advertising consumers into active advertising producers since they can pass the advert's message on to their friends. Companies using social media marketing have to keep up with the different social media platforms and stay on top of ongoing trends. Since the different platforms and trends attract different audiences, firms must be strategic about their use of social media to attract the right audience. Moreover, the tone of the content can affect the efficacy of social media marketing. Companies such as fast food franchise Wendy's have used humor (such as shitposting) to advertise their products by poking fun at competitors such as McDonald's and Burger King. This particular example spawned a lot of fanart of the Wendy's mascot which circulated widely online, (particularly on sites like DeviantArt) increasing the effect of the marketing campaign. Other companies such as Juul have used hashtags (such as #ejuice and #eliquid) to promote themselves and their products.

Social media personalities, often referred to as " influencers", who are internet celebrities who have been employed and/or sponsored by marketers to promote products online. Research shows that digital endorsements seem to be successfully attracting social media users, especially younger consumers who have grown up in the digital age. In 2013, the United Kingdom Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) began to advise celebrities and sports stars to make it clear if they had been paid to tweet about a product or service by using the hashtag #spon or #ad within tweets containing endorsements, and the US Federal Trade Commission has issued similar guidelines. The practice of harnessing social media personalities to market or promote a product or service to their following is commonly referred to as Influencer Marketing. In 2019 The Cambridge Dictionary defines an "influencer" as any person (personality, blogger, journalist, celebrity) who has the ability to affect the opinions, behaviors, or purchases of others through the use of social media.

Social media have a range of uses in political processes and activities. Social media have been championed as allowing anyone with access to an Internet connection to become a content creator and as empowering users. The role of social media in democratizing media participation, which proponents herald as ushering in a new era of participatory democracy, with all users able to contribute news and comments, may fall short of the ideals, given that many often follow like-minded individuals, as noted by Philip Pond and Jeff Lewis. Online-media audience-members are largely passive consumers, while content creation is dominated by a small number of users who post comments and write new content. Online engagement does not always translate into real-world action, and Howard, Busch and Sheets have argued that there is a digital divide in North America because of the continent's history, culture, and geography.

Younger generations are becoming more involved in politics due to the increase of political news posted on social media. Political campaigns are targeting millennials online via social-media posts in hope that they will increase their political engagement. Social media was influential in the widespread attention given to the revolutionary outbreaks in the Middle East and North Africa during 2011. During the Tunisian revolution in 2011, people used Facebook to organize meetings and protests. However, debate persists about the extent to which social media facilitated this kind of political change.

Social-media footprints of candidates for political office have grown during the last decade - the 2016 United States presidential election provided good examples. Dounoucos et al. noted that Twitter use by candidates was unprecedented during that election cycle. Most candidates in the United States have a Twitter account. The public has also increased their reliance on social-media sites for political information. In the European Union, social media have amplified political messages.

Militant groups have begun to see social media as a major organizing and recruiting tool. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (also known as ISIL, ISIS, and Daesh) has used social media to promote its cause. In 2014, #AllEyesonISIS went viral on Arabic Twitter. ISIS produces an online magazine named the Islamic State Report to recruit more fighters. State-sponsored cyber-groups have weaponized social-media platforms to attack governments in the United States, the European Union, and the Middle East. Although phishing attacks via email are the most commonly used tactic to breach government networks, phishing attacks on social media rose 500% in 2016.

Increasing political influence on social media saw several campaigns running from one political side against another. Often, foreign-originated social-media campaigns have sought to influence political opinion in another country. For example, a Twitter campaign run in Saudi Arabia produced thousands of tweets about Hillary Clinton's trending on #HillaryEmails by supporters of Mohammed bin Salman. It also involved Riyadh's social-marketing firm, SMAAT, which had a history of running such campaigns on Twitter. Politicians themselves use social media to their advantage - and to spread their campaign messages and to influence voters.

Due to the growing abuse of human rights in Bahrain, activists have used social media to report acts of violence and injustice. They publicized the brutality of government authorities and police, who were detaining, torturing and threatening many individuals. On the other hand, Bahrain's government was using social media to track and target rights activists and individuals who were critical of the authorities; the government has stripped citizenship from over 1,000 activists as punishment.

Some employers examine job applicants' social media profiles as part of the hiring assessment. This issue raises many ethical questions that some consider an employer's right and others consider discrimination. Many Western-European countries have already implemented laws that restrict the regulation of social media in the workplace. States including Arkansas, California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin have passed legislation that protects potential employees and current employees from employers that demand that they provide their usernames and/or passwords for any social media accounts. Use of social media by young people has caused significant problems for some applicants who are active on social media when they try to enter the job market. A survey of 17,000 young people in six countries in 2013 found that 1 in 10 people aged 16 to 34 have been rejected for a job because of online comments they made on social media websites.

For potential employees, using social media publicly may alter shape patterns of deception in resumes.

The use of social media in science communications offers extensive opportunities for exchanging scientific information, ideas, opinions and publications. Scientists use social media to share their scientific knowledge and new findings on platforms such as ResearchGate, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Academia.edu. Among these the most common type of social media that scientists use is Twitter and blogs. It has been found that Twitter increased the scientific impact in the community. The use of social media has improved and elevated the interaction between scientists, reporters, and the general public. Over 495,000 opinions were shared on Twitter related to science in one year (between September 1, 2010, and August 31, 2011), which was an increase compared with past years. Science related blogs motivate public interest in learning, following, and discussing science. Blogs use textual depth and graphical videos that provide the reader with a dynamic way to interact with scientific information. Both Twitter and blogs can be written quickly and allow the reader to interact in real time with the authors. However, the popularity of social media platforms changes quickly and scientists need to keep pace with changes in social media. In terms of organized uses of scientific social media, one study in the context of climate change has shown that climate scientist and scientific institutions played a minimal role in online debate, while nongovernmental organizations played a larger role.

Signals from social media are used to assess academic publications, as well as for different scientific approaches. Another study found that most of the health science students acquiring academic materials from others through social media.

According to a 2007 journal, before social media admissions officials in the United States used SAT and other standardized test scores, extra-curricular activities, letters of recommendation, and high school report cards to determine whether to accept or deny an applicant. In the 2010s, while colleges and universities still used these traditional methods to evaluate applicants, these institutions were increasingly accessing applicants' social media profiles to learn about their character and activities. According to Kaplan, Inc, a corporation that provides higher education preparation, in 2012 27% of admissions officers used Google to learn more about an applicant, with 26% checking Facebook. Students whose social media pages include offensive jokes or photos, racist or homophobic comments, photos depicting the applicant engaging in illegal drug use or drunkenness, and so on, may be screened out from admission processes.

"One survey in July 2017, by the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers, found that 11 percent of respondents said they had refused to admit an applicant based on social media content. This includes 8 percent of public institutions, where the First Amendment applies. The survey found that 30 percent of institutions acknowledged reviewing the personal social media accounts of applicants at least some of the time."

Social media comments and images are being used in a range of court cases including employment law, child custody/child support and insurance disability claims. After an Apple employee criticized his employer on Facebook, he was fired. When the former employee sued Apple for unfair dismissal, the court, after seeing the man's Facebook posts, found in favor of Apple, as the man's social media comments breached Apple's policies. After a heterosexual couple broke up, the man posted "violent rap lyrics from a song that talked about fantasies of killing the rapper's ex-wife" and made threats against him. The court found him guilty and he was sentenced to jail. In a disability claims case, a woman who fell at work claimed that she was permanently injured; the employer used the social media posts of her travels and activities to counter her claims.

Courts do not always admit social media evidence, in part, because screenshots can be faked or tampered with. Judges are taking emojis into account to assess statements made on social media; in one Michigan case where a person alleged that another person had defamed them in an online comment, the judge disagreed, noting that there was an emoji after the comment which indicated that it was a joke. In a 2014 case in Ontario against a police officer regarding alleged assault of a protester during the G20 summit, the court rejected the Crown's application to use a digital photo of the protest that was anonymously posted online, because there was no metadata proving when the photo was taken and it could have been digitally altered.

As of March 2010, in the United States, 81% of users look online for news of the weather, first and foremost, with the percentage seeking national news at 73%, 52% for sports news, and 41% for entertainment or celebrity news. According to CNN, in 2010 75% of people got their news forwarded through e-mail or social media posts, whereas 37% of people shared a news item via Facebook or Twitter. Facebook and Twitter make news a more participatory experience than before as people share news articles and comment on other people's posts. Rainie and Wellman (2012) have argued that media making now has become a participation work, which changes communication systems. However, 27% of respondents worry about the accuracy of a story on a blog. From a 2019 poll, Pew Research Center found that Americans are wary about the ways that social media sites share news and certain content. This wariness of accuracy is on the rise as social media sites are increasingly exploited by aggregated new sources which stitch together multiple feeds to develop plausible correlations. Hemsley and colleagues (2018) refer to this phenomenon as "pseudoknowledge" which develop false narratives and fake news that are supported through general analysis and ideology rather than facts. Social media as a news source was further questioned as spikes in evidence surround major news events such as was captured in the United States 2016 presidential election and again during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Social media are used to fulfill perceived social needs such as socializing with friends and family as well as romance and flirting, but not all needs can be fulfilled by social media. For example, a 2003 article found that lonely individuals are more likely to use the Internet for emotional support than those who are not lonely. A nationally representative survey from Common Sense Media in 2018 found that 40% of American teens ages 13-17 thought that social media was "extremely" or "very" important for them to keep up with their friends on a day-to-basis. The same survey found that 33% of teens said social media was extremely or very important to have meaningful conversations with close friends, and 23% of teens said social media was extremely or very important to document and share highlights from their lives. Recently, a Gallup poll from May 2020 showed that 53% of adult social media users in the United States thought that social media was a very or moderately important way to keep in touch with those they cannot otherwise see in-person due to social distancing measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sherry Turkle explores this topic in her book Alone Together as she discusses how people confuse social media usage with authentic communication. She posits that people tend to act differently online and are less afraid to hurt each other's feelings. Additionally, Some online behaviors can cause stress and anxiety, due to the permanence of online posts, the fear of being hacked, or of universities and employers exploring social media pages. Turkle also speculates that people are beginning to prefer texting to face-to-face communication, which can contribute to feelings of loneliness. Nationally representative surveys from 2019 have found this to be the case with teens in the United States and Mexico. Some researchers have also found that exchanges that involved direct communication and reciprocation of messages correlated with fewer feelings of loneliness. However, that same study showed that passively using social media without sending or receiving messages does not make people feel less lonely unless they were lonely to begin with.

The term social media "stalking" or "creeping" have been popularized over the years, and this refers to looking at the person's "timeline, status updates, tweets, and online bios" to find information about them and their activities. While social media creeping is common, it is considered to be poor form to admit to a new acquaintance or new date that you have looked through his or her social media posts, particularly older posts, as this will indicate that you were going through their old history. A sub-category of creeping is creeping ex-partners' social media posts after a breakup to investigate if there is a new partner or new dating; this can lead to preoccupation with the ex, rumination, and negative feelings, all of which postpone recovery and increase feelings of loss.

The more time people spend on Facebook, the less satisfied they feel about their life. Self-presentation theory explains that people will consciously manage their self-image or identity related information in social contexts. In fact, a critical aspect of social networking sites is the time invested in customizing a personal profile, and encourage a sort of social currency based on likes, followers, and comments. Users also tend to segment their audiences based on the image they want to present, pseudonymity and use of multiple accounts across the same platform remain popular ways to negotiate platform expectations and segment audiences.

However, users may feel pressure to gain their peers' acceptance of their self-presentation. For example, in a 2016 peer-reviewed article by Trudy Hui Hui Chua and Leanne Chang, the authors found that teenage girls manipulate their self-presentation on social media to achieve a sense of beauty that is projected by their peers. These authors also discovered that teenage girls compare themselves to their peers on social media and present themselves in certain ways in an effort to earn regard and acceptance. However, when users do not feel like they reached this regard and acceptance, this can actually lead to problems with self-confidence and self-satisfaction. A nationally representative survey of American teens ages 13-17 by Common Sense Media found that 45% said getting " likes " on posts is at least somewhat important, and 26% at least somewhat agreed that they feel bad about themselves if nobody comments on or "likes" their photos. Some evidence suggests that perceived rejection may lead to feeling emotional pain, and some may partake in online retaliation such as online bullying. Conversely, according to research from UCLA, users' reward circuits in their brains are more active when their own photos are liked by more peers.

Social media can also function as a supportive system for adolescents' health, because by using social media, adolescents are able to mobilize around health issues that they themselves deem relevant. For example, in a clinical study among adolescent patients undergoing treatment for obesity, the participants' expressed that through social media, they could find personalized weight-loss content as well as social support among other adolescents with obesity. Whilst, social media can provide such information there are a considerable amount of uninformed and incorrect sources which promote unhealthy and dangerous methods of weight loss. As stated by the national eating disorder association there is a high correlation between weight loss content and disorderly eating among women who have been influenced by this negative content. Therefore, there is a need for people to evaluate and identify reliable health information, competencies commonly known as health literacy. This has led to efforts by governments and public health organizations to use social media to interact with users, to limited success.

Other social media, such as pro-anorexia sites, have been found in studies to cause significant risk of harm by reinforcing negative health-related behaviors through social networking, especially in adolescents. Social media effects the way a person views themselves. The constant comparison to edited photos, of other individual's and their living situations, can cause many negative emotions. This can lead to not eating, and isolation. As more and more people continue to use social media for the wrong reasons, it increases the feeling of loneliness in adults.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the spread of information throughout social media regarding treatments against the virus has also influenced different health behaviors. For example, People who use more social media and belief more in conspiracy theory in social media during the COVID-19 pandemic had worse mental health and is predictive of their compliance to health behaviors such as hand-washing during the pandemic.

News media and television journalism have been a key feature in the shaping of American collective memory for much of the 20th century. Indeed, since the colonial era of the United States, news media has influenced collective memory and discourse about national development and trauma. In many ways, mainstream journalists have maintained an authoritative voice as the storytellers of the American past. Their documentary-style narratives, detailed exposés, and their positions in the present make them prime sources for public memory. Specifically, news media journalists have shaped collective memory on nearly every major national event-from the deaths of social and political figures to the progression of political hopefuls. Journalists provide elaborate descriptions of commemorative events in U.S. history and contemporary popular cultural sensations. Many Americans learn the significance of historical events and political issues through news media, as they are presented on popular news stations. However, journalistic influence has grown less important, whereas social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, provide a constant supply of alternative news sources for users.

As social networking becomes more popular among older and younger generations, sites such as Facebook and YouTube gradually undermine the traditionally authoritative voices of news media. For example, American citizens contest media coverage of various social and political events as they see fit, inserting their voices into the narratives about America's past and present and shaping their own collective memories. An example of this is the public explosion of the Trayvon Martin shooting in Sanford, Florida. News media coverage of the incident was minimal until social media users made the story recognizable through their constant discussion of the case. Approximately one month after Martin's death, its online coverage by everyday Americans garnered national attention from mainstream media journalists, in turn exemplifying media activism. In some ways, the spread of this tragic event through alternative news sources parallels that of Emmett Till -whose murder by lynching in 1955 became a national story after it was circulated in African-American and Communist newspapers.

Social media use sometimes involves negative interactions between users. Angry or emotional conversations can lead to real-world interactions, which can get users into dangerous situations. Some users have experienced threats of violence online and have feared these threats manifesting themselves offline. Related issues include cyberbullying, online harassment, and ' trolling'. According to cyberbullying statistics from the i-Safe Foundation, over half of adolescents and teens have been bullied online, and about the same number have engaged in cyberbullying. Both the bully and the victim are negatively affected, and the intensity, duration, and frequency of bullying are the three aspects that increase the negative effects on both of them.

One phenomenon that is commonly studied with social media is the issue of social comparison. People compare their own lives to the lives of their friends through their friends' posts. Because people are motivated to portray themselves in a way that is appropriate to the situation and serves their best interests, often the things posted online are the positive aspects of people's lives, making other people question why their own lives are not as exciting or fulfilling. One study in 2017 found that problematic social media use (i.e., feeling addicted to social media) was related to lower life satisfaction and self-esteem scores; the authors speculate that users may feel if their life is not exciting enough to put online it is not as good as their friends or family.

Studies have shown that self-comparison on social media can have dire effects on physical and mental health because they give us the ability to seek approval and compare ourselves. In one study, women reported that social media are the most influential sources of their body image satisfaction; while men reported them as the second most impacting factor.

Social media has allowed for people to be constantly surrounded and aware of celebrity images and influencers who hold strong online presence with the number of followers they have. This constant online presence has meant that people are far more aware of what others look like and as such body comparisons have become an issue, as people are far more aware of what the desired body type is. A study produced by King university showed that 87% of women and 65% of men compared themselves to images found on social media.

There are efforts to combat these negative effects, such as the use of the tag #instagramversusreality and #instagramversusreallife, that have been used to promote body positivity. In a related study, women aged 18-30 were shown posts using this hashtag that contained side-by-side images of women in the same clothes and setting, but one image was enhanced for Instagram, while the other was an unedited, "realistic" version. Women who participated in this experiment noted a decrease in body dissatisfaction.

According to a study released in 2017 by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, the link between sleep disturbance and the use of social media was clear. It concluded that blue light had a part to play-and how often they logged on, rather than time spent on social media sites, was a higher predictor of disturbed sleep, suggesting "an obsessive 'checking'". The strong relationship of social media use and sleep disturbance has significant clinical ramifications for young adults health and well-being. In a recent study, we have learned that people in the highest quartile for social media use per week report the most sleep disturbance. The median number of minutes of social media use per day is 61 minutes. Lastly, we have learned that females are more inclined to experience high levels of sleep disturbance than males. Many teenagers suffer from sleep deprivation as they spend long hours at night on their phones, and this, in turn, could affect grades as they will be tired and unfocused in school. In a study from 2011, it was found that time spent on Facebook has a strong negative relationship with overall GPA, but it was unclear if this was related to sleep disturbances. Since blue light has increasingly become an issue smartphone developers have added a night mode feature that does not cause as much strain to the eyes as a blue light would.

One studied emotional effect of social media is ' Facebook depression', which is a type of depression that affects adolescents who spend too much of their free time engaging with social media sites. This may lead to problems such as reclusiveness which can negatively damage one's health by creating feelings of loneliness and low self-esteem among young people. Using a phone to look at social media before bed has become a popular trend among teenagers and this has led to a lack of sleep and inability to stay awake during school. Social media applications curate content that encourages users to keep scrolling to the point where they lose track of time. There are studies that show children's self-esteem is positively affected by positive comments on social media and negatively affected self-esteem by negative comments. This affects the way that people look at themselves on a "worthiness" scale. A 2017 study of almost 6,000 adolescent students showed that those who self-reported addiction-like symptoms of social media use were more likely to report low self-esteem and high levels of depressive symptoms. From the findings on a population-based study, there is about 37% increase in the likelihood of major depression among adolescents. In a different study conducted in 2007, those who used the most multiple social media platforms (7 to 11) had more than three times the risk of depression and anxiety than people who used the fewest (0 to 2).

A second emotional effect is social media burnout, which is defined by Bo Han as ambivalence, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization. Ambivalence refers to a user's confusion about the benefits she can get from using a social media site. Emotional exhaustion refers to the stress a user has when using a social media site. Depersonalization refers to the emotional detachment from a social media site a user experiences. The three burnout factors can all negatively influence the user's social media continuance. This study provides an instrument to measure the burnout a user can experience when his or her social media "friends" are generating an overwhelming amount of useless information (e.g., "what I had for dinner", "where I am now").

A third emotional effect is the " fear of missing out" (FOMO), which is defined as the "pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent." FOMO has been classified by some as a form of social anxiety. It is associated with checking updates on friends' activities on social media. Some speculate that checking updates on friends' activities on social media may be associated with negative influences on people's psychological health and well-being because it could contribute to negative mood and depressed feelings. Looking at friends' stories or posts on various social media applications can lead users to feel left out and become upset because they are not having as fun as others. This is a very common issue between teen users of certain apps and it continues to effect their personal well-being.

On the other hand, social media can sometimes have a supportive effect on individuals who use it. Twitter has been used more by the medical community. While Twitter can facilitate academic discussion among health professionals and students, it can also provide a supportive community for these individuals by fostering a sense of community and allowing individuals to support each other through tweets, likes, and comments.

Social impacts

The digital divide is a measure of disparity in the level of access to technology between households, socioeconomic levels or other demographic categories. People who are homeless, living in poverty, elderly people and those living in rural or remote communities may have little or no access to computers and the Internet; in contrast, middle class and upper-class people in urban areas have very high rates of computer and Internet access. Other models argue that within a modern information society, some individuals produce Internet content while others only consume it, which could be a result of disparities in the education system where only some teachers integrate technology into the classroom and teach critical thinking. While social media has differences among age groups, a 2010 study in the United States found no racial divide. Some zero-rating programs offer subsidized data access to certain websites on low-cost plans. Critics say that this is an anti-competitive program that undermines net neutrality and creates a " walled garden" for platforms like Facebook Zero. A 2015 study found that 65% of Nigerians, 61% of Indonesians, and 58% of Indians agree with the statement that "Facebook is the Internet" compared with only 5% in the US.

Eric Ehrmann contends that social media in the form of public diplomacy create a patina of inclusiveness that covers traditional economic interests that are structured to ensure that wealth is pumped up to the top of the economic pyramid, perpetuating the digital divide and post-Marxian class conflict. He also voices concern over the trend that finds social utilities operating in a quasi- libertarian global environment of oligopoly that requires users in economically challenged nations to spend high percentages of annual income to pay for devices and services to participate in the social media lifestyle. Neil Postman also contends that social media will increase an information disparity between "winners" - who are able to use the social media actively - and "losers" - who are not familiar with modern technologies or who do not have access to them. People with high social media skills may have better access to information about job opportunities, potential new friends, and social activities in their area, which may enable them to improve their standard of living and their quality of life.

According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of Americans at least occasionally receive news from social media. Because of algorithms on social media which filter and display news content which are likely to match their users' political preferences (known as a filter bubble), a potential impact of receiving news from social media includes an increase in political polarization due to selective exposure. Political polarization refers to when an individual's stance on a topic is more likely to be strictly defined by their identification with a specific political party or ideology than on other factors. Selective exposure occurs when an individual favors information that supports their beliefs and avoids information that conflicts with their beliefs. A study by Hayat and Samuel-Azran conducted during the 2016 U.S. presidential election observed an " echo chamber" effect of selective exposure among 27,811 Twitter users following the content of cable news shows. The Twitter users observed in the study were found to have little interaction with users and content whose beliefs were different from their own, possibly heightening polarization effects. Another 2016 study using U.S. elections, conducted by Evans and Clark, revealed gender differences in the political use of Twitter between candidates. Whilst politics is a male dominated arena, on social media the situation appears to be the opposite, with women discussing policy issues at a higher rate than their male counterparts. The study concluded that an increase in female candidates directly correlates to an increase in the amount of attention paid to policy issues, potentially heightening political polarization.

Efforts to combat selective exposure in social media may also cause an increase in political polarization. A study examining Twitter activity conducted by Bail et al. paid Democrat and Republican participants to follow Twitter handles whose content was different from their political beliefs (Republicans received liberal content and Democrats received conservative content) over a six-week period. At the end of the study, both Democrat and Republican participants were found to have increased political polarization in favor of their own parties, though only Republican participants had an increase that was statistically significant.

Though research has shown evidence that social media plays a role in increasing political polarization, it has also shown evidence that social media use leads to a persuasion of political beliefs. An online survey consisting of 1,024 U.S. participants was conducted by Diehl, Weeks, and Gil de Zuñiga, which found that individuals who use social media were more likely to have their political beliefs persuaded than those who did not. In particular, those using social media as a means to receive their news were the most likely to have their political beliefs changed. Diehl et al. found that the persuasion reported by participants was influenced by the exposure to diverse viewpoints they experienced, both in the content they saw as well as the political discussions they participated in. Similarly, a study by Hardy and colleagues conducted with 189 students from a Midwestern state university examined the persuasive effect of watching a political comedy video on Facebook. Hardy et al. found that after watching a Facebook video of the comedian/political commentator John Oliver performing a segment on his show, participants were likely to be persuaded to change their viewpoint on the topic they watched (either payday lending or the Ferguson protests) to one that was closer to the opinion expressed by Oliver. Furthermore, the persuasion experienced by the participants was found to be reduced if they viewed comments by Facebook users which contradicted the arguments made by Oliver.

In a study examining the potential polarizing effects of social media on the political views of its users, Mihailidis and Viotty suggest that a new way of engaging with social media must occur to avoid polarization. The authors note that media literacies (described as methods which give people skills to critique and create media) are important to using social media in a responsible and productive way, and state that these literacies must be changed further in order to have the most effectiveness. In order to decrease polarization and encourage cooperation among social media users, Mihailidis and Viotty suggest that media literacies must focus on teaching individuals how to connect with other people in a caring way, embrace differences, and understand the ways in which social media has a real impact on the political, social, and cultural issues of the society they are a part of.

Recent research has demonstrated that social media, and media in general, have the power to increase the scope of stereotypes not only in children but people of all ages. Both cases of stereotyping of the youth and the elderly are prime examples of ageism. The presumed characteristics of the individual being stereotyped can have both negative and positive connotations but frequently carry an opposing viewpoint. For example, the youth on social media platforms are often depicted as lazy, immature individuals who oftentimes have no drive or passion for other activities. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the youth were accused for the spread of the disease and were blamed for the continuous lockdowns across the world. These misrepresentations make it difficult for the youth to find new efforts and prove others wrong, especially when a large group of individuals believe that the stereotypes are highly accurate. Considering the youthful groups that are present on social media are frequently in a new stage of their lives and preparing to make life-changing decisions, it is essential that the stereotypes are diminished so that they don't feel invalidated. Further, stereotyping often occurs for the elderly as they are presumed to be a group of individuals who are unaware of the proper functions and slang usage on social media. These stereotypes often seek to exclude older generations from participating in trends or engaging them in other activities on digital platforms.

Three researchers at Blanquerna University, Spain, examined how adolescents interact with social media and specifically Facebook. They suggest that interactions on the website encourage representing oneself in the traditional gender constructs, which helps maintain gender stereotypes. The authors noted that girls generally show more emotion in their posts and more frequently change their profile pictures, which according to some psychologists can lead to self-objectification. On the other hand, the researchers found that boys prefer to portray themselves as strong, independent, and powerful. For example, men often post pictures of objects and not themselves, and rarely change their profile pictures; using the pages more for entertainment and pragmatic reasons. In contrast, girls generally post more images that include themselves, friends and things they have emotional ties to, which the researchers attributed that to the higher emotional intelligence of girls at a younger age. The authors sampled over 632 girls and boys from the ages of 12-16 from Spain in an effort to confirm their beliefs. The researchers concluded that masculinity is more commonly associated with positive psychological well-being, while femininity displays less psychological well-being. Furthermore, the researchers discovered that people tend not to completely conform to either stereotype, and encompass desirable parts of both. Users of Facebook generally use their profiles to reflect that they are a "normal" person. In that study, social media was found to uphold gender stereotypes both feminine and masculine. The researchers also noted that traditional stereotypes are often upheld by boys more so than girls. The authors described how neither stereotype was entirely positive, but most people viewed masculine values as more positive.

Social media has allowed for mass cultural exchange and intercultural communication. As different cultures have different value systems, cultural themes, grammar, and world views, they also communicate differently. The emergence of social media platforms fused together different cultures and their communication methods, blending together various cultural thinking patterns and expression styles.

Social media has affected the way youth communicate, by introducing new forms of language. Abbreviations have been introduced to cut down on the time it takes to respond online. The commonly known " LOL" has become globally recognized as the abbreviation for "laugh out loud" thanks to social media and use by people of all ages particularly as people grow up.

Another trend that influences the way youth communicates is (through) the use of hashtags. With the introduction of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, the hashtag was created to easily organize and search for information. Hashtags can be used when people want to advocate for a movement, store content or tweets from a movement for future use, and allow other social media users to contribute to a discussion about a certain movement by using existing hashtags. Using hashtags as a way to advocate for something online makes it easier and more accessible for more people to acknowledge it around the world. As hashtags such as #tbt (" throwback Thursday") become a part of online communication, it influenced the way in which youth share and communicate in their daily lives. Because of these changes in linguistics and communication etiquette, researchers of media semiotics have found that this has altered youth's communications habits and more.

Social media has offered a new platform for peer pressure with both positive and negative communication. From Facebook comments to likes on Instagram, how the youth communicate, and what is socially acceptable is now heavily based on social media. Social media does make kids and young adults more susceptible to peer pressure. The American Academy of Pediatrics has also shown that bullying, the making of non-inclusive friend groups, and sexual experimentation have increased situations related to cyberbullying, issues with privacy, and the act of sending sexual images or messages to someone's mobile device. This includes issues of sexting and revenge porn among minors, and the resulting legal implications and issues, and resulting risk of trauma. On the other hand, social media also benefits the youth and how they communicate. Adolescents can learn basic social and technical skills that are essential in society. Through the use of social media, kids and young adults are able to strengthen relationships by keeping in touch with friends and family, make more friends, and participate in community engagement activities and services.

Criticism, debate and controversy

Criticisms of social media range from criticisms of the ease of use of specific platforms and their capabilities, disparity of information available, issues with trustworthiness and reliability of information presented, the impact of social media use on an individual's concentration, ownership of media content, and the meaning of interactions created by social media. Although some social media platforms, such as servers in the decentralized Fediverse, offer users the opportunity to cross-post between independently run servers using a standard protocol such as ActivityPub, the dominant social network platforms have been criticized for poor interoperability between platforms, which leads to the creation of information silos, viz. isolated pockets of data contained in one social media platform. However, it is also argued that social media has positive effects, such as allowing the democratization of the Internet while also allowing individuals to advertise themselves and form friendships. Others have noted that the term "social" cannot account for technological features of a platform alone, hence the level of sociability should be determined by the actual performances of its users. There has been a dramatic decrease in face-to-face interactions as more and more social media platforms have been introduced with the threat of cyber-bullying and online sexual predators including groomers being more prevalent. Social media may expose children to images of alcohol, tobacco, and sexual behaviors. In regards to cyber-bullying, it has been proven that individuals who have no experience with cyber-bullying often have a better well-being than individuals who have been bullied online.

Twitter is increasingly a target of heavy activity of marketers. Their actions focused on gaining massive numbers of followers, include use of advanced scripts and manipulation techniques that distort the prime idea of social media by abusing human trustfulness. British-American entrepreneur and author Andrew Keen criticized social media in his 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur, writing, "Out of this anarchy, it suddenly became clear that what was governing the infinite monkeys now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated. Under these rules, the only way to intellectually prevail is by infinite filibustering." This is also relative to the issue "justice" in the social network. For example, the phenomenon " Human flesh search engine" in Asia raised the discussion of "private-law" brought by social network platform. Comparative media professor José van Dijck contends in her book The Culture of Connectivity (2013) that to understand the full weight of social media, their technological dimensions should be connected to the social and the cultural. She critically describes six social media platforms. One of her findings is the way Facebook had been successful in framing the term 'sharing' in such a way that third party use of user data is neglected in favor of intra-user connectedness.

There has been speculation that social media has become perceived as a trustworthy source of information by a large number of people. The continuous interpersonal connectivity on social media, for example, may lead to people regarding peer recommendations as indicators of the reliability of information sources. This trust can be exploited by marketers, who can utilize consumer-created content about brands and products to influence public perceptions.

The trustworthiness of information can be improved by fact-checking. Some social media has started to employ this.

Evgeny Morozov, a 2009-2010 Yahoo fellow at Georgetown University, contended that information uploaded to Twitter may have little relevance to the masses of people who do not use Twitter. In an article for the magazine titled "Iran: Downside to the 'Twitter Revolution'", Morozov wrote:

[B]y its very design Twitter only adds to the noise: it's simply impossible to pack much context into its 140 characters. All other biases are present as well: in a country like Iran it's mostly pro-Western, technology-friendly and iPod-carrying young people who are the natural and most frequent users of Twitter. They are a tiny and, most important, extremely untypical segment of the Iranian population (the number of Twitter users in Iran - a country of more than seventy million people - was estimated at less than twenty thousand before the protests).

In contrast, in the United States (where Twitter originated), the social network had 306 million accounts as of 2012.

Professor Matthew Auer of Bates College casts doubt on the conventional wisdom that social media are open and participatory. He also speculates on the emergence of "anti-social media" used as "instruments of pure control".

Social media 'mining' is a type of data mining, a technique of analyzing data to detect patterns. Social media mining is a process of representing, analyzing, and extracting actionable patterns from data collected from people's activities on social media. Google mines data in many ways including using an algorithm in Gmail to analyze information in emails. This use of the information will then affect the type of advertisements shown to the user when they use Gmail. Facebook has partnered with many data mining companies such as Datalogix and BlueKai to use customer information for targeted advertising. Massive amounts of data from social platforms allows scientists and machine learning researchers to extract insights and build product features.

Ethical questions of the extent to which a company should be able to utilize a user's information have been called " big data". Users tend to click through Terms of Use agreements when signing up on social media platforms, and they do not know how their information will be used by companies. This leads to questions of privacy and surveillance when user data is recorded. Some social media outlets have added capture time and Geotagging that helps provide information about the context of the data as well as making their data more accurate.

On April 10, 2018, in a hearing held in response to revelations of data harvesting by Cambridge Analytica, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, faced questions from senators on a variety of issues, from privacy to the company's business model and the company's mishandling of data. This was Mr. Zuckerberg's first appearance before Congress, prompted by the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign, harvested the data of an estimated 87 million Facebook users to psychologically profile voters during the 2016 election. Zuckerberg was pressed to account for how third-party partners could take data without users' knowledge. Lawmakers grilled the 33-year-old executive on the proliferation of so-called fake news on Facebook, Russian interference during the 2016 presidential election and censorship of conservative media.

For The New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, the role of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, in revolutions and protests is overstated. On one hand, social media makes it easier for individuals, and in this case activists, to express themselves. On the other hand, it is harder for that expression to have an impact. Gladwell distinguishes between social media activism and high-risk activism, which brings real changes. Activism and especially high-risk activism involves strong-tie relationships, hierarchies, coordination, motivation, exposing oneself to high risks, making sacrifices. Gladwell discusses that social media are built around weak ties and he argues that "social networks are effective at increasing participation - by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires." According to him, "Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice, but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice."

Social media content is generated through social media interactions done by users through the site. There has always been a huge debate on the ownership of the content on social media platforms because it is generated by the users and hosted by the company. Added to this is the danger to the security of information, which can be leaked to third parties with economic interests in the platform, or parasites who comb the data for their own databases.

Privacy rights advocates warn users on social media about the collection of their personal data. Some information is captured without the user's knowledge or consent through electronic tracking and third-party applications. Data may also be collected for law enforcement and governmental purposes, by social media intelligence using data mining techniques. Data and information may also be collected for third party use. When information is shared on social media, that information is no longer private. There have been many cases in which young persons especially, share personal information, which can attract predators. It is very important to monitor what you share and to be aware of who you could potentially be sharing that information with. Teens especially share significantly more information on the internet now than they have in the past. Teens are much more likely to share their personal information, such as email address, phone number, and school names. Studies suggest that teens are not aware of what they are posting and how much of that information can be accessed by third parties.

There are arguments that "privacy is dead" and that with social media growing more and more, some heavy social media users appear to have become quite unconcerned with privacy. Others argue, however, that people are still very concerned about their privacy, but are being ignored by the companies running these social networks, who can sometimes make a profit off of sharing someone's personal information. There is also a disconnect between social media user's words and their actions. Studies suggest that surveys show that people want to keep their lives private, but their actions on social media suggest otherwise. Everyone leaves a trail when they use social media. Every time someone creates a new social media account, they provide personal information that can include their name, birthdate, geographic location, and personal interests. In addition, companies collect data on user behaviors. All of this data is stored and leveraged by companies to better target advertising to their users.

Another factor is ignorance of how accessible social media posts are. Some social media users who have been criticized for inappropriate comments stated that they did not realize that anyone outside their circle of friends would read their posts; in fact, on some social media sites, unless a user selects higher privacy settings, their content is shared with a wide audience.

According to a 2016 article diving into the topic of sharing privately and the effect social media has on expectations of privacy, "1.18 billion people will log into their Facebook accounts, 500 million tweets will be sent, and there will be 95 million photos and videos posted on Instagram" in a day. Much of the privacy concerns individuals face stem from their own posts on a form of a social network. Users have the choice to share voluntarily and have been ingrained into society as routine and normative. Social media are a snapshot of our lives; a community we have created on the behaviors of sharing, posting, liking, and communicating. Sharing has become a phenomenon which social media and networks have uprooted and introduced to the world. The idea of privacy is redundant; once something is posted, its accessibility remains constant even if we select who is potentially able to view it. People desire privacy in some shape or form, yet also contribute to social media, which makes it difficult to maintain privacy. Mills offers options for reform which include copyright and the application of the law of confidence; more radically, a change to the concept of privacy itself.

According to the wall street journal published on February 17, 2019, According to UK law, Facebook did not protect certain aspects of the user data.

The US government announced banning TikTok and WeChat from the States over national security concerns. The shutdown was announced for September 20, 2020. Access to TikTok was extended till 12 November 2020, and a federal court ruling on October 30, 2020, has blocked further implementation of restrictions that would lead to TikTok's shutdown.

The commercial development of social media has been criticized as the actions of consumers in these settings have become increasingly value-creating, for example when consumers contribute to the marketing and branding of specific products by posting positive reviews. As such, value-creating activities also increase the value of a specific product, which could, according to marketing professors Bernad Cova and Daniele Dalli (2009), lead to what they refer to as "double exploitation." Companies are getting consumers to create content for the companies' websites for which the consumers are not paid.

As social media usage has become increasingly widespread, social media has to a large extent come to be subjected to commercialization by marketing companies and advertising agencies. In 2014 Christofer Laurell, a digital marketing researcher, suggested that the social media landscape currently consists of three types of places because of this development: consumer-dominated places, professionally dominated places and places undergoing commercialization. As social media becomes commercialized, this process has been shown to create novel forms of value networks stretching between consumer and producer in which a combination of personal, private and commercial contents are created.

As one of the biggest preoccupations among adolescents is social media usage, in 2011 researchers began using the term "Facebook addiction disorder" (F.A.D.), a form of internet addiction disorder. FAD is characterized by compulsive use of the social networking site Facebook, which generally results in physical or psychological complications. The disorder, although not classified in the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) or by the World Health Organization, has been the subject of several studies focusing on the negative effects of social media use on the psyche. One German study published in 2017 investigated a correlation between extensive use of the social networking site and narcissism; the results were published in the journal . According to the findings: "FAD was significantly positively related to the personality trait [of] narcissism and to negative mental health variables ( depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms)."

While these issues regarding social media addiction are continuous and increasing, there are ways to help reduce and curb one's social media obsessions. Turning off social media notifications (temporary or long-term) is one solution that can reduce social media addiction by reducing distraction, for those who struggle with the habit of constantly "refreshing" social media platforms and checking for new notifications.

Some feel that modern problems require modern solutions, so we are starting to see modern approaches like that of Dr. Alok Kanojia (a psychiatrist known online as Dr. K) who runs not only a coaching program but also YouTube and Twitch channels called HealthyGamerGG, where he talks about mental health and gaming, and conducts interviews.

Having social media in the classroom was a controversial topic in the 2010s. Many parents and educators have been fearful of the repercussions of having social media in the classroom. There are concerns that social media tools can be misused for cyberbullying or sharing inappropriate content. As result, cell phones have been banned from some classrooms, and some schools have blocked many popular social media websites. Many schools have realized that they need to loosen restrictions, teach digital citizenship skills, and even incorporate these tools into classrooms. Some schools permit students to use smartphones or tablet computers in class, as long as the students are using these devices for academic purposes, such as doing research. Using Facebook in class allows for the integration of multimodal content such as student-created photographs and video and URLs to other texts, in a platform that many students are already familiar with. Twitter can be used to enhance communication building and critical thinking and it provides students with an informal " back channel", and extend discussion outside of class time.

Censorship by governments

Social media often features in political struggles to control public perception and online activity. In some countries, Internet police or secret police monitor or control citizens' use of social media. For example, in 2013 some social media was banned in Turkey after the Taksim Gezi Park protests. Both Twitter and YouTube were temporarily suspended in the country by a court's decision. A new law, passed by Turkish Parliament, has granted immunity to Telecommunications Directorate (TİB) personnel. The TİB was also given the authority to block access to specific websites without the need for a court order. Yet TİB's 2014 blocking of Twitter was ruled by the constitutional court to violate free speech. More recently, in the 2014 Thai coup d'état, the public was explicitly instructed not to 'share' or 'like' dissenting views on social media or face prison. In July of that same year, in response to WikiLeaks' release of a secret suppression order made by the Victorian Supreme Court, media lawyers were quoted in the Australian media to the effect that "anyone who tweets a link to the WikiLeaks report, posts it on Facebook, or shares it in any way online could also face charges". On 27 July 2020, in Egypt, two women were sentenced to two years of imprisonment for posting TikTok videos, which the government claims are "violating family values".

Mastodon, GNU social, Diaspora, Friendica and other compatible software packages operate as a loose federation of mostly volunteer-operated servers, called the Fediverse, which connect with each other through the open source protocol ActivityPub. In early 2019, Mastodon successfully blocked the spread of violent right-wing extremism when the Twitter alternative Gab tried to associate with Mastodon, and their independent servers quickly contained its dissemination.

In December 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made a similar suggestion, stating that efforts would be taken to achieve an "open and decentralized standard for social media". Rather than " deplatforming", such standards would allow a more scalable, and customizable approach to content moderation and censorship, and involve a number of companies, in the way that e-mail servers work.

Deplatforming is a form of Internet censorship in which controversial speakers or speech are suspended, banned, or otherwise shut down by social media platforms and other service providers that normally provide a venue for free expression. These kinds of actions are similar to alternative dispute resolution. As early as 2015, platforms such as Reddit began to enforce selective bans based, for example, on terms of service that prohibit " hate speech". According to technology journalist Declan McCullagh, "Silicon Valley' s efforts to pull the plug on dissenting opinions" have included, as of 2018, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube "devising excuses to suspend ideologically disfavored accounts".

Law professor Glenn Reynolds dubbed 2018 the "Year of Deplatforming", in an August 2018 article in The Wall Street Journal. According to Reynolds, in 2018, "the internet giants decided to slam the gates on a number of people and ideas they don't like. If you rely on someone else's platform to express unpopular ideas, especially ideas on the right, you're now at risk." Reynolds cited Alex Jones, Gavin McInnes and Dennis Prager as prominent 2018 victims of deplatforming based on their political views, noting, "Extremists and controversialists on the left have been relatively safe from deplatforming."

Most people see social media platforms as censoring objectionable political views.

According to Danah Boyd (2011), the media plays a large role in shaping people's perceptions of specific social networking services. When looking at the site MySpace, after adults started to realize how popular the site was becoming with teens, news media became heavily concerned with teen participation and the potential dangers they faced using the site. As a result, teens avoided joining the site because of the associated risks (e.g. child predators and lack of control), and parents began to publicly denounce the site. Ultimately, the site was labeled as dangerous, and many were detracted from interacting with the site.

As Boyd also describes, when Facebook initially launched in 2004, it solely targeted college students and access was intentionally limited. Facebook started as a Harvard-only social networking service before expanding to all other Ivy League schools. It then made its way to other top universities and ultimately to a wider range of schools. Because of its origins, some saw Facebook as an "elite" social networking service. While it was very open and accepting to some, it seemed to outlaw and shun out most others who didn't fit that "elite" categorization. These narratives propagated by the media influenced the large movement of teenage users from one social networking service to another.

According to LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (2018) by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, the use of effective social media marketing techniques is not only limited to celebrities, corporations, and governments, but also extremist groups to carry out political objectives based on extremist ideologies. The use of social media by ISIS and Al-Qaeda has been used primarily to influence operations in areas of operation and gain the attention of sympathizers of extremist ideologies. Social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and various encrypted-messaging applications have been used to increase the recruiting of members into these extremist groups, both locally and internationally. Larger platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and various others have received backlash for allowing this type of content on their platform (see Use of social media by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). The use of social media to further extremist objectives is not only limited to Islamic terrorism, but also extreme nationalist groups across the world, and more prominently, right wing extremist groups based out of the United States.

As many of the traditional social media platforms banned hate speech (see Online hate speech), several platforms have become popular among right-wing extremists to carry out planning and communication of thoughts and organized events; these application became known as " Alt-tech". Platforms such as Telegram, Parler, and Gab were used during the 2021 storming of the US Capitol in Washington, D.C. The use of this social media was used to coordinate attacks on the Capitol. Several members within these groups shared tips on how to avoid law enforcement and what their plans were with regards to carrying out their objectives; some users called for killings of law enforcement and politicians.

If a user has died, the company will work with an immediate family member to deactivate the account. Additionally, Twitter will not give the account to any person(s), regardless of the relationship.

Facebook

The company added a new setting last year[when? ] that gives users the option of having their account permanently deleted when one dies. There is also an option for 'legacy contact' which means that the Facebook user can have a family and/or friend take over the account once the person has died. The 'legacy contact' option is under the security tab at the bottom of the page.

There are two options for people who have died. Similar to Facebook, the user can have the account memorialized with proof of death. The other option is to have the account deleted.

A family member can request that the account be shut down. The family member must provide the URL to the account, proof of relationship, the account user's email address, date of death, a link to the obituary, and the name of the last company the deceased worked for.

Pinterest

To delete the account of someone who has died, one must email the company with the URL of the account. One must also provide a death certificate and/or provide a link to the obituary as well as proof of relationship to the deceased.

YouTube provides three capabilities for a deceased user's account: (1) they can close the account, (2) they can transfer payments from the account to an immediate family member and legal representative of the user's estate, and (3) they can provide the data in the account to a family member. All three capabilities require (1) the requestor's government-issued ID or driver's license, (2) the decedent's death certificate, and (3) additional supporting documentation.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Social media are interactive technologies and digital channels that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of social media arise due to the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some common features: Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.

# data[].attributes.body
Social media negatively affects humanity
- negative effects on an individual
+addiction
+self image
+mental health
- negative effects on society
+political polarisation
+hate speech
- negative effects on humanity
+manipulation techniques

# data[].attributes.body
Potential points of discussion:

·       Racism

·       Homophobia

·       Misogynism

·       Capitalism

·       Immigrants

·       Disabled people

·       Anglophone bias

# data[].attributes.body
- Strategies of radical groups for spreading misinformation
- (Closed groups – united narrative – repeated phrases)

- Is freedom of speech good?
- (Discussing radical ideas, the appearance of misinformation)

-Social media is driving society apart
- (Political polarisation)