How can something that 1.7 billion people use daily be a negative effect on them? Created by Harvard Student Mark Zuckerberg in 2003, Facebook is the most used social media site on the internet. In 2005 Facebook revealed a new feature unknown to other websites, the ability to upload and tag photos and news feed which then allowed the site to overtake MySpace as the biggest social media site. But even a site like Facebook can have its downfalls. Facebook has an overall negative effect on our society because of its effect on relationships and mental health and its threat on privacy and predators.
To begin with, Facebook shows a negative impact on the mental health and relationships of many people. For example, “20% of couples in relationships said that the internet has impacted their relationships in negative ways.” (Harmon). Facebook gives you the ability to connect with people from your past. This can mean that a conversation between a past couple can go from innocent to something more and can create distrust in their present relationship. Next, this article states that 4% of teens between the ages of 13-17 said that social media had some sort of negative affect on their friendships, 3% said they felt more introverted because of social media, and 5% said that they felt less outgoing (Harmon). This fact demonstrates that many teens struggle with mental health issues caused by Facebook and other social media sites. Social media dependence is also linked to “poor emotion regulation, impulsivity, alcohol abuse, and internet addiction” as well as attention seeking behaviors (Viola). This goes further to prove that social media has negative effect on the mental health of many individuals including teenagers. Therefore, Facebook can create a negative effect of on the mental health and on the relationships on many people.
Next, there is the danger of predators. Because many people like to make posts about themselves on Facebook and this then puts lots of information about them on the internet where anyone can get access to it (Acohido). Because of this, things like people’s names, schools, residency gets shared with billions of people from all over the world. Secondly, the “CyberTipline, the nation’s hotline for reporting sexual exploitation of children, received 223,374 reports in 2010, nearly double the 2009 number.” (Acohido). This statistic shows that as the usage of the internet increased the amount of children being exploited increased by a significant amount and this number is only going to continue increasing if something isn’t done about it. Lastly, “Facebook ads may contain malware” (“Five Hidden Danger of Facebook”). While one might not think of predators as being inanimate things it’s quite possible. Malware though is a good example of this. Malware can contain things such as viruses and other dangerous installments that can enter the hard drive of the computer and completely destroy it, wipe everything off of it, and it can steal login information that it can share with other parties. So, the second threat Facebook creates is that of predators.
Lastly, Facebook also threatens the privacy of its users. Whenever someone goes on Facebook sometimes there are websites with things like quizzes and interesting articles but Facebook shares information about the users profile with these third parties (“Five Hidden Danger of Facebook”). These third parties now have important information such as names, email addresses, and family information. These things can be used by third parties to do things you are unaware of. Next, Facebook uses geotagging (Acohido). Geotagging is when a picture is tagged with the location it was shot at. This can become a problem if the picture is taken at home or at school because now millions of people have access to home addresses and such. When Facebook updates, its “privacy settings are reverted to a less safe defeault mode”, where anyone can view a profile that was previously private. (“Five Hidden Dangers of Facebook”) Because of this someone can think that they are somewhat safe and they might post where they are or what they’re doing that night giving and someone they don’t know can have that info about them. To summarize, Facebook is lacking on good privacy control and this can be seen as a huge threat to many of its users.