Instagram? Facebook? Twitter? U name it, Social media in this day and age is like an addiction to everyone from young kids to old people. Everyone is hung up in their virtual world. Social media refers to the apps and websites that people use to share their ideas, views, thoughts, feelings etc. on a virtual network. There are millions of people using social media on daily basis and little do they know it’s becoming an addiction that’s slowly ruining their lives. Social media apps like Facebook were at first solely created for the purpose of communication between a small group of people. People were drawn to the idea of being able to talk to their families and friends that are living across the world just with the small-medium of internet and as time passed by many other social media apps started getting popular such as Instagram, where u could different kinds of pictures and Twitter, where u could share your thoughts and ideas.
To be honest social media has a lot of good sides but as we know “every coin has two sides”, It has a lot of bad sides too. Social media nowadays has become an escape from reality to the teenagers, they literally spend hours and hours of their time browsing through social media, talking to people on the internet across the world and sharing their feelings but in their real life they don’t have any friends and their studies and relationship with their family are getting ruined but they are too busy living their lives in the virtual world.
Social media has also been the primal hub for spreading false information all over the world in a short span of time because all it takes is one share from a single person and people start sharing one by one and soon its trending on Twitter and everyone in the world is talking about it but no one is certain if the information is true or not. One such incident is the “Pizza Gate” incident where various people across the internet spread the false news of “Bill and Hillary Clinton was reported to be using a Pizza restaurant as a front for a paedophile sex ring”. (Valencia College)It had caused a lot of trouble for the accused but it died down as it was revealed that it was false news.
“Online bullying” and “Cancel culture” can be considered as another aspect of bad sides of the internet. Online bullying is the act of bullying someone over the internet by sending them to mean comments or downgrading them and trolling them using their pictures without their permission. And accordingly, Cancel culture refers to pointing at someone’s mistake online and shaming them for it without any certain evidence and ruining their careers and future. Celebrities or even normal people get cancelled by people over the internet over silliest things that they did years ago and they can’t even defend themselves due to the overwhelming pressure from all those people.
Internet and social media can be ruthless sometimes and it can completely consume us before we even know it but if we are careful and can find a balance between social media and our daily lives it can help us grow as a person as we would be able to keep up the trend and learn Different new things from social media or make new friends whilst keeping balance in real life by maintaining a relationship with people around us and not getting too detached from the world, we live in.
