Why Is Social Media Being Unsafe

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Social Media Being Unsafe Social media is starting to become a global addiction. Since 2010, the amount of social media users has increased from 0.97 billion people to 2.22 billion people (Statista 2016), and that number is expected to keep rising. The first social media website was called “six degrees”, it was a blogging site that was created in 1997. Ever since then, there have been many websites that help us communicate with others. Currently in 2016, there are over 200 social media sites that are still open to the public. However, the most popular ones are Facebook and Youtube with over a billion users each, and research proves that the average amount of time spent on social media is 3.2 hours and some teenagers even use it for a whopping …show more content…

than playing outside with their friends or family. Even though, there are a lot of people who use social media and also go outside, the time being spent on social media deducts the time being spent playing outside. Research proves that some teens spend less than an hour outside compared to the 2-3 hours spent on social media per day (Clare 2009). Also, when someone is outside, they usually take a lot of pictures or selfies (when a person takes photos of themselves using the front camera of a phone) and they post it on Snapchat, Twitter or Instagram. Adding on to this, since people spend more time on social media compared to playing outside, it can ruin people's relationship with each other. For example: when two friends are hanging out, instead of talking to one another they will probably be on their friends talking to other people. Last of all, since people are on social media for a long time, it can affect a person's mental health. Research states that the more time on social media can cause emotional suppression, lack of attention span, a decline in intellectual abilities, stress, fatigue, and worst of all an addiction that will be hard to get rid of (Perov 2014). Not only can this affect your mental health it can also affect your health physically. For example: with all that screen time you can ruin your …show more content…

Also, people (usually teenagers) end up posting things that reveal too much about them exposing them to child predators and etc. What we mean by “there is more treats on the internet” is that since the amount of internet users is rising, meaning that there are more people around the world using social media and not everyone will be a genuine person, who is nice to everyone and respects everyone's privacy, there will be people with fake personalities and accounts. These fake accounts can be made by anyone who has access to the internet. It can be used to act like a different gender or different age,so he/she can appeal to a specific person or a group of people. These fake accounts can also be used to get private information from someone else like their phone number, address, email and more. For example: the most common situation is when a boy tries to appeal to a girl. The boy will make a fake account with a pretended name, false age, and a picture off of Google for their profile picture, just so the girl will talk to the boy. When a teen exposes her/himself on their social media, this can result in treats such as child predators, hackers, spam mail, viruses, spyware etc (Tray 2012). When a teen posts a picture that reveals to much of their body, it will get a lot of attention from your friends. But, not only does your

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