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_______Social Media has evolved over the years from MySpace and MS Messenger where the people using it were predominantly teens in first-world countries to Facebook being one of the apps automatically downloaded on your smartphone. Everyone around the world uses these apps to be able to communicate with those around them. In recent years many people from nations like Lithuania and Kenya will show their daily lives on places like TikTok and as short-form video content is the form of content that most people consume it brings in the downside of missing context, lacking information, and straight-up lies. The most popular apps of social media have their pros and cons in communication. Twitter is solely messaging what you are thinking and even with a word count millions of people use it to share their days, Instagram and Facebook are for sharing photos and sometimes short videos of your life, while TikTok is only for short-form video content this doesn’t negate the fact that these platforms are used for harmful forms of communication, cyberbullying has increased the suicide rate and thousands of people are being harmfully misinformed every day because they believe what has been lied out right in front of them. The fact of the matter is that Social Media is ultimately more harmful than it is good.
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_______The term seeing is believing is something that has had many people up in arms about for hundreds of years. A good portion of people believes that but once you travel onto social media sites such as forums on places like Reddit or Q-Anon you can fall into a place where you see things that are very much not real but prefaced to make you believe they are. The best example of this is the infamous case of the slenderman stabbings, two girls had learned of a fictional creature made up on Reddit that had spilled from the internet into their daily lives, and this obsession over this fictional creature led them to stab one of their best friends so that they could become his proxy. Both girls were barely teens only twelve years old at the time that they went on to commit this horrific attack, thankfully their friend survived this and both girls were sent to prison but this is just one of many examples of how even if the information is false or carried to be A.R.G it can affect people who believe it to be real.
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_______Misinformation has always been prevalent on every social media platform but in the wake of a worldwide pandemic and a president with a cult-like following this misinformation can cause people to lose their lives. When the world shut down the president at the time whether because he truly believed it or he simply did not want to share the truth stated that this pandemic was no more than a cold. This man over the years of his presidency had grown a following of people that can only be compared to a cult that believed him and while yes the bacteria of Covid-19 was in the same family as the cold it was a new strand that we were wholly unprepared to treat let alone cure. He continued to share the majority of his thoughts on this on Twitter which ultimately climaxed during the 2020 election as he and FoxNews, a major supporter of his, used their platforms to not only convince the people that the election was fraudulent but that this man, who in his first election in 2016 won only by the electoral college as the popular vote was against him, was still the president even after losing. This constant badgering about the election led to the January 5th storming of the capital where police looked rather complicit in letting these people go in especially when compared to brutal force against BLM protests earlier that year.
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_______With this being said, social media in general isn’t too bad. Sure Reddit and Twitter are cesspools of waste where the scum of the earth live to share their opinions that can and have led to the deaths of thousands of people, but you can communicate with your favorite creators with the click of a button, share your innermost thoughts, even if those thoughts are that you like kids as multiple grown adults proudly advertise it in their Twitter bio. Instagram is great too it takes over the place Tumblr used to hold where you share your cute vacation pictures and how good you look in a bikini to your hundreds of followers who are typically teen girls feeding into their eating disorders and self-hatred as they try to make themselves took the same way while blissfully unaware of the vast amount of photoshop the creator used to cover up their own insecurities. Facebook is pretty good, the majority of the people some grandparents share wholesome pictures while the caption drips with poorly aged opinions and blatant racism. Social Media as a whole is a form of communication with poor management that only feeds into the delusions of the masses, you can communicate with people like you but if someone isn't like you they will make sure you know their opinions, posting things regardless of if it is real or fake you will hate and no one who is on any social media platform can avoid seeing it, this intake of information does not just go past people it feeds into their perception of the world around them and desensitizes them to what reality is like.
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