social media
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What is social media?
Social media includes platforms and technologies that allow people to communicate in one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many exchanges. Social media allows people to simultaneously create, distribute, and consume content.
Social media helps people maintain connections across different geographic locations and can create new communities, offer social support, and reduce barriers to creating friendships. Social media also allows activists to fundraise, partner with influencers, promote events, and spread awareness of issues, which has fueled political protests.
However, social media also poses risks, such as digital addiction, cyberbullying, and privacy concerns. Social media companies harvest sensitive data that can be used to influence opinions, spread misinformation, and discriminate against vulnerable people.
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What are some popular social media platforms?
Social media platforms enable users to share content, ideas, personal messages, and other information over the internet. They have grown significantly since the early 2000s, evolving from simple online communities to essential tools for communication, marketing, and social change.
Popular platforms include Facebook, with billions of users worldwide, and Instagram, a photo and video sharing service. X (formerly Twitter) is known for its microblogging service, while YouTube is used for sharing videos. Other widely used platforms are TikTok for short videos and LinkedIn for professional networking. Instant messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram facilitate global connections.
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How do people use social media in their daily lives?
Social media has transformed daily life, enabling communication and connection on a scale never seen before. People use platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to connect with friends and family across distances, share experiences, and build communities around shared interests. Social media serves as a vital tool for publicizing events, raising awareness about safety concerns, and recommending local services. During events like the COVID-19 pandemic, social media became a primary source of news, highlighting its role in information dissemination. It allows people to express themselves, build communities, and stay informed, but also presents challenges such as mental health concerns.
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How do social media sites help people connect with others?
Social media platforms enable individuals to connect in various ways. They allow users to maintain and create personal profiles, find others with similar interests, and build communities. Social media also reduces traditional barriers to friendships and allows people to share aspects of their lives with friends and family, and obtain support from online communities. These platforms allow for sharing information, ideas, and personal messages. Social media provides connections to career networking, advice, and global project collaboration. Overall, social media helps people connect by creating communities, removing barriers, and providing support.
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How does social media spread news and information?
Social media platforms have amplified the speed and reach of news and information dissemination. Unlike traditional media, social platforms allow anyone with a device to spread news, regardless of source credibility.
However, this hyper-connected environment can make it difficult to verify information, contributing to the spread of misinformation. Social media algorithms and echo chambers can further exacerbate the problem by prioritizing engagement over accuracy, and by creating filter bubbles where users are primarily exposed to information confirming existing beliefs. This can lead to the rapid spread of dangerous fads and inaccurate information, with severe consequences for public health and safety.
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What are some benefits and risks of using social media?
Social media offers numerous benefits, such as promoting community and enabling connections with friends and family across geographical boundaries. It provides access to supportive networks, especially beneficial for those who are isolated or have specific needs. Social media also serves as a vital tool for publicizing events and safety concerns.
However, it poses risks, including increased privacy threats like data mining and malware. Reliance on social media for information, especially concerning mental health, can be inaccurate and misleading. It may also lead to feelings of inadequacy and contribute to mental health issues like depression and anxiety.
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social media, a form of mass media communications on the Internet (such as on websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos). Social networking and social media are overlapping concepts, but social networking is usually understood as users building communities among themselves while social media is more about using social networking sites and related platforms to build an audience.
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The earliest forms of social media appeared almost as soon as technology could support them. E-mail and chat programs debuted in the early 1970s, but persistent communities did not surface until the creation of the discussion group network USENET in 1979. USENET allowed users to post and receive messages within subject areas called newsgroups. USENET and other discussion forums, such as privately hosted bulletin board systems (BBSs), enabled individuals to interact, but each was essentially a closed system. With the release in 1993 of the Mosaic web browser, those systems were joined with an easy-to-use graphical interface. The architecture of the World Wide Web made it possible to navigate from one site to another with a click, and faster Internet connections allowed for more multimedia content than could be found in the text-heavy newsgroups.
The first companies to create social networks based on web technology were Classmates.com and SixDegrees.com. Classmates.com, founded in 1995, used an aggressive pop-up advertising campaign to draw web surfers to its site. It based its social network on the existing connection between members of high-school and college graduating classes, armed service branches, and workplaces. SixDegrees.com was the first true social networking site. It was launched in 1997 with most of the features that would come to characterize such sites: members could create profiles for themselves, maintain lists of friends, and contact one another through the site’s private messaging system. SixDegrees.com claimed to have attracted more than three million users by 2000, but it failed to translate those numbers into revenue and collapsed with countless other dot-coms when the “bubble” burst that year for shares of e-commerce companies.
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Nevertheless, social media sites became popular in the early 21st century. Social networks such as Friendster and MySpace emerged that allowed family members, friends, and acquaintances to connect online. Those two sites were eventually supplanted by Facebook, which became one of the world’s most popular social media sites with billions of users worldwide. Other forms of social media emerged for the sharing of specific types of content. For example, YouTube allows users to share videos, and TikTok is specifically designed for the sharing of short videos. LinkedIn emphasizes a user’s professional connections, where users create pages similar in structure to résumés.
Concerns over the possible negative effects of social media are also growing in tandem with the burgeoning technology. For example, some observers suggest that social media sites spur greater schadenfreude—the emotional experience of pleasure in response to another’s misfortune—perhaps as a result of the dehumanization that occurs when interacting through screens on computers and mobile devices. Some studies also suggest a strong tie between heavy social media use and increased depression, anxiety, loneliness, suicidal tendencies, and feelings of inadequacy. During his second tenure as U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy raised concerns about social media’s impact on children and in 2024 he suggested mandated warning labels on social media sites.