NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA (FACEBOOK)
Mark
Zuckerberg and his associates invented a social application which has
revolutionized the way our human society interact with others across the globe.
In short, Facebook is a gamechanger. My previous article on the advantages of
Facebook argued that it affords online socialization for people from different
nationalities. I addition, the application has been constantly upgraded to
include important functionalities such as audio and video calls, text
messaging, creating groups and pages for advertisement etc.
Simultaneously,
Facebook has also negatively impacted our lives in uncountable ways. Let's quickly glance through some of the
demerits of the social media platform, Facebook.
Our
privacy have been compromised. Hackers have illegally accessed personal
information from millions of users of the application. Confidential information
such as phone numbers, email address, gender, race, date of births, political
affiliation and more have been have been obtained by unethical internet users
through the Facebook application. This was recently revealed to us through the
popular Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal in which data of millions of users were illegally accessed and used for political agenda.
In
other ways, Facebook has been used by fraudsters to dupe innocent victims.
Creating an account on the Facebook platform is very easy. Therefore, bad
people intentionally register fake accounts to transact malicious businesses.
Of late, there are a lot of fake religious personalities on Facebook. These fake
Pastors, fake Mallams and fake Fetish Priests claim to have special healing
powers and money-giving powers.
They
convincingly defraud their patrons by securing huge sums of money from them
without an ability to offer their so-called spiritual and ritual services. It
is rather unfortunate that the Facebook management team haven't yet developed
intelligent systems to correctly identify and terminate or deactivate the
millions of these fake accounts. The nefarious activities of these charlatans
are irritating. They keep spamming people with deceptive advertisements and
repetitive friend requests. I can't even count the number of suspicious friend
requests I have received and deleted from my Facebook account. Something must
be done to curb the adulteration of this useful platform.
Consequently,
an unfair obligation of fact-checking and proofreading have therefore been
placed on users or consumers of information on Facebook. It is very easy to be misled
by false information on Facebook. For example, death rumors of many living
celebrities have been falsely spread on Facebook. Unqualified or incompetent
academicians have also been misleading their followers on Facebook with
inaccurate information. Amateur doctors, engineers, artistes and scientists
have taught wrongful content to their followers.
Aside
the proliferation of falsehood, subscribers of Facebook would also agree that
the application has wasted a lot of productive hours. Uncontrolled or addictive
usage of Facebook robs users of their precious time. Students who frequently
visit the Facebook website to the neglect of their studies witness depreciation
in their academic results. One can foresee without much uncertainty that, the
social media addiction comfortably eats it way into workers in companies and
organizations. Some workers go online to Facebook while at their workplaces. This
reduces the productivity of the companies/organizations that they work in.
The
most bothering issue about using Facebook is the amount of economic resources
that are wasted on the platform. Even though, Facebook is a free application,
it needs internet data or credit before it can function. Constantly buying
airtime or data could be very expensive. It’s easy for Facebook addicts to easily
go broke. The application consumes a lot of data due to the uploading and downloading
of images and videos. Personally, I want to confess to you that I had to delete
the Facebook app I installed from Google Play store. The reason is that; it was
very uneconomical for me. Since I switched to using the in-built browsers on my
device, I noticed a significant decrease in my expenditure on Facebook.
In
conclusion, I would say that Facebook addiction isn't bad, provided the users gain
knowledge, money and other rewarding skills. Good addicts to Facebook use the
app to make money or advertise their businesses. I respect people who engineer
ways to derive benefits out of Facebook. Bad users waste their time meaninglessly
on Facebook. Wicked users utilize Facebook to scam innocent victims. However,
we all have choices. The future of Facebook depends on all of us; so let us use
it wisely.
Thank
you.
HAS FACEBOOK AFFECTED YOU IN ANY WAY?
PLEASE LEAVE COMMENTS BELOW.
Writer:
Robert Abalungo (Bob Bright)
BSc.
Physics, KNUST
Find
me on Facebook.com/RobertBobBright
Follow
me on Twitter @Robert_Abalungo
Call
or WhatsApp me: +233549086173
Send
me a mail: robaba73@gmail.com
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