Animeleague

Have you ever made friends on social media? Can it really be dangerous? How do you feel about social media - is it evil or the opposite?

I don't trust any platforms at all, I even deleted my Facebook not so long ago, seriously finally I have peace of mind...

Discord might get banned in most countries soon.
Apparently a high level of predators are using it to
bait and groom people.

trust nothing

It is all about internet safety at the end of the day. What I find scary and I'm not blaming parents here, but they need to know what their child is doing on social media.


The amount of kids who go "TikTok was an app made for kids" ummm no it wasn't. Otherwise why is there an age restriction? Parents need to have more control over internet time as you can look up anything or do anything and get into serious trouble.

Social media, in my view, has to be one of the worst things that has happened to society in decades. The irony is that it really did not have to be this way..

I could list off the negatives it's caused to the world, but a few highlights -

- Facebook in particular, but other social media sites also, deliberately via algorithms mainly show what the person already thinks and believes in. This has caused politics and social norms to become increasingly extreme as people only see their own echo-chambers of people who already agree with them. Being in groups where you're arguments are challenged is absolutely vital in a democracy.
- Too much power has been handed in the hands of too few at the social media and tech firms due to networking effects meaning that people will always flock to a very small number of platforms. This makes it more like a utility, which means it should come under a lot of regulation (similar to how water, electric and phone companies are heavily regulated in the UK). This is also more dangerous long-term as such powerful firms can begin to distort society itself (we'll likely see this get worse and not better in the future).
- There is no acknowledgment of the value of a user's information and data. Put simply, data is the new currency of this world - this is how the social media companies make such an insane amount of money. When someone registers for a social media site that serves ads, they should effectively compensate the user to a certain sum for their data (ie: basically pay them a % portion of their income to use their site for the data they're harvesting if said user agrees for their data to be used).
- There is little to no regulation of sites like facebook, Tiktok, instagram etc, and I can't see this changing anytime soon. This is dangerous for vulnerable people with mental health conditions and individuals who are of a younger age (as per above).
- (More minor, but maybe not, as we still don't know the long-term repercussions of this one..) It encourages a way of thinking where everyone thinks they are the star of their own show. Everyone nowadays is a "celeb" and has fans and followers (or at the very least only have to read and see people who are their "friends" who can be removed in a click with usually few IRL repercussions). The days where you'd see a genuine community is gone in that regard, replaced by a lot of (quite frankly) selfish people who are more than happy to blame everyone else but themselves when they mess up.

Tldr; social media needs to be fully regulated by the government and treated as you would treat a national utility. In fact this may need to go further, with some companies such as meta broken up (ie: split them back to facebook, instragram and whatsapp respectively - these takeovers should NEVER have been allowed to begin with). There needs to be more responsibility taken by the platforms for what is said (similar to how on these forums you can't get away with bullying for example) and also what is SHOWN to avoid echo chambers - if need be establish independent bodies that monitor and enforce this (said bodies paid for by a digital tax on the company), and there needs to be some monetary value put on your own data and enshrined into law which the company would also be oblidged to pay you for. Social media algorithms that dictate who is shown what (both ads and non-ads) should also be given to the regulator so they can monitor and check in detail what they're actually doing. Any attempts to deceive or misinform the regulators with nothing but the absolute and full truth should be treated the same way as finance with a criminal prison sentence. The matter of everyone being a "star" of their own show, I am not sure how could be so easily fixed, though it's a more minor issue compared to the rest.

This would begin to fix *some* of the issues. Social media companies make insane profits - similar to how we tax pollution on the planet to fund renewables, we should tax them to mitigate their pollution on society.

This site is probably the most social my media gets. And I don't trust any of you lol

MySpace was actually the first social media platform that I was aware of when I was younger. FB came along years later afterwards. Then you also had other ways. I still remember having Yahoo IM, AOL IM and Hotmail IM. The number of ways for people to contact young individuals back in the day was just as easy as today.
Facebook, Google, Twitter have only added tracking software to the apps they carry making it a heck of a lot easier for scammers
to get away with whatever they want to.

Myspace>Facebook imo

the best part of myspace was that you could autoplay flash files on it so i played this on a friend's page:

My favorite was copying/pasting codes. It gave the impression that I knew html. Lol

I trust social media as much as I trust the government. I would never trust anything that I do not have control over myself. I'm more trusting of social technology that is ran by a smaller network of people, like local instances of chat rooms and servers.

i avoid social media as much as possible; i have no facebook profile, i don't use apps like instagram and i don't advertise myself as it leaves me open to potential trolls or whatever... maybe i'm just paranoid, but facebook is clearly f**ked, especially as it follows what you search on google as after you've searched for something specific, advertisements appear on facebook which are relevant to what you were looking for (if that makes sense) T__T

Made many friends from social media. Do I trust the companies behind social media though? Fuck no.