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Jacqueline Escobar

Lamarr Green

ENGL-1314-0006

15 April 2020

Social Media

The use of social media and its importance has grown in our society. We spend the

majority of our time on our phones checking and posting on our social media. According to Matt

Friedman and his colleagues in their 2019 article published on We Are Social, “More than 4.5

billion people now use the internet, while social media users have passed the 3.8 billion mark.

Nearly 60 percent of the world’s population is already online, and the latest trends suggest that

more than half of the world’s total population will use social media by the middle of this year.”

In addition, the amount of social media sites have grown. For example we have Facebook,

WhatsApp, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and so on. Hello fellow peers, I hope everyone is doing

great under the circumstances and staying safe, I’m Jacqueline. Escobar and I will argue why

social media is bad for our society because it threatens our privacy and is addicting.

By participating in the trend of posting on social platforms, we are putting our safety and

privacy at risk for a couple of likes. According to Lee Humphreys and his colleagues in their

2010 article written on the Conference of International Communication Association, “The rise of

social media more broadly brings about many issues with regards to privacy and surveillance.”

In addition, social media threatens our privacy because anyone can get a hold of our private

information from our social media sites such as our phone numbers, locations, address, email

address, social security numbers, and so on. Everything you post on the internet is permanent and

can be held against you even if you delete it.

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Adolescents experience a sense of anxiety and stress when they are not able to access

their social media accounts because they have a fear of missing out. According to David

Blackwell and his colleagues in their 2017 article published on Personality and Individual

Differences, “Social media use is prevalent in today's society and has contributed to problems

with social media addiction.” Social media is addicting because people are obsessed with

posting, commenting, and the amount of followers and likes they get.
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Work Cited

Blackwell, David, et al. “Extraversion, Neuroticism, Attachment Style and Fear of Missing Out

As Predictors of Social Media Use and Addiction.” Personality and Individual

Differences, vol. 116, 2017, pp. 69–72.

Friedman, Matt, et al. “Digital 2020: 3.8 Billion People Use Social Media.” We Are Social, 4

Feb. 2020, wearesocial.com/blog/2020/01/digital-2020-3-8-billion-people-use-social-

media.

Humphreys, Lee. “How Much Is Too Much? Privacy Issues on Twitter.” Conference of

International Communication Association, Singapore, June 2010,

www.academia.edu/458376/How_Much_is_Too_Much_Privacy_Issues_on_Twitter.