In little more than a decade, the impact of social media has gone from being an entertaining extra to a fully integrated part of nearly every aspect of daily life for many.
Recently in the realm of commerce, Facebook faced skepticism in its testimony to the Senate Banking Committee on Libra, its proposed cryptocurrency and alternative financial system. In politics, heartthrob Justin Bieber tweeted the President of the United States, imploring him to “let those kids out of cages.” In law enforcement, the Philadelphia police department moved to terminate more than a dozen police officers after their racist comments on social media were revealed.
And in the ultimate meshing of the digital and physical worlds, Elon Musk raised the specter of essentially removing the space between social and media through the invention — at some future time — of a brain implant that connects human tissue to computer chips.
All this, in the span of about a week.
As quickly as social media has insinuated itself into politics, the workplace, home life and elsewhere, it continues to evolve at lightning speed, making it tricky to predict which way it will morph next. It’s hard to recall now, but SixDegrees.com, Friendster and Makeoutclub.com were each once the next big thing, while one survivor has continued to grow in astonishing ways. In 2006, Facebook had 7.3 million registered users and reportedly turned down a $750 million buyout offer. In the first quarter of 2019, the company could claim 2.38 billion active users, with a market capitalization hovering around half a trillion dollars.
“In 2007 I argued that Facebook might not be around in 15 years. I’m clearly wrong, but it is interesting to see how things have changed,” says Jonah Berger, Wharton marketing professor and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On. The challenge going forward is not just having the best features, but staying relevant, he says. “Social media isn’t a utility. It’s not like power or water where all people care about is whether it works. Young people care about what using one platform or another says about them. It’s not cool to use the same site as your parents and grandparents, so they’re always looking for the hot new thing.”
Just a dozen years ago, everyone was talking about a different set of social networking services, “and I don’t think anyone quite expected Facebook to become so huge and so dominant,” says Kevin Werbach, Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics. “At that point, this was an interesting discussion about tech start-ups.
“Today, Facebook is one of the most valuable companies on earth and front and center in a whole range of public policy debates, so the scope of issues we’re thinking about with social media are broader than then,” Werbach adds.
Cambridge Analytica, the impact of social media on the last presidential election and other issues may have eroded public trust, Werbach said, but “social media has become really fundamental to the way that billions of people get information about the world and connect with each other, which raises the stakes enormously.”
Just Say No
“Facebook is dangerous,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) at July’s hearing of the Senate Banking Committee. “Facebook has said, ‘just trust us.’ And every time Americans trust you, they seem to get burned.”
Social media has plenty of detractors, but by and large, do Americans agree with Brown’s sentiment? In 2018, 42% of those surveyed in a Pew Research Center survey said they had taken a break from checking the platform for a period of several weeks or more, while 26% said they had deleted the Facebook app from their cellphone.
A year later, though, despite the reputational beating social media had taken, the 2019 iteration of the same Pew survey found social media use unchanged from 2018.
Facebook has its critics, says Wharton marketing professor Pinar Yildirim, and they are mainly concerned about two things: mishandling consumer data and poorly managing access to it by third party providers; and the level of disinformation spreading on Facebook.
“Social media isn’t a utility. It’s not like power or water where all people care about is whether it works. Young people care about what using one platform or another says about them.”–Jonah Berger
“The question is, are we at a point where the social media organizations and their activities should be regulated for the benefit of the consumer? I do not think more regulation will necessarily help, but certainly this is what is on the table,” says Yildirim. “In the period leading to the [2020 U.S. presidential] elections, we will hear a range of discussions about regulation on the tech industry.”
Some proposals relate to stricter regulation on collection and use of consumer data, Yildirim adds, noting that the European Union already moved to stricter regulations last year by adopting the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). “A number of companies in the U.S. and around the world adopted the GDPR protocol for all of their customers, not just for the residents of EU,” she says. “We will likely hear more discussions on regulation of such data, and we will likely see stricter regulation of this data.”
The other discussion bound to intensify is around the separation of Big Tech into smaller, easier to regulate units. “Most of us academics do not think that dividing organizations into smaller units is sufficient to improve their compliance with regulation. It also does not necessarily mean they will be less competitive,” says Yildirim. “For instance, in the discussion of Facebook, it is not even clear yet how breaking up the company would work, given that it does not have very clear boundaries between different business units.”
Even if such regulations never come to pass, the discussions “may nevertheless hurt Big Tech financially, given that most companies are publicly traded and it adds to the uncertainty,” Yildirim notes.
One prominent commentator about the negative impact of social media is Jaron Lanier, whose fervent opposition makes itself apparent in the plainspoken title of his 2018 book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. He cites loss of free will, social media’s erosion of the truth and destruction of empathy, its tendency to make people unhappy, and the way in which it is “making politics impossible.” The title of the last chapter: “Social Media Hates Your Soul.”
Lanier is no tech troglodyte. A polymath who bridges the digital and analogue realms, he is a musician and writer, has worked as a scientist for Microsoft, and was co-founder of pioneering virtual reality company VPL Research. The nastiness that online existence brings out in users “turned out to be like crude oil for the social media companies and other behavior manipulation empires that quickly came to dominate the internet, because it fuelled negative behavioral feedback,” he writes.
“Social media has become really fundamental to the way that billions of people get information about the world and connect with each other, which raises the stakes enormously.”–Kevin Werbach
Worse, there is an addictive quality to social media, and that is a big issue, says Berger. “Social media is like a drug, but what makes it particularly addictive is that it is adaptive. It adjusts based on your preferences and behaviors,” he says, “which makes it both more useful and engaging and interesting, and more addictive.”
The effect of that drug on mental health is only beginning to be examined, but a recent University of Pennsylvania study makes the case that limiting use of social media can be a good thing. Researchers looked at a group of 143 Penn undergraduates, using baseline monitoring and randomly assigning each to either a group limiting Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat use to 10 minutes per platform per day, or to one told to use social media as usual for three weeks. The results, published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks in the group limiting use compared to the control group.
However, “both groups showed significant decreases in anxiety and fear of missing out over baseline, suggesting a benefit of increased self-monitoring,” wrote the authors of “No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression.”
Monetizing a League (and a Reality) All Their Own
No one, though, is predicting that social media is a fad that will pass like its analogue antecedent of the 1970s, citizens band radio. It will, however, evolve. The idea of social media as just a way to reconnect with high school friends seems quaint now. The impact of social media today is a big tent, including not only networks like Facebook, but also forums like Reddit and video-sharing platforms.
“The question is, are we at a point where the social media organizations and their activities should be regulated for the benefit of the consumer?”–Pinar Yildirim
Virtual worlds and gaming have become a major part of the sector, too. Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader says gamers are creating their own user-generated content through virtual worlds — and the revenue to go with it. He points to one group of gamers that use Grand Theft Auto as a kind of stage or departure point “to have their own virtual show.” In NoPixel, the Grand Theft Auto roleplaying server, “not much really happens and millions are tuning in to watch them. Just watching, not even participating, and it’s either live-streamed or recorded. And people are making donations to support this thing. The gamers are making hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Now imagine having a 30-person reality show all filmed live and you can take the perspective of one person and then watch it again from another person’s perspective,” he continues. “Along the way, they can have a tip jar or talk about things they endorse. That kind of immersive media starts to build the bridge to what we like to get out of TV, but even better. Those things are on the periphery right now, but I think they are going to take over.”
Big players have noticed the potential of virtual sports and are getting into the act. In a striking example of the physical world imitating the digital one, media companies are putting up real-life stadiums where teams compete in video games. Comcast Spectator in March announced that it is building a new $50 million stadium in South Philadelphia that will be the home of the Philadelphia Fusion, the city’s e-sports team in the Overwatch League.
E-sports is serious business, with revenues globally — including advertising, sponsorships and media rights — expected to reach $1.1 billion in 2019, according to gaming industry analytics company Newzoo.
“E-sports is absolutely here to stay,” says Fader, “and I think it’s a safe bet to say that e-sports will dominate most traditional sports, managing far more revenue and having more impact on our consciousness than baseball.”
It’s no surprise, then, that Facebook has begun making deals to carry e-sports content. In fact, it is diversification like this that may keep Facebook from ending up like its failed upstart peers. One thing that Facebook has managed to do that MySpace, Friendster and others didn’t, is “a very good job of creating functional integration with the value they are delivering, as opposed to being a place to just share photos or send messages, it serves a lot of diversified functions,” says Keith E. Niedermeier, director of Wharton’s undergraduate marketing program and an adjunct professor of marketing. “They are creating groups and group connections, but you see them moving into lots of other services like streaming entertainment, mobile payments, and customer-to-customer buying and selling.”
“[WeChat] has really instantiated itself as a day-to-day tool in China, and it’s clear to me that Facebook would like to emulate that sort of thing.”–Keith Niedermeier
In China, WeChat has become the biggest mobile payment platform in the world and it is the platform for many third-party apps for things like bike sharing and ordering airplane tickets. “It has really instantiated itself as a day-to-day tool in China, and it’s clear to me that Facebook would like to emulate that sort of thing,” says Niedermeier.
Among nascent social media platforms that are particularly promising right now, Yildirim says that “social media platforms which are directed at achieving some objectives with smaller scale and more homogenous people stand a higher chance of entering the market and being able to compete with large, general-purpose platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.”
Irreplaceable – and Damaging?
Of course, many have begun to believe that the biggest challenge around the impact of social media may be the way it is changing society. The “attention-grabbing algorithms underlying social media … propel authoritarian practices that aim to sow confusion, ignorance, prejudice, and chaos, thereby facilitating manipulation and undermining accountability,” writes University of Toronto political science professor Ronald Deibert in a January essay in the Journal of Democracy.
Berger notes that any piece of information can now get attention, whether it is true or false. This means more potential for movements both welcome as well as malevolent. “Before, only media companies had reach, so it was harder for false information to spread. It could happen, but it was slow. Now anyone can share anything, and because people tend to believe what they see, false information can spread just as, if not more easily, than the truth.
“It’s certainly allowed more things to bubble up rather than flow from the top down,” says Berger. Absent gatekeepers, “everyone is their own media company, broadcasting to the particular set of people that follow them. It used to be that a major label signing you was the path to stardom. Now artists can build their own following online and break through that way. Social media has certainly made fame and attention more democratic, though not always in a good way.”
Deibert writes that “in a short period of time, digital technologies have become pervasive and deeply embedded in all that we do. Unwinding them completely is neither possible nor desirable.”
His cri de coeur argues: that citizens have the right to know what companies and governments are doing with their personal data, and that this right be extended internationally to hold autocratic regimes to account; that companies be barred from selling products and services that enable infringements on human rights and harms to civil society; for the creation of independent agencies with real power to hold social-media platforms to account; and the creation and enforcement of strong antitrust laws to end dominance of a very few social-media companies.
“Social media has certainly made fame and attention more democratic, though not always in a good way.”–Jonah Berger
The rising tide of concern is now extending across sectors. The U.S. Justice Department has recently begun an anti-trust investigation into how tech companies operate in social media, search and retail services. In July, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the award of nearly $50 million in new funding to 11 U.S. universities to research how technology is transforming democracy. The foundation is also soliciting additional grant proposals to fund policy and legal research into the “rules, norms and governance” that should be applied to social media and technology companies.
Given all of the reasons not to engage with social media — the privacy issues, the slippery-slope addiction aspect of it, its role in spreading incivility — do we want to try to put the genie back in the bottle? Can we? Does social media definitely have a future?
“Yes, surely it does,” says Yildirim. “Social connections are fabrics of society. Just as the telegraph or telephone as an innovation of communication did not reduce social connectivity, online social networks did not either. If anything, it likely increased connectivity, or reduced the cost of communicating with others.”
It is thanks to online social networks that individuals likely have larger social networks, she says, and while many criticize the fact that we are in touch with large numbers of individuals in a superficial way, these light connections may nevertheless be contributing to our lives when it comes to economic and social outcomes — ranging from finding jobs to meeting new people.
“We are used to being in contact with more individuals, and it is easier to remain in contact with people we only met once. Giving up on this does not seem likely for humans,” she says. “The technology with which we keep in touch may change, may evolve, but we will have social connections and platforms which enable them. Facebook may be gone in 10 years, but there will be something else.”
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Anumakonda Jagadeesh
Excellent.
Social Media has become indispensable.
Timeline
Year Event type Description
1973 Invention Talkomatic is created by Dave Woolley and Douglas Brown at the University of Illinois, as a multi-user chat room application. It is an instant sensation among users in the PLATO System’s online community.
1973 Invention TERM-Talk is created by the staff at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois, as an instant-messaging application enabling any two users on the PLATO system to conduct a live, character-by-character typed conversation on the bottom of the screen of their PLTO terminals. Soon many features would be added to it including “Monitor Mode,” enabling one user in the TERM-talk to share their own screen with the other user, to ask questions or point out something that they’re seeing. Years later this concept would be introduced as “Screen Sharing” or Remote Desktop Software.
1973 Invention PLATO Notes is created by 17-year-old student Dave Woolley at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois, as a conferencing and bulletin board forum system for communicating with the user community. In 1976, Notes expanded to enable any user to create a “notesfile” on any subject. PLATO Notes would serve as the inspiration for Lotus Notes developed by former PLATO users Ray Ozzie, Len Kawell, and Tim Halvorsen.
circa 1980 Milestone Bulletin Board System (BBS) emerges as one of the earliest known forms of social media, and remains popular and under development until the late 1990s.[8]
1984 Invention FidoNet forms as BBSs start to exchange email in North America and later internationally.
1988 Invention IRC rises from the roots of BBS (and was initially intended to extend it), offering a similar service and experience. It has remained in use until this day.
An example of a popular IRC client today is mIRC.
1996 Launch ICQ is released by Israeli company Mirabilis.
1996 Launch Bolt.com was started as the first social networking and video website.
1997 Launch, Milestone Social networking website SixDegrees.com is created, which is said to be the first ever social media website.
1997 Launch AOL Instant Messenger is released.
1998 Launch Open Diary launches the first social blogging network, inventing the reader comment and friends-only content.
1998 Acquisition ICQ is acquired by AOL, and the service is patented.
1999 Acquisition SixDegrees.com is purchased by YouthStream Media Networks for $125 million.
1999 Launch Yahoo! Messenger, another popular instant messaging service, launches.
1999 Launch MSN Messenger (also known as Windows Live Messenger), a popular messaging, video and voice calling service, launches.[
1999 Launch LiveJournal, an early blogging platform and social network launches.
2000 Launch Habbo, a game-based social networking site, launches.
2001 Defunction SixDegrees.com shuts down.
2001 Launch, Invention Windows Messenger is released, and is shipped with Windows XP. This is an integrated version of MSN Messenger.
2002 Launch Social networking and gaming site Friendster launches. The service would be popular in Asia and the Pacific Islands.
2003 Launch Business-oriented social networking service LinkedIn launches.
2003 Launch Social networking website Hi5 launches.
2003 Launch Another business-oriented social networking website, XING, launches. This service is more popular in Europe.
2003 Launch Myspace, one of the most popular social networking sites ever, launches.[20]
2003 Launch Skype, a very popular instant messaging and video/voice calling service (VoIP), launches.
2004 Launch Facebook, the most popular social networking service to-date, launches. It now features a voice and video calling service, as well as a widely used instant messaging service.
2004 Launch Flickr, an image and video hosting website, launches. Many users use Flickr to keep personal photos, and it is also widely used as a platform for hosting images and videos that are later embedded in other websites and services (such as blogs).
2004 Launch Orkut, a social networking website owned by Google, launches.
2004 Launch Tagged, a social discovery website, launches.
2005 Launch Bebo, a social networking website, launches.
2005 Acquisition Myspace is acquired by News Corporation for $580 million.
2005 Launch Qzone, a Chinese social networking website, launches.
2005 Launch Reddit, an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website, launches.
2005 Launch Renren, a Chinese social networking website, launches.
2005 Launch YouTube, a video sharing service, launches.
2005 Acquisition Yahoo! acquires Flickr.
2005 Launch Facebook launches its photos feature with no restrictions on storage (but without the ability to tag friends).
2006 Launch Twitter, one of the most popular social networking sites worldwide, launches. This website was very popular in Brazil and India.
2006 Launch VK (VKontakte), an extremely popular Russian-based social networking service that resembles Facebook, launches. This service is very popular in Europe.
2006 Launch Facebook launches News Feed. The original news feed is an algorithmically generated and constantly refreshing summary of updates about the activities of one’s friends.
2006 Acquisition YouTube is acquired by Google for $1.65 billion
2007 Launch Tumblr, a popular microblogging and social networking website, launches.
2007 Launch FriendFeed, a real-time social media feed aggregator, launches.[37]
2007 Launch Justin.tv, a live-streaming that allowed anyone to broadcast video online, launches.
2008 Acquisition AOL buys Bebo for $850 million.
2009 Acquisition FriendFeed is acquired by Facebook for $15 million in cash, and $32.5 million in stock.
2009 Launch Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging website, launches.
2010 Launch Pinterest, a photo sharing website, launches. This services allows users to submit images or “pins”, then other users can “pin” them on personalized “pinboards”. Users can then comment on each other’s content and interact with it.
2010 Acquisition AOL sells ICQ to Mail.Ru (formerly known as Digital Sky Technologies) for $185 million.
2010 Acquisition Bebo is sold by AOL to Criterion Capital Partners.
2010 Launch Instagram, a photo/video sharing and social media service, launches.
2010 Launch Path, a social networking-enabled photo sharing and messaging service for mobile devices, launches.
2010 Launch Quora, a popular question-and-answer platform, launches.
2011 Launch Snapchat, a photo/video sharing and social media service, launches.[
2011 Acquisition Microsoft acquires Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion.
2011 Launch Google+, a social networking service, launches.
2011 Launch Keek, a video sharing and social media service, launches.
2011 Acquisition Myspace is sold to Specific Media by News Corp. for $35 million.
2011 Launch LinkedIn files for an IPO and trades its first shares under the NYSE symbol “LNKD”, at $45 per share.
2011 Launch Twitch.tv, a live-streaming service that is popular worldwide, launches. This service is a spin-off from Justin.tv, as it is more focused on broadcasting users playing video games.
2011 Launch Twitter overhauls its website to feature the “Fly” design, which the service says is easier for new users to follow and promotes advertising. In addition to the Home tab, the Connect and Discover tabs are introduced along with a redesigned profile and timeline of Tweets.
2012 Milestone, Launch Facebook goes public, negotiating a share price of $38 apiece, valuing the company at $104 billion, the largest valuation to date for a newly listed public company.
2012 Launch Snapchat launches video sharing, allowing users to share 10 second videos.
2012 Launch Tinder, a widely popular dating-oriented social networking service, launches.
2012 Acquisition Facebook acquires Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock.
2013 Launch, acquisition Vine, a widely popular video sharing and social media service, launches shortly after being acquired by Twitter for $30 million.
2013 Launch Twitter files for its IPO, and begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The share closed at US$44.90, giving the company a valuation of around US$31 billion.
2013 Launch Instagram launches video sharing.
2013 Acquisition Bebo is purchased from Criterion Capitol Partners for $1 million by Bebo’s founders.
2013 Launch Instant messaging and video/voice calling service Google Hangouts launches.
2013 Launch * Myspace re-launches, coming out with a re-designed website, and a mobile app.
2014 Defunction Justin.tv shuts downs to focus work on Twitch.tv.
2014 Launch Snapchat launches collaborative timelines based on events.
2014 Acquisition Amazon acquires Twitch.tv for $970 million.
2014 Defunction Orkut is shut down by Google.
2015 Defunction, Milestone Friendster shuts down due to “the evolving landscape in our challenging industry” and lack of engagement by the online community.
2015 Launch Pinterest announces the launch of Buyable Pins, a special type of pin that can be used to make purchases within Pinterest itself. When users select a Buyable Pin, they have the option of choosing the item they wish to buy (for instance, choosing between different dress sizes and colors), and they can then make the purchase within the app using a variety of payment methods, including Apple Pay. Launch partners include Shopify and Demandware. The buyable pins are free to use, and Pinterest does not take a cut of the purchases made. However, Pinterest intends to allow sellers to promote buyable pins just as they can promote other pins.
2015 Launch, acquisition Periscope, a live video sharing app, launches shortly after being acquired by Twitter.[75]
2015 Launch * Bebo re-launches as a messaging app for iOS and Android.
2015 Launch Beme, a short video sharing app, launches. The creators are Casey Neistat and Matt Hackett.
2015 Launch Discord a free instant messaging and video/voice calling service (VoIP) designed for the gaming community, launches
2015 Launch Meerkat, an application similar to Periscope, launches.
2016 Acquisition Microsoft says it will be acquiring LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, and is expected to finalize the deal by the end of 2016.
2016 Acquisition Time Inc. buys Myspace and its parent company.
2016 Defunction, milestone Yahoo discontinues its services for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris clients in early August 2016. It will now only support Yahoo Messenger on Android, iOS, and web clients.
2016 Defunction Vine announced that Twitter would be discontinuing the Vine mobile app, later renamed to “Vine Camera”.
2016 Acquisition CNN acquires Beme, with the terms of acquisition remaining undisclosed.[85]
2017 Milestone Snapchat files for its IPO, and begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The share closed at 24.48, giving the company a valuation of around US$33 billion.
2017 Defunction Beme shuts down on January 31, following its acquisition by CNN in 2016.
2018 Discontinue Yahoo Messenger India shuts down on July 17, 2018, due to poor reception from its users.
2018 Discontinue Path announces the termination of its service on September 17, 2018. Its closure takes place nearly a month later, on October 18, 2018.
2019 Discontinue Google+ is shut down due to low users
(Wikipedia)
Social media is a phrase that we throw around a lot these days, often to describe what we post on sites and apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and others. So you can infer that social media are web-based sites that allow people to interact with each other.
But if we use the term to describe a site like Facebook, and also a site like Digg, plus a site like Wikipedia, and even a site like I Can Has Cheezburger, then it starts to get more confusing.
Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India
Topstik .
It is a little tough to say that social media is Irreplaceable. Social media sites are a part of our daily life. There is a way to connect with friends and families. We can easily explore our online business through social media.
Satya Prakash
I am a web developer designer digital marketer at w3care.com and I would like to share the statistics that in 2.95 billion people using social media in the year 2019 and it is grow up to 3.43 billion in 2023. It means nearly half of the world is connected to the Internet, think what happen if the world wide population will get connect to the Internet.
Cullen Wholey
I agree with the fact that too much of anything is unhealthy. Including social media, which is highly addictive in our society. And I am not afraid to admit it has affected me greatly. Social media has sped up our society’s constant influx of knowledge and our ability to know what is going on around us. This article essentially asks the question as to whether social media could become potentially dangerous for mental health. And asks the question as to whether social media is even a necessity. I believe that many sources of media are not a necessity and are only used to fill a void in our lives however, some sources of media are very useful. Such as smaller messaging apps like Discord or GroupMe that can be used to connect virtually to people with similar interests. Discord helped me connect with my friends over the summer during one of the heaviest waves of the COVID pandemic. It may not be the same as an in-person hangout, but it is far better than nothing at all. I believe there is a balance that one should strive for in their everyday life. A person should make time for what’s important like, work, family, friends, proper nutrition..etc. All of these things should be prioritized over something as arbitrary as your Instagram status. And I believe this article reflects that opinion. Another great thing about this article is it measures the pros and cons but doesn’t outright take a side. Overall it is a well balanced article
If anybody reads this, thank you for your time,
Cullen Wholey
Izabella Muroyan
I agree with the thought that social media is already an irreplaceable part of our daily life. But I also believe that it is highly addictive in our society, and due to that fact, social media could become potentially dangerous for people’s mental health. There is no doubt that social media made our life much more comfortable in some spheres. Nowadays, it is not problematic to find all information that we need only by googling it; moreover, social media helps us know what is going on around us. Despite all those advantages that social media gives, I believe there are too many websites and sources that are not a necessity for us. In my opinion, people should try to avoid those sources, and spend their time on more productive things. To conclude, I believe that there should be a balance between social media and real life.