Essay Sample on Social Media

Technology is a useful tool, it gives access to anything we could possibly need or answers to any question we could think of. Although technology has many benefits, it has also contributed to issues in our society that would have never been possible if it never existed. Technology itself is not to blame but rather something that exists because of it, social media. 

If you were to go up to a random person on the street and ask them if they had any form of social media, the answer would most likely be yes. 82% of people in the United States have a social media account. Social media didn’t start out bad, in fact in the beginning its main purpose was to connect us. However as time went on it ended up causing us to isolate ourselves from the people around us. While social media can be toxic to everyone it seems to target a certain group, teenagers. Since its release social media has contributed to suicide rates rising, mental illness rates rising, and has caused IQ’s to drop. Social media distorts our version of reality, we base our self worth off of how many followers we have or how many likes we get on a post. More people get bullied online than in person, the reason, it is easier to abuse someone from behind a screen rather than to their face, and social media creates the perfect environment. 

Platforms aim to find ways to control us, rather than being the consumers, we are in fact the products. The more time we spend on social media, the more money we make on the platforms, one way platforms try to control us and try to get us to stay on for longer is through algorithms. Social media algorithms store our information such as what we click on, what we type, and what we interact with the most. They then take this information and use it to push similar topics and post towards us in hopes that we will interact with it even more, causing us to spend more time on social media and in turn earning the platforms more money. 

Another way platforms control us by using algorithms is through fake news. Not everything on the internet is true, while some people are able to tell fact from fiction, others are not able to decipher this. Others may be able to decipher this but have been persuaded to believe a certain way through social media. For example, say an article about the existence of Bigfoot pops up on your Instagram, while you know that Bigfoot is not real the article catches your eye and you click on it. Now that you have clicked on it the computer interprets this as you are interested in learning more and keeps recommending you videos which leads you farther and farther down the rabbit hole of false information. 

Who do we hold accountable? A computer is only as smart as its operator, therefore the creators of the platforms or the people telling the computer what to do are the ones responsible for the issues talked about above. Technology takes things literally, if you tell it to perform a certain task it will complete that task at all costs with no exceptions. For example, Google is designed to find information that closest matches your search result. The problem is that the google search engine isn’t scanning to see if the information is the most accurate source, it was designed to give you the information that is most relevant to your search. The programmers and the platform are to be held accountable for this because they most likely did not think about this, they assumed that the computer would be able to interpret this on its own, however as previously stated, technology will only perform what it is told to perform. 

The problems outlined above are all caused by rather intentional and unintentional mistakes on behalf of the platforms themselves. The easiest way to fix these problems is by bringing attention to them and confronting the platforms in order for them to fix the issues. Technology is too valuable for us to just choose not to use, however we can choose to speak out about some of its issues and choose to continue supporting a certain platform.