46of Americans get their news from social media sites. While the top news source remains television, with 66% of Americans staying in the loop watching news channels, many incidents are reported on social media much before they appear on TV. The Paris attacks in November 2015 are one good example of this.
After Elizabeth Delmatoff introduced a social media program to her seventh-grade students in George Middle School in Portland, Oregon, their grades shot up by 50%, and absenteeism was reduced by a third.
About four of every five teenagers affirm that using social media helps them feel more connected to their friends. 68% of the survey respondents reported that social media helps them feel supported when times are difficult.
There is an abundance of examples of people using social media to start movements. Perhaps the most relevant example considering the current political climate is when Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students in Parkland, Florida, used Twitter to promote gun control protests after a deadly shooting.
With social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter adding between $900 billion to $1.3 trillion to the economy, the added productivity and improved customer service facilitated over social media seem like secondary advantages.
One excellent example of social media essay topics is the incident in Hillsborough, CA. Freshman goalie Daniel Cui was bullied for being the reason for the season loss. But his teammates and classmates came to the rescue, changing their profile pictures to a photo of Daniel saving a goal.
One in four teens say that using social media helps them feel less shy, with 53% of teens identifying as shy. 28% of the respondents feel more outgoing, and 20% feel more confident using social media platforms.
The general public does not have access to expensive databases and restricted journals. Social media enables researchers from across fields to share updates about their research to the public, making it more transparent and helping prove incorrect information false.
With 80% of university faculty using social media, the instructors of the modern world connect with their students more closely. 50% of teachers report using social media to teach, and 30% use it to communicate with their students.
Fake news is abundant on social media, with 64% of Twitter users reporting finding information on the platform only to discover its falsity later. 16% of these respondents said they retweeted the information, not knowing it was false.
Over one in three people think social media is the biggest waste of time. When social media users receive a notification, it takes them between 20 and 25 minutes to return to the original task. 30% of the time, it takes two hours for the user to get back to their work.
52% of students have been victims of cyberbullying at some point, with 84% reporting that they were bullied on Facebook. This is concerning since victims in middle school are two times more likely to commit suicide.
Using social media can enhance the feelings of disconnection, putting children at a high risk of depression and other issues. Doom scrolling and passive consumption of social media are related to loneliness.
In the 2015-16 school year, the Texas Education Agency opened over 220 cases about inappropriate relationships between students and instructors. Educations experts believe the rise of these issues has resulted from the increased use of social media.
Accounts that share content created by other social media users rack up millions of views and generate profits. This loss of intellectual property and income is quite common. Many YouTube vloggers lose thousands of dollars because someone else shared their content on Facebook.
All public Tweets since March 2006 are archived by The Library of Congress. Additionally, details of issues such as an affair posted on Facebook can be used against someone in court during divorce proceedings because the information can never be completely deleted.
Social media platforms are not equipped with virus scanners, making it easy for hackers to send virus-loaded files via chat. Furthermore, with many making sensitive information such as their birth date, phone number, and high school name available on their social media, identity theft becomes a threat.
Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks.[1][2] Common features include:[2]
The term social in regard to media suggests platforms enable communal activity. Social media can enhance and extend human networks.[6] Users access social media through web-based apps or custom apps on mobile devices. These interactive platforms allow individuals, communities, and organizations to share, co-create, discuss, participate in, and modify user-generated or self-curated content.[7][5][1] Social media are used to document memories, learn, and form friendships.[8] They may be used to promote people, companies, products, and ideas.[8] Social media can be used to consume, publish, or share news.
Popular social media platforms with over 100 million registered users include Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, ShareChat, Instagram, Pinterest, QZone, Weibo, VK, Tumblr, Baidu Tieba, and LinkedIn. Depending on interpretation, other popular platforms that are sometimes referred to as social media services include YouTube, Letterboxd, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, LINE, Snapchat, Pinterest, Viber, Reddit, Discord, TikTok, and Microsoft Teams. Wikis are examples of collaborative content creation.
Social media outlets differ from old media (e.g. newspapers, TV, and radio broadcasting) in many ways, including quality,[9] reach, frequency, usability, relevancy, and permanence.[10] Social media outlets operate in a dialogic transmission system (many sources to many receivers) while traditional media operate under a monologic transmission model (one source to many receivers). For instance, a newspaper is delivered to many subscribers, and a radio station broadcasts the same programs to a city.[11]
Social media has been criticized for a range of negative impacts on children and teenagers, including exposure to inappropriate content, exploitation by adults, sleep problems, attention problems, feelings of exclusion, and various mental health maladies.[12][13] Social media has also received criticism as worsening political polarization and undermining democracy.
The PLATO system was launched in 1960 at the University of Illinois and subsequently commercially marketed by Control Data Corporation. It offered early forms of social media features with innovations such as Notes, PLATO's message-forum application; TERM-talk, its instant-messaging feature; Talkomatic, perhaps the first online chat room; News Report, a crowdsourced online newspaper, and blog and Access Lists, enabling the owner of a note file or other application to limit access to a certain set of users, for example, only friends, classmates, or co-workers.
ARPANET, which came online in 1967, had by the late 1970s enabled exchange of non-government/business ideas and communication, as evidenced by the network etiquette (or "netiquette") described in a 1982 handbook on computing at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.[14] ARPANET evolved into the Internet in the 1990s.[15] Usenet, conceived by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, was the first open social media app, established in 1980.
A precursor of the electronic bulletin board system (BBS), known as Community Memory, appeared by 1973. Mainstream BBSs arrived with the Computer Bulletin Board System in Chicago, which launched on February 16, 1978. Before long, most major US cities had more than one BBS, running on TRS-80, Apple II, Atari, IBM PC, Commodore 64, Sinclair, and similar personal computers. CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL were three of the largest BBS companies and were the first to migrate to the Internet in the 1990s. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, BBSes numbered in the tens of thousands in North America alone.[16] Message forums were the signature BBS phenomenon throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.
In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee integrated HTML hypertext software with the Internet, creating the World Wide Web. This breakthrough led to an explosion of blogs, list servers, and email services. Message forums migrated to the web, and evolved into Internet forums, supported by cheaper access as well as the ability to handle far more people simultaneously.
Social media started in the mid-1990s with the invention of platforms like GeoCities, Classmates.com, and SixDegrees.com.[18] While instant messaging and chat clients existed at the time, SixDegrees was unique as it was the first online service designed for people to connect using their actual names instead of anonymously. It boasted features like profiles, friends lists, and school affiliations, making it "the very first social networking site".[18][19] The platform's name was inspired by the "six degrees of separation" concept, which suggests that every person on the planet is just six connections away from everyone else.[20]
Research from 2015 reported that globally, users spent 22% of their online time on social networks,[22] likely fueled by the availability of smartphones.[23] As of 2023 as many as 4.76 billion people used social media[24] some 59% of the global population.
In 2019, Merriam-Webster defined social media as "forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)."[25]
Mobile social media refers to the use of social media on mobile devices such as phones and tablets. It is distinguished by its ubiquity, since users no longer have to be at a desk in order to participate on a computer. Mobile services can further make use of the user's immediate location to offer information, connections, or services relevant to that location.
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