Social media has become a giant part of today’s society. Apps such as Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram are a major part in communicating. People like the idea of being behind a screen because they are able to create a version of themselves that they can broadcast to the world. Social media however invades the privacy of its users. They sell the data collected from each person to third parties.  Hefernan stated “These were troll operations with a wide range of phony ads designed to fan the flames of American racism, anti-LGBT sentiment, and fervor for guns­—as well as to build opposition to Clinton.” It shows how dangerous social media really is. Ads like those make the wrong people connect and act on these beliefs. It was discovered that Facebook took money from the trolls and posted ads about Trump. Facebook realized that they were in the wrong for persuading the votes of the country. Zuckerberg states “For the ways my work was used to divide people rather than bring us together, I ask forgiveness and I will work to do better”.  I found it weird that Zuckerberg wrote “us” because he was grouping himself with the rest of society and his own creation divided his relationships. Social media has too much of an influence on society. It is not surprising that the troll ads made people vote for Trump. People look towards social media for approval and the more ads that they see, the more they want that product. The fact that ads can persuade the vote of a country says a lot, that society shifted toward a world of social media. In all of the articles, they are trying to put the blame on someone when the blame should be on society as a whole. We voluntarily make our choices based off of the influence of social media. It has effected our society both positively and negatively. It helps people connect with other people who share a common interest, it helps a person network their brand, allows people to keep in touch with old friends, follow celebrities, and it gives a voice to people who are too shy to speak up. It however puts pressure on people’s social status, can hurt a person’s self esteem, and cyber bullying can occur. We are so glued to our phone screens that we miss out on the world around us. Do you think society could last a day with no service?

I feel like social media has affected this society in both negative and positive ways. In previous generations, you weren’t able to connect with anyone around the world in the span of seconds. With the help of sites like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube & twitter, this was made possible. While reading one of the articles, one of mark Zuckerberg’s business strategies really stood out to me. He believed that “social capacity” is increased a lot compared to people that aren’t on a social network. “Humans have the capacity to maintain empathetic relationships with about 150 people, communities of about 150 people. I like to think Facebook extends that” ( Article 3).  With social media, you can meet thousands of people and maintain relationships with them, used as a way for memorization and easy communication. As i was reading these articles though, they all seemed to have a similar theme of negativity towards social media. As someone that heavily supports it, i can agree with some of the negatives that were said and i can but myself in the authors shoes to understand where they are coming from. In article 1, the author suggests that Facebook doesn’t connect and share with people in your but instead promote propaganda, disinformation, fake news, and fake accounts. I feel like this is a big deal because when politics get involved with the fake news, it can weaken certain sides of  government for false reasons. Despite all of of that i think the positives outweigh the negatives because there are much more ways to benefit from social media. For example starting a business, you can network with people and meet people that are interested in the same thing and from there you can expand, or there are ways you can get paid on social media if you’re a influencer (Instagram). The reason why I see social media having a positive affect on society is because i watch YouTube get paid a lot of money for doing that they love and just being themselves. It’s almost like watching Television. Also, Television is being used less because with social media you can search exactly what you want to find, and quickly. Following news pages is a perfect example since you can see live footage of things, and knowing about things seconds after it happens.

Social Media has become extremely popular over the years. Social Media has become the outlet that everyone uses for multiple purposes such as promoting products, sharing important news or information, or just keeping people updated with their daily lives. Social Media is also used as an outlet where individuals are allowed to speak freely and voice their opinions. Youtube and Facebook are quite popular, in which individuals post videos on their reactions or opinions on things happening in the world. An important event that was globally talked about on Social Media was the 2016 election. Many individuals had their opinions on Trump running for the election. Trump is also known for voicing his opinion on social media, he is very popular on twitter. Trump relied on social media for most of his election. In the article “Who Will Take Responsibility for Facebook” by Virginia Heffernan we learn how Facebook was paid to post adds supporting the Trump campaign. “Facebook broke its silence. The company admitted it had received payments for ads placed by organizations “likely operated out of Russia.” Facebook admitted to taking payments to promote ads supporting the Trump Campaign, which ultimately led to Trump winning the election. This brought negative attention towards Zuckerberg and Facebook as many individuals had mixed feelings about the election. Many people were upset that Trump won the election, so Facebook being involved in the election was not good for Zuckerberg and his company. In the article “The Truth About Facebook’s Fake Quest to Connect The World” by Noam Cohen , he discusses the companies deepest myths.  “The mythology of Facebook as a well-meaning company doing good by connecting the world didn’t only pacify an unsuspecting public for a decade, it inspired a fiercely loyal workforce.” This line states that there’s more to Facebook then we know. Cohen seems to be targeting the “fiercely loyal workforce” as he discusses how the workers of Facebook were not able to connect and communicate with their families and friends. The workers were expected to give up everything and work for the company. One worker discusses how working for the company made him disconnected from his own family and also led him to losing his wife. This relates to many individuals because social media can cause people to ruin their relationships, social media consumes peoples time as people are constantly on their phones tweeting or snapping. Some people forget how to live in the moment, so I would conclude by saying social media is affecting us negatively. We rely on social media so much that people rarely watch the news or even read the newspaper we rely on our phones and social media to keep us up to date.

Social media started as a way to bring people all over the globe together. Whether it was befriending people on Facebook, sharing your picture on Instagram and Flickr or watching a video from your favorite YouTube channel. Throughout time the social media changed from being something that was entertaining to have, to being controlled by multi-million dollar corporations and others with higher power. Manipulating our way of thinking and having it become something we feel like we cannot live without. We have entered a time where we’ve become dependent to social media in order to keep up with current events, causing us to believe every post and video we encounter is real. For example, In Virginia Heffernan’s article Who Will Take Responsibility for Facebook? she writes about how Facebook admitted to accepting payment from Russia so they can post fake news in order to influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. “These were troll operations with a wide range of phony ads designed to fan the flames of American racism, anti-LGBT sentiment, and fervor for guns­—as well as to build opposition to Clinton”. Since Facebook did not overlook content that was being posted, people were influenced to make certain decisions based off of the false information that was given. Another example is Henry Jenkins’ article Taking the You Out lf YouTube where he writes about how people reacted to Google buying YouTube and whether it was a good or bad thing.  In the article, he mentions an essay written by John McMurria that explains how some people were actually upset at the founders for making a big profit out of selling YouTube since the reason it was so popular was because of everyone consistently making videos and watching other channels.  “We have all seen major media companies telling us that file-sharing is bad because it takes other people’s intellectual property without just compensation. So, why are these same companies now taking their audience’s intellectual property for free?”. It goes to show that these corporations that own the social media outlets no longer care about people being interactive with one another, but they want the number of people who are using their platform in general. Noam Cohen’s article The Truth About Facebook’s Fake Quest To Connect The World  supports this statement; “‘The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good,’—From the start, the case for connecting the world wasn’t based on morality, but survival.”.

Social media websites have provided us as a society with many different opportunities such as; reconnecting/staying in touch with old friends, meeting new people, exchanging ideas, and sharing content. Social media has however taken over many lives in this society as people have began to rely heavily on it as a source of income as a result of them false advertising products/companies for revenue in return, a platform to seek validation from strangers, and to also possibly be brainwashed by the many advertisements and propaganda being blasted to force people to pick one side over another in cases such as politics. This can be shown through the article “Who Will Take Responsibility For FaceBook,” as news broke that  “the company admitted it had received payments for ads placed by organizations ‘likely operated out of Russia.’ These were troll operations with a wide range of phony ads designed to fan the flames of American racism, anti-LGBT sentiment, and fervor for guns­—as well as to build opposition to Clinton.” It shows how dangerous social media sites can become when people with negative intentions come onto these sites and brainwash millions of people across the world to believe in and support evil ideas such as racism and pro-gun laws. A seemingly innocent person can join a site with their own positive ideas and suddenly end up being thrown into a cult of people who have strong beliefs about things that surely won’t make American great again. We can’t be blamed though because we have no choice but to see these corrupt advertisements as people such as the CEO of Facebook have instead decided to deny and claim innocence in the cycle of corruption instead of developing a solution to try to wipe out these sources of immorality. YouTube is another site that began as an open community for people across the world to create content in the form of videos and post for millions of people to see. However, many sites have claimed to be open and diverse but when you take a look at the people who receive the most subscribers/followers, likes, and comments, they are not racially diversed. In “Taking the You Out of YouTube,” McMuria states that a glance at the top 100 rated, viewed and disused videos, and most subscribed channels reveals far less racial diversity than broadcast network television. Most were US uploads with some non-US sports and Japanese popular culture.” This supports the idea that many of these social media sites falsely use the ideas of equality and that they are open to all in order to attract more people to join their sites, not because they actually promote openness across their website.  It was also interesting that Jenkins stated that “perhaps we might think about the difference between what it means to be a YouTube community and what it would take to use the YouTube video sharing technologies to help expand the movement for racial and economic justice.” There are many corrupt and evil events currently occurring all over the world, but instead of people uniting over social media to try and erupt some form of change and to spread love, we are instead using these sites to further separate each other, argue, and spread more hate/injustice. We tend to focus more on trying to prove to strangers on the internet that we are “living our best lives” by bragging about all of the materialistic things we have and the amount of clout/attention that we are gaining. Andrew Bosworth, an outspoken Facebook executive, said “The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.” I very much agree with this because we never stop to think about how dishonest, manipulative, and corrupt social media sites are in reality. We focus only on the good of them and as long as we get what we want out of the sites, we don’t care about the possibility of them negatively affecting our lives.

“Who Will Take Responsibility for Facebook?” by Virginia Hefferman, “Taking the You out of Youtube” by Henry Jenkins, and “The Truth About Facebook’s Fake Quest to Connect the World” by Noam Cohen all present a similar trending topic: who is to be held accountable for the people on the internet? Hefferman stated “Nothing about Facebook is intrinsically organized or self-regulating.” In other words, Facebook is an open platform with no real boundaries set in place by administrative powers. This is considered to be dangerous and quite irresponsible of Mark Zuckerberg due to his inability to limit the amount of hate speech and “fake news” that circulates his platform. Hefferman even went as far to compare this lack of accountability in Facebook with the tragedy of 9/11 and the failures in the infrastructure of the Twin Towers. Furthermore, Henry Jenkins appeared to share a similar viewpoint when it comes to YouTube. After Google’s takeover of the online community, YouTube was no longer an intimate experience between creators and users but another large corporation owned platform where all users aren’t truly heard. Although, Jenkins does the see the bright side of YouTube in that it is a place where a sort of online culture diffusion can occur and people of varying backgrounds can come together and form new technologies, concepts, strategies, etc. However, similar to Facebook’s crisis of fake news and hate speech, people in the higher rankings of YouTube are not held accountable for their free usage of people’s intellectual property that is uploaded to the network. While technically, YouTube is an open platform – it is also a community based platform in which video makers are the reason the site is a viable network. Jenkins asks “So, why are these same companies now taking their audience’s intellectual property for free?” The large corporations under Google are capable of exploiting users and have to answer to no one. Lastly, Noam Cohen wrote about the “cultist” behavior of Facebook. To paraphrase, Cohen talks about how Facebook claims to be about connecting people and that these connections inherently make Facebook a good thing – however, in reality Facebook’s only concern is obtaining new users through the premise of if everyone uses the site then the next person should as well. According to the article, Zuckerberg made claims that Facebook will increase people’s empathy and cause them to share more connections than ever humanly possible. Essentially, Cohen appears to be most related to a conspiracy theorist out of the three authors presented. Overall, these articles appear to be asking questions about who is to be held responsible for the downfall of ethics in these large scale online communities. Nefferman and Cohen wish to blame Zuckerberg for Facebook’s rather crude and dishonest nature while Henry Jenkins is more on the lines of asking what classifies an effectively diverse and fair online forum and/or network. It is quite fair to say that they all hold at least a sense of validity in that one must question the efficacy of these open online websites meant to connect people and spread helpful information all the while maintaining a safe and healthy space for growth and communication. Nonetheless, the blame of Zuckerberg is questionable as the hate that the people refer to that is found on Facebook is posted by individuals who have hateful ideals but supported by people with similar ideals, not those with unhealthy mindsets who happen to be converted by falsified information. Zuckerberg may not have to be held accounted for the millions of users on Facebook because all he did was open a forum for people to share their thoughts. In YouTube’s case, Google as a larger corporation may not be able to control the way in which people participate on its platform but should be capable of supplying the correct value to content creators due to their large contributions to the network. They provide a service to the online community and the corporations who run YouTube and should be compensated as such.

Social media has affected society both positively and negatively. Facebook has definitely taken a huge toll on people of all ages. There are many fake pages & businesses promoting fake news and advertisements. Due to Facebook, it has been easier to locate and communicate with people who have the same beliefs or likes as you. There are large events who attract thousands of people and it will show if they will be in attendance. The network is famous for allowing people to update their location and pictures daily. Sometimes it spreads unreliable sources for events, information, and other things.

Facebook’s social networking has led to new shows such as “Catfish” being created because there are so many fake profiles trying to engage in relationships with people they do not know. While there have been many successful results from online dating, Facebook has put people in dangerous situations. “Facebook is indeed a new world order. It determines our digital and real-world behavior in incalculable ways.” (Chayka). The degree of dangerous situations usually varies from dating to fake events and propaganda. The more people use phones, the more they are learning to question and investigate posts online.

Thanks to user-produced content such as Youtube, Instagram, and Twitter, people can post their reactions and opinions on what is being posted around the internet. It can determine the truth behind posts and bring more attention to discussions. Nowadays, missing people and opinionated discussions, behind the scene stories and more are usually posted. It brings people together online and movements are usually started. While it brings people together online and creates small online communities it separates people in person. “The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good,” (Alamy).

Social media stops many from learning how to communicate in person and makes people lose the personal touch to socializing in person. Sometimes cyberbullying is a result of overusing social media starting at a young age. During High School, it is a sensitive period in a teenager’s life and one incident online can change a person’s self-esteem. Social networking generally has its pros and cons depending on the age ranges of the users.

After doing the 3 readings, that we were supposed to do, I believe that social media has affected us as a society very negatively.  For one, people now don’t have to talk to people face to face, because they can just text people or write a blog on the internet about a resturant that they didn’t like. They can also can be lying about the blog they posted, which what people do. Theirs also fake news on the internet, and if enough people share it, the fake news can blow up. People who make a living by doing dumb stuff or saying dumb, can be famous now. If their wasn’t social media, they would’t blow up. People who write blogs, can be more popular than journalists, people who went to school to get a degree so they can write for a newspaper and have a degree in it. Social media have they positives but the negatives outweigh the positives .In the article,”The Truth About Facebook’s Fake Quest to Connect the World”, by Noam Cohen, it talks about how Facebook displayed displeasure  about the internal message boards, for example Women @ Facebook, but didn’t say anything about senior vice president Joel Kaplan’s support for then former Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh. In the same article, a former Facebook manager said he realized that Facebook “wasn’t giving a voice to the voiceless but was helping to establish online the same inequalities that exist offline”. Social media can be a very mean place. Their is cyberbullying, which is horrible, and people can cyberbully other people, without the people knowing who is doing it to them. In the text,” Taking the You out of Yotube”, the big compaines, like Google and Yahoo, are buying social media platform, and messing up what people were using the socail media websites in the first place. Even though social media is bad for society, I would’t take social media put of people lives. Social media have some good things, like we can now watch telivision now on Netflix, Hulu, HBO and other subscriptions. We can find out sports scores, whenever we want too. Despite this, Social media is bad for society.