Ethics of Social Media

This webpage talks about the ethical use of social media and its effects on people, the spread of information, relationships, and privacy

The ethical use of social media is not spreading disinformation and not using it to harass or hurt others. Social media plays a large role in society today, whether it be used to spread information, share some experiences with others, share certain views with others, and communicate with others. Ethical use of social media is a significant topic for discussion because this question has come into light in the past few years as social media has gotten more and more out of control as more disinformation and bad things have surfaced onto it.

Data Privacy and Security

Social media does not have good data privacy as they often sell your data to other companies. One example of what another company might do with your data is use it for advertising purposes and get more personalized ads for you so the likelihood of you buying something increases, increasing their profit. There is also the issue of data mining, which is the process of extracting patterns from data sets to use for a multitude of things. The issue with this is that it can be used to manipulate a large group of people, misinform them, and it can also present some security concerns. Sometimes all of this data is taken without the person's permission, leading to some data that the person wanted private, no longer being private. An example of an ethical challenge that has to do with privacy on social media is a company/person having your address. The upsides of this is a company being able to market useful things for you or give you information that would be useful to you, but the downside of this is that people that you don’t know have your address and in the case of a data breach, untrustworthy people can have your address. The process is best explained by digitalprivacy.ieee.org, and they say, “When signing up for social media, users are typically required to provide personal information like name, email, birthdate, interests, location and more. This data is then stored, analyzed and used by the platforms for various purposes. The companies build extensive profiles about their users based on online activity and behaviors. All interactions and posts on social media are analyzed to understand user preferences and habits.”

Social Media's Effect on Mental Health

Social media has a large effect on a person's mental health as it can help and hurt it. Some examples of this are some uplifting messages or posts, or cyberbullying and harassment. Social media can also be addicting and not appropriate, both of which will hurt someone's mental health. Social media can positively influence someone's mental health by letting people connect with friends, make new ones, or maybe view/post mentally helpful content, but it can also negatively influence someone's mental health by subjecting them to content they shouldn’t be viewing, cyberbullying, and/or change the way they think about certain things in a worse way, and according to Forbes Health, they say,”Research shows correlations between excessive use of social media and mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety, loneliness and sleep deprivation.” Social media platforms have an ethical duty to limit/stop the negative influences that I mentioned above, especially if they have younger people on their website.

Social Media's Effect on the Dissemination of Information

It is widely known that social media plays a huge role in the spread of information, whether the information is true or false. The unfortunate thing about social media is that anybody has access to it and anybody can use it to their advantage, especially against kids. People can use websites such as Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram to spread negative or false information to users, and it is very easy to do. Spreading false information has negative ethical implications as it can cause one to harm oneself, or harm others, and according to ualr.edu, they say,”Social media has the power to affect a social change on society. Social media has allowed thousands of people, if not millions, to have a voice and spread the information that the user feels is relevant and important. Unfortunately, a side effect of giving so many people a voice is the spread of false information disguised as truth. Information passed by social media can change the belief of an individual or a group.” Being misinformed could also lead to someone making bad decisions and/or misinforming others and causing them to make the same mistakes. Users can combat the spread of disinformation by not paying attention to it, and if you see something, do a little extra research on it to actually see if it’s true. Users should not have social media as the place where they get most of their facts, or keep themselves well informed. Social media platforms can combat this by moderating the content that is posted on their site and setting more clear guidelines and rules that users must follow.

Social Media and Relationships

Social media affects relationships and personal social health in different ways, some good, and some bad. Social media allows millions of people who would normally never meet each other, meet each other, and can help form relationships. You can connect with people across the world and form strong relationships with other people with similar interests. It could also be used to isolate people as they may share their views or themselves and be shunned and harrassed by other people. There are many ethical considerations when interacting with other people online. You should always be aware of who you are interacting with and be aware of the things you say to them as it could offend other people and/or not be appropriate for the other person to see, as well as any information and images that you might share with somebody else. When using social media, you should always show respect and empathy towards others and show qualities of an overall decent human being.

Personal Reflection

I don't really use social media other than youtube, but I only use that for watching other content, not posting. I also try not to watch things that aren’t suitable for someone like me to watch. I also try to limit the amount of content that I watch daily. The steps that I can take that will make my social media use respectful to others is by not using it to harrass or make fun of other people, make sure I don’t share something that someone else doesn’t want me to, and not posting things that could potentially offend, hurt, or misinform others.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the ethical use of social media is a complicated topic, but something that should be obvious that social media shouldnt be used to harm others and their mental health, harass other people, steal data from other people, or purposely misinform others. People can also take some extra steps to ensure that they don’t become victims or part of the problem for any of these things such as being well informed, not sharing private information, not using social media as your only source of information, and posting hurtful things online.

Information Sources

MBA Knowledge Base IE Insights IEEE Digital Privacy Forbes Health UA Little Rock

Picture Sources

Title Picture Section 1 Picture Section 2 Picture Section 3 Picture Section 4 Picture

Rollover Image Sources

Title Image Rollover Section 1 Image Rollover Section 2 Image Rollover Section 3 Image Rollover Section 4 Image Rollover