Social media considerations/ issues

Social media tools and applications bring convenience to people. People have social media tools and applications on their smartphones, so they can use their smartphones for social, shopping, learning and entertaining. 

However, just like a coin has two sides, social media tools and applications also bring issues to people. 

1. Cyberbullying. 

Cyberbullying behavior may include abusive texts and emails, hurtful messages, images or videos imitating others online, excluding others online, humiliating others online, spreading nasty online gossip and chat, creating fake accounts to trick someone or humiliate them. With the development of social media and affordable smartphones, cyberbullying becomes more and more common. In serious cases, it even leads to suicide. BBC published  Akubra girl Dolly's bullying suicide shocks Australia on 10 January 2018, which mentioned "One in five children in Australia say they were bullied in the past year." (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-42631208)

2. Cyber addiction. 

Being addicted to a cyber world, like online games, a user could compulsively spend most of his time online. If a user was intervened, he would experience unpleasant withdrawal symptoms such as anxiety, moodiness, and compulsive fantasising about the Internet. Those symptoms can be relieved by using the internet. Cyber addiction harms users' health (mental and physical), lets them lost their families, friends, and jobs, even leads to cybercrimes.  

3. Fake news.

Fake news usually means false information with a just-as-good mask. I recently learned a fake news example in BSBLIB304 Develop and Use Information Literacy Skills, The endangered Tree Octopus, URL is https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/. If you open it, you will find the information looks really authentic and complete, but it is a fake news website. The second example is "Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston are back together", which appears mostly every year. It often aims to damage the reputation of a person or entity or make money through advertising revenue. 

[References and related reading]

[1] Australia Government - eSafetyCommissioner. (n.d.) Cyberbullying. Retried 03 June 2021 https://www.esafety.gov.au/key-issues/cyberbullying.

[2] BBC News. 10 January 2018. Akubra girl Dolly's bullying suicide shocks Australia. Retrieved 03 June 2021 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-42631208.

[3] Better Health Channel. (n.d.) Internet addiction. Retrieved 03 June 2021 https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/HealthyLiving/internet-addiction#signs-of-internet-addiction.

[4] PSYCOM. (n.d.) Internet Addiction Disorder. Retrieved 03 June 2021 https://www.psycom.net/iadcriteria.html.

[5] Australia Government - eSafetyCommissioner. (n.d.) Fake news. Retried 03 June 2021 https://www.esafety.gov.au/key-issues/cyberbullying.