Societal Issues Raised by Social Media

Social media has a huge impact on society, however it also comes with a number of associated societal issues.

Potential Benefits for Society

Social media has many benefits for society in addition to it's downsides, including: Political Usage
 * Being used by police to identify and prevent potential crimes
 * Being used by people to almost instantly communicate and co-ordinate
 * Being useful for helping people to plan events and advertise local businesses

One societal issue raised by social media is politically-motivated advertisement and manipulation of what people can see on social media. This is a prevalent issue because social media could be used to influence how people vote and as more and more people use social media to get their news, the effects of governments or companies trying to suppress information through social media becomes more powerful.

Fake News

Another societal issue raised by social media is that of "fake news", where untrue news is spread from person to person over social media without any form of verification. Fake news is a prominent issue because it causes a spread of misinformation to that can sometimes last for a very long time.

How This Affects Privacy

Your Social Media can tell a lot of important information about yourself; your friends and family, where you live, work and went to school, and with your social media posts, someone could quickly build up a picture about your life, and the police could use all of this information as a means to investigate a possible crime; they could use your social media as evidence.