Social media cannot be brought up in any fashion without immediately mentioning Facebook. For almost a decade now, Facebook has been the proverbial poster child for social media, and the two are almost interchangeable words to a large population of people. 

 In the developed world, it is a safe bet to assume any person one meets in a given day has a Facebook account. That means only a friend request stands in the way of quite a lot of personal information, which can be collected by anyone with a motive. This could, and in many documented cases has, create issues in parts of someone’s business life that should never be affected by their personal one. 

Employers now browse their employees’ Facebook accounts to determine their character and professionalism, and they do so by judging individuals on the content they post. If one posts a picture of themselves at a party with a beer in hand, they run the risk of being fired, as they are not an adequate “ambassador” to their employer. 

Additionally, all information posted on Facebook is mined to generate tailored advertisements, gather statistics on political affiliations, and even create a purchase history. This allows all kinds of corporate entities to manipulate the public using data that should be private. We sacrifice this privacy, all for the sake of figuring out which Nintendo character you are most like. 

The other giant of the platform is Twitter, and it comes with its own set of problems. Since Twitter is a much more public platform, those with a large amount of followers set themselves up to be scrutinized for each tweet.Every time something is posted, it has the potential to be used as blackmail in the future, or a devastating blow to social status today. 

While social media is indeed a tool that can be used to create widespread good, it is also one that should be taken seriously and used with caution. This is the only way to ensure that our entire lives are not recorded on an Excel spreadsheet in Silicon Valley, and that is something that everyone should strive to prevent. We deserve to be treated as people, not treated as data.