Social Media Predators

In “The Limits of Friendship” by Maria Konnikova, social media has significantly changed the way we interact with friends and family. Everybody thinks that using social media is the best way to talk to friends and family, however, in my opinion, they are wrong because it doesn’t give you the face-to-face connections we need as humans for social interaction. On the other hand, the great thing about using social media is you can connect with more people, but in a superficial kind of way. Therefore, we do not get the face-to-face interactions with our friends and family. We, the people that are addicted to social media, learn that without face-to-face conversations we wouldn’t have a normal “social” life outside of social media. The question

Online predators and Stalkers can easily gain access to social media users’ personal information by either requesting to be a user’s friend or simply finding a way around the user's privacy settings. According to June Ahn, chat rooms are public and is an unmonitored space where online predators are more likely to be. “Adolescents are less likely to be targeted for unwanted sexual solicitation in social media than chat rooms.”(Ahn, June) I have found that, 412 adolescents were more likely to talk with strangers. This is hazardous for young children and adolescents because their lack of life experience leads them to blindly accept all friend request. The effort to seem popular by having many friends online can damage credibility and truth worthiness.

The social media is widely used in this generation, as 68% of American adults use Facebook, and 28% of them use Instagram, while 26% for Pinterest, and 21% for Twitter (Greenwood et al.). Besides, the Consumer Reports magazine states that “more than 7 million active users of Facebook were under the minimum required age of 13” and “over 5 million were 10 or younger” (Strom and Strom).

The use of social media is ruining this generation’s real life social skills. According to Social Media Today, an online community for professionals, “The amount of time people spend on social media is constantly increasing. Teens now spend up to nine hours a day on social platforms, while 30% of all time spent online is now allocated to social media interaction.” Texting or online communications does not allow people to truly express themselves for who they truly are. There is a loss of social and personal development communicating through social media. For instance, people online are unable to use body language, tone, voice and facial expressions through a text. An article on The Telegraph, pointed out that “One in four people spend more time socialising online, using sites such as Facebook, than they do in person, according to research.” The study also found that even when there is an opportunity to see people face-to-face, on weekends for example, up to 11% of adults still prefer to stay at home and communicate on their devices instead. (USA Today). The problem with socialising online is that affects a person’s ability to communicate properly in face-to-face interactions. The person will feel a sense of social anxiety and not project their voice loud enough for their audience to hear them. For

It’s no coincidence that a 16-year-old teenage girl, who thought she was meeting with her teenage pen pal, met with a 43-year old man and came up missing the next morning. It’s also no coincidence that a 13-year-old homosexual boy, who was constantly harassed with cruel messages online, hung himself last night. CNN reports that teenagers in the US spend approximately nine hours on social media a day. That’s over 250 total hours of average social media usage a month! Meanwhile, within the countless hours that the typical teenager spends online, it only takes one second for trouble to transpire. The large amount of time that teenagers spend online paired with the millions of users on major networks leave the door for social media abuse wide open.

The social media is widely used in this generation, as 68% of American adults use Facebook, and 28% of them use Instagram, while 26% for Pinterest, and 21% for Twitter (Greenwood et al.). Besides, the Consumer Reports magazine states that “more than 7 million active users of Facebook were under the minimum required age of 13” and “over 5 million were 10 or younger” (Strom and Strom).

Many naive teenage girls use social media and do not adequately monitor their privacy, believing the anonymity of technology will shield them from harm. However, these sexual predators can disguise their identity. These predators can arrange to meet up with their victim at places in the outside world. A teenage girl may believe this predator is someone her age, but how would she know if they never met in person? Many will argue the most positive effects of technology's intangible contact would be the reconnection with friends from times long ago, or being able to have long-distance relationships. Still, many people who frequently use social media have never actually seen their online "friends" in real life. This loss of human contact in social media and technology contributes to high numbers of sexual assaults and murders from the predators in the real world. Technology does allow people to complete tasks without the contact with others, but this has had an ultimately negative effect on society. Even though technology's human contact limitation allows for personal and private tasks such as shopping or checking out books alone, technology has mainly been proven to contribute to antisocial behavior, mental health issues,

Even with the dangerous developments in social media over the past several years, many parents have chosen to allow their children to use these sites despite age restrictions. There are three reasons to argue for age restrictions on social media sites: lack of supervision by parents, targeting of children by pedophiles, and the prevalence of children falsifying their age. The ability of pedophiles to conceivably target children with social media proves that this is an issue that parents need to examine so that they may better protect their children. The threat from pedophiles causes an enormous problem for millions of children on social media sites. Unfortunately, Western Daily Press states that “Pedophiles can get away with grooming young teenagers on social media sites.” My essay will argue that age restrictions need to be in place, and additional regulations should ensure that law enforcement agencies have the tools required to supervise underage children 's use of social media, including Facebook and Twitter. Quoting from Business Wire, “three out of four parents feel that social network sites are not protecting children.” According to Irish Independent, “four out of ten children falsify their age” when using social media. I will also argue that additional research on this topic can be used to raise the awareness of parents, and can also help to alert the children themselves to the danger. My essay will also examine questions, such as: How can social media sites protect

These drawbacks include too many people being reliant to talking online rather than in person and not verbally communicating with friends even though they are in the same room. Jasmine Fowlkes shows the reality in how social media is affecting our new generation through her article, “Viewpoint: Why Social Media is Destroying our Social Skills.” After discussing the results conducted by several researchers, Fowlkes states,“As more generations are born into the social age, social media will continue to be the favored communication form among young people. However, this shift may begin to affect their ability to properly communicate in person with peers.” Many start to rely on applications on our devices to talk to people, but this results in less verbal communication. In addition, Kelly-Fay’s Talktrack research study showed that conversations held in person are much more impactful than on social media. Rather than making social media a huge part of your life, Fowlkes wishes that people would look up from their phones and engage more with others since that could change their lives.

The internet does offer negative contributions such associal media attracting online predators, this has the potential to lead to many undesirable effects on children.Younger people’s profiles on social media have the potential to attract aggressive online predators who tactically use personal information from social media profiles to choose their targets who they then abduct and sexually exploit, before this however they are the offenders use instant messaging or email to contact the target and form a relationship with them posing as themselves, research indicates only 5% of offenders pretend to be teenagers (Wolak, 2008).

Some of the top benefits of social media over the years are that it is free to anyone, the content can get out to resources virtually immediately, and it can be delivered to a wide variety of people. For these reasons, communication through social media has become an extremely accessible and convenient way to communicate. It is also popular for those who need to be in contact with others. One example that comes to mind is a teenager who goes away on a trip to visit a friend or family. They can be hundreds of miles away but still talk to their parents as if they weren’t. Another example is a person who is shy and has a hard time making friends face-to-face, social media sites are a great way to meet people and build relationships.

Technology is a key element in the world today. In today’s society social media and social networking seem to play a vital role in people’s lives all around the world. There are some that debate whether it is improving or immobilize communication skills. I will not only focus on the negative impacts on communication because there are some positive impacts on communication through social media. I will explore how social media strengthens and weakens communication skills. According to Merriam-Webster the definition of social media is it forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and social blogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos). Now in days social media has a major impact in everyone’s daily lives whether you at work, just woken up in the morning, or out shopping.

The social media is widely used in this generation, as 68% of American adults use Facebook, and 28% of them use Instagram, while 26% for Pinterest, and 21% for Twitter (Greenwood et al.). Besides, the Consumer Reports magazine states that “more than 7 million active users of Facebook were under the minimum required age of 13” and “over 5 million were 10 or younger” (Strom and Strom).

Social media and networking seem to play an essential part in everyone’s lives throughout the planet. Many debate whether it is improving or destroying human face to face interaction. This essay doesn’t just focus on the negative impacts but the positive impacts of communication through social media as well. Social media and networking strengthening and weakening communication skills will be explored throughout.

Students growing up in a cyber-age society that makes them sophisticated users of the technology. The role of the internet more likely as the nervous system connects each function and information all over the world. Accessing the internet become essential for students' daily life that to maintain the connection with friends, relatives, teachers, learning material, news, entertainments and other resources, in the meanwhile, they also expose themselves to the cyber environment where exist both resources and risks. For example, the easy connection provides a convenient pathway for online “predators” searching their victims. Janis Wolak, David Finkelhor, Kimberly J. Mitchell, and Michele L. Ybarra pointed out media stories about online “predators” become dominating new reports since the late 1990s.