Social Media

The thesis statement of the essay is “Social Media and the negative aspects it is spreading”. This course gave the opportunity to explore more about social media than a normal person known before. In this essay, the main focus is being given to the disadvantages that social media has and what negative aspects it is spreading globally. The emphasis is being given to the privacy problems, copyrights, politics and social media, terrorism and propagandas.

Social media is a digital tool that makes a person able to share content with the public. But in the past few years, the social media is being used for so many unethical purposes and spreading negative affects more than the positive ones. Over a decade the free social media apps like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram has made the people slaves to the digital screens and people without thinking use to spend hours in front of their phones. For billions of people, sharing their personal life pictures and their content on the social media has remain no problem at all yet it becomes a part of their life. People do not think on the fact that how negatively social media is affecting us psychologically (Timrayner, 2012).

The internet for the world is now become a universal medium. It gives people access to millions of articles, books and so many other literature work that once was considered a big problem if someone had to make a research. People who used to spend hours in libraries to search for the data are now busy with their computer screens and spending time to find out the topics related to their subject. It seem quite an easy way to make a research right? But what is making a hurdle for the authors is to make a difference in between a genuine and fake data (Carr, 2020).

One of the disadvantage of this current technology and social media is that it has made the families departed while living under the same roof.  People in the late 90s used to have the landlines in their homes and that landline was a connection in between the people because they all would love to sit together in the living room and talked to their loved ones. But now the modern technology has made this loved vanished away. Now, a person under the same roof make a phone call to talk to his/her mother, father or to any of the sibling rather to go into their rooms. According to the federal government, the majority of American homes now use cellphones exclusively. “We do not even have a landline anymore,” people now began to say that proudly (Cho, 2019).

Apart from these of the negative impacts that social media and the modern world technology has put on us. People are so much involve in their online world that they loss the contact with the real world outside. Having friends on Facebook, groups of same concerns in the social media apps is now the life of the modern world people. They do care about what is happening to their virtual friends but pay no heed towards their parents and their families. That’s what I think is the major loss this technology has made to us.

Watching the Netflix series The Black Mirror has made so many wonderful episodes that really defines well what the technology is doing to us and how far this technology can go in the future life. In the episode “The Entire History of You” what they showed to world is that how a person in the future can see all of his past by using a simple grain. And the results of this technology was terrific. Sometimes people want to forget the memories that hurt them a lot so much. Who wants to recall such memories? And same terrific thing was being watched in another episode named “Be Right Back” where Martha wanted to connect back to boyfriend named Ash who got killed in the car accident and she was not able to process this. She then using an app talked to the reboot of her boyfriend and she thought it would be a good idea to talk to him for the last time in order to get closure. But that has proved to be a mistake because there is hell of difference in between an actual person and in a reboot.

The technology has made our private lives long gone because we are not having our privacy at all. Not even if we delete all the applications from our phone but still we are being recorded and being seen by the government and by the agencies and we are not alone even if we are. In the article “The Messy Media Ethics Behind the Sony Hack”, the author has said right about the fact that the gray area where most of the information resides in between the private and public or between prurient and illuminating might not be the exception but the new normal. Hacking the private information no matter what the reason is should be considered unethical and immoral act disregard of the reason that why such an action is being taken by the government or by the journalist at first place (Petersen, 2014).

Apart from these, the social media and the modern technology has made the hackers more powerful even before. Now that people put almost every sort of their personal information from their names, date of births to their debit, credit card account details on many of the online purchasing sites and even on movie sites. The hackers has made millions of dollars just by stealing this information.

Many of the female celebrities have seen as the victim and their very private pictures was being leaked out by their own husbands and boyfriends. This is another one of the leading problems of the modern world. In the article “Why Revenge Porn is Really F*cked Up” it has been seen that was not a new thing for many of us to hear or read but we really do not pay attention to the sensitivity of this topic. In this article, the author has made a discussion about Chrissy Chambers and what had happened to her. Chamber has been known to many of us by an American activist and YouTube star and she had made a history as being the first ever person in the UK to bring both civil and criminal charges against her former partner who posted the revenge porn (Finch, 2015).

What has been discussed above made a crystal clear image that the technology and the social media has given us more disadvantages than we can count the advantages. Our personal life, our private life, the family time, the family union, the physical life, practical and even the social life all has been effected so much that we cannot even count them all. And even if we stop using the social media still, we cannot be able to get our normal life back. Social media has engulfed it all and with every passing day how far the technology is going it is impossible to stop this but we can make some limits in order to protect ourselves.

Work Cited:

1. Tim Rayner. “Foucault and Social Media: Life in a Virtual Panopticon.” Philosophy for Change, 11 Nov. 2012, philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/foucault-and-social-media-life-in-a-virtual-panopticon.
2. Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, 23 Jan. 2020, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868.
3. Cho, Julia. “Families Don’t Use Landlines Anymore.” The Atlantic, 12 Dec. 2019, http://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/12/families-landline-shared-phone/603487.
4. Petersen, Anne Helen. “The Messy Media Ethics Behind The Sony Hacks.” BuzzFeed News, 12 Dec. 2014, http://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/complicated-sony-ethics.
5. Finch, Sam Dylan. “6 Reasons Why Revenge Porn Is Really mess Up (And How One Woman Is Pushing Back).” Everyday Feminism, 16 June 2015, everydayfeminism.com/2015/06/6-reasons-why-revenge-porn-is-actually-really-fcked-up-and-how-one-woman-is-pushing-back.

This week’s topic “Reality, Authenticity & making Sense of it All” is the closing topic for the blogging. And it is covering the rest of the material. The articles and the materials give for this topic is all relevant to the topic.

Starting from the article, “Addicted to Distraction” the author has made the discussion about how we are so addicted to the things that make us distracted. He raised the point that when a person has access to so many seductive things, he/she would get distracted so easily. He further said that: “It’s not only substances that can be addicting; it’s activities as well. If an activity compulsively pulls you toward it to the extent that you shirk responsibilities, fail to finish projects, neglect your relationships and more, and consider yourself addicted to distraction.”

The next article: “The Kids Are Not Alright” the author mentioned the story of a young man who used to have a shelter when he was studying and when he passed out he was left all alone and he had to have a gun with him all the time. After sometime, he was gotten out of jail after serving six months for gun charge. The author said that: “In recent decades, policy makers have recognized early childhood as a critical developmental period. Yet emerging science indicates that young adulthood may be just as significant. Early adults’ brains are still developing, and, as Kim writes, it’s an important transition time, when one learns to live on one’s own. Universities and colleges provide support for young people who are fortunate enough to attend. But we’ve done little to help young people who come from families of limited means.”

He mentioned in the article that kids who used to get raised in a poor neighborhood or children from the foster houses are more vulnerable as compared to other children. So these children end up having an insecure future and bad habits and thus fall in crime. I felt this thing, I think there should be proper policies and these policies should implemented in order to protect the rights of such children.

What do you guys think about this fact? Do you agree that policy makers should make it clear that policies are being implemented or not?

The next article: “The Decade the Internet Lost Its Joy” the author said that the internet was always bad, but at least it used to be fun. At the start of this decade, being online still had less of the feeling of chaotic good than the years preceding it, but it wasn’t yet consumed by the monolithic forces that rule today’s web. Since the turn of the millennium, we’ve been used to the flood of emerging platforms — Myspace, Xanga, Friendster, Napster, Flickr, Tumblr, Neopets — each vying to be a better version of the last.

The author further added that “As user experience became more seamless, we began to miss the internet’s seams. We used to begrudgingly click through individual pages and archives — now everything has an infinite scroll. Where we once felt in control of the amount of a site we wanted to see, feeds now pull us down and down into the ever-widening abyss.”

I agree with the author. The internet had given us many of the problems as compared to the benefits. What is your opinion about this fact?

Keeping in view this week’s topic, I am going to share an article relevant to it foster children and the crime rate.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1541204020939643

This week’s topic “NetSpeak, Memes, Emoji’s & Participatory Culture” is a different topic with totally a different meaning to understand. After reading the articles and listening the ted talks. I came to know more about what the emoji is use for.

Starting from the article “Emoji Don’t Mean What They Use to do” the author said that the pictorial language has now moved away from the ideography and now is part of the illustration. And while moving so it lost the power of expression in this process. With every passing years, the number of emoji are being increased and giving people diverse options to choose from. People now are so dependent upon the emoji in order to express their emotions. The emoji that we use in our daily lives does not tend to mean what they represent. In the article the author said that “Pictograms are powerful because they are specific but flexible. The train can represent a light-rail line, a subway, a toy, and so on. A snowman can mean a literal snowman, or a warning that it’s cold out, or even a gripe about the office thermostat. The pleasure, and power, of emoji arises from the ambiguity inherent in picto-ideographic writing”.

In the next article “If It Doesn’t Spread, its Dead”, the author talked about the future of the entertainment world. The author further added that in the world of entertainment the people are so involved with the viral media and memes that we are lacking the connection with the real world. The author said that “Use of the terms “viral” and “memes” by those in the marketing, advertising and media industries may be creating more confusion than clarity. Both these terms rely on a biological metaphor to explain the way media content moves through cultures, a metaphor that confuses the actual power relations between producers, properties, brands, and consumers.”

The third article “Breaking up isn’t hard as it used to be on (Facebook)” has made the discussion even more interesting. The author in this article discusses the love of the modern world that as the world is growing fast so is the love life of the modern people. And now people find it easy to break up on Facebook and they do not even feel hurt about it. But one of the feature of Facebook makes it quite a difficult task to do. The memory list where your memories after a year will be shown and even you moved on it is still difficult to see those happy memories there.

In the Ted Talk “Memes and temes” Susan Blackmore she said that memes are like the virus that spread from brain to brain. She said that humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme which spreads itself via technology.

All of the above discussion make me to think about the fact that how we have turned our lives from reality to digital world where in order to express the love, sadness, humor and excitement we are slaves of the emoji now.

What you think about this fact? Do you think that this digital life we are living is worthy?

For this week’s news post. I have chosen this article to share with you all in order to understand more about the emoji and their different meanings.

https://ludejo.eu/10-emoji-that-dont-mean-what-you-think/

This week’s topic is very interesting yet alarming for many of us because it opens up the side effects of the technology even more to let us all know and be aware of it. The topic “Ethics, Privacy, Porn (Revenge) and Terrorism” covers all of the aspects and the material provided for the reading was sufficient enough to understand this topic.

Starting from the article “Terrordotcom: IS’s Social Media Warfare in Syria and Iraq” has enlighten the fact that how social media and internet is being used in order to spread terror around the world. The author in the article made a discussion on the fact that how the terrorist organizations today use internet and most notably social-media network in order to create the effects they desire through a series of on-line activities. The author said that: “From a strategy point of view, IS has employed social media to gain attention to mass media and strategic audiences, amplify and control its messaging in support of its narrative in order to recruit and radicalize followers.”

The second article “Why Privacy Matters Even If You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’”. If you have got nothing to hide, you have got nothing to fear was a common sentence we all have listened in our lives so many times and the debate is not new to make. But the author suggests here that if you have got nothing to hide you still wanted to have your privacy and your personal life being secured. The author further put light on the difference “between nothing to hide” and secrecy by saying that: “The deeper problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of secrecy. In contrast, understanding privacy as a plurality of related issues demonstrates that the disclosure of bad things is just one among many difficulties caused by government security measures.”

From above this, I think the author is so on point. We all wanted to have some privacy no matter if we have got something to hide or not.

What do you say about this?

The third article i.e. “Why Revenge Porn is Really F*cked Up” was not a new thing for many of us to hear or read but we really do not pay attention to the sensitivity of this topic. In this article, the author has made a discussion about Chrissy Chambers and what had happened to her.

Chamber has been known to many of us by an American activist and YouTube star and she had made a history as being the first ever person in the UK to bring both civil and criminal charges against her former partner who posted the revenge porn. After reading the article, I felt so bad about her. I believe that every person got the right to say NO when they are not OK in a relationship but taking revenge is not maturity rather cruelty which shows the mentality of a person. What happened with Chamber was not a new story, it is happening with many of the females in the same or in different form but it is happening and not all the women raise their voices against the criminal which made them more powerful I think.

What do you say about this? Do you think that we all have to raise voice against the criminality? Does females have to speak up against the humiliations and assaults they bear?  

Keeping in mind this week’s topic, I am going to share a news article on the topic of “The Privacy Project: Does Privacy Matters?” which further includes many of the articles on the same topic.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/privacy-project-does-privacy-matter

This week’s topic brings a new discussion in-front of us i.e. “Celebrity, Branding and Marketing” and the material provided have given the information not only about the life of celebrities on the social media but how different people are using this platform for their own purposes.

The article: “Essena O’Neil Quits Instagram” was one of the article I found really appreciating and finally the one with whom I can relate my opinions. Essena O’Neil who was considered the teenage social media superstar, deleted many of her social media accounts and change the name of her Instagram account to “Social Media is Not Real”. Later in the series of the confessional videos that she made for her social media family she stated that while she was being watched by thousands of people and considered to have a dream life, but in reality she was becoming miserable and tired with this fictional world and highly edited life style.

On one of her Instagram post she said: “Without realizing, I’ve spent the majority of my teenage life being addicted to social media, social approval, social status, and my physical appearance. Social media, especially how I used it, isn’t real.”

The second article: “Why People Get Annoyed at Celebrities on Kickstarter (And Why They Probably shouldn’t)” was totally a different from the previous one and it showed how the celebrities used the social media in for their branding and marketing purposes. In this article, it has been stated that an actor/director Zach Braff launched a Kickstarter and raised money to almost $2 million in just two days. While originally Kickstarter was launched in order to make the young people fund their dreams. Like for the youngsters who have the big ideas but no bank balance to make their dream come true. This was the idea for those sort of people but then we had seen an actor/director launched the Kickstarter in order to raise fund from the people for his new upcoming movie and that’s what make the people offended from the celebrities. But that’s really not the truth or is it? What do you think about it?

The question that was raised here is why an actor needed to do this?

Was it because of the shortage for the movie funds or just an act to grab the attention?

And I think that people should really focus on what they are raising funds for before just getting started with whatever they see attractive. They should know the reasons and then decide either to put their portion in it or not. Like in this case I think what Zach did was wrong and he had taken the rights of other little people who was first not able to make their ideas turn into reality and then the people like Zach grabbed their rights in order to gain more and more profits.

“The Filter Bubble” a term being used by Eli Pariser, the main idea or theme of the movie was based on the fact that internet is vast and can be taken as a universe of information but what we are able to see is made filtered by the giants like Google, Facebook and YouTube have made things personalized for us. It is just our thought that we are having access to everything but in reality every click of ours is being monitored and guided.

Keeping in mind this week’s topic, I am going to share an article which is also describing that now many celebrities are freezing their Facebook and Instagram accounts.

– https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/high-profile-celebrities-are-freezing-their-facebook-and-instagram-accoun/585291/

When I read this week’s topic, I felt that there is something very serious is going to be revealed on me. And when I started to read the articles, I got answers for my curiosities. This week’s topic “Politics, Subversion of Democracy, News (Fake) and Digital Activism” is based on many of the articles, news and reports on how social media platforms are being used by the politicians in order to get their motives fulfilled.

Starting from the article: “Longtime NBC Reporters Quits”, in this article one of the reporter William Arkin stated the mainstream social media as “Prisoners of Donald Trump”. He further stated that his 30 years of career in NBC were the “Trump free” days and now everything is happening as per the requirement of the President. The media has now become puppet in the hands of the politicians.

In one of the memo, he writes, quote, “I find it disheartening that we do not report the failures of the generals and national security leaders. I find it shocking that we essentially condone continued American bumbling in the Middle East and now Africa through our ho-hum reporting.”

In the next article: “The Next Big Focus in the Russia Investigation: Social Media”, it has been stated that for the last nine months, Twitter and Facebook have tried to dodge the intense public scrutiny involved with the investigation into Russian interference in last year’s presidential election. The Congressional investigation are digging in on Russia’s use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies to try to influence the 2016 campaign. From both of these articles, what I got to understand that everyone in this world including the politicians are using the social media in order to get their campaigns successful. The social media platforms are considered the most wide spread platforms and are being used by every person of every age.

The CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg gave this statement: “We support Congress in deciding how to best use this information to inform the public, and we expect the government to publish its findings when their investigation is complete”.

My question here to you all is:

What do you think about this campaign?

What are your opinions on the statement of NBC reporter and on the statement of Mark Zuckerberg?

The next article: “Can Facebook Fix Its Own Worst Bug? Has enlighten the fact that Mark Zuckerberg now acknowledges the dangerous side of the social revolution he helped started. But is one of the most powerful tool for connection in human history capable of adapting to the world it created.

And the last article named “The Traffic Factories” the report’s premise is that it is impossible to settle these debates until we understand how people and organizations are producing and using the data and how these information gathered by the internet companies are then used by them either in positive or in negative form.

All of this discussion is based on the fact that Internet has made such changings and is being used in various ways that now it is impossible to stop its diversity. The politicians are getting their missions successful by using the media as per their purposes.

I have chosen this week’s news post on the same topic that is being discussed in order to get all of you understand that how much the politics and the politicians are ruling the internet these days.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/19/55-of-u-s-social-media-users-say-they-are-worn-out-by-political-posts-and-discussions/

This week we are going to discuss some new topics related to “Copyright, Privacy and Fair Use”. The materials that has been given is covering different topics for this week’s blog. The reading material like “South Park wins Lawsuits over “What What in the Butt” Parody, “Yes, Copyright’s sole purpose is to benefit the Public”, “Fair use Doctrine”, and the documentary “Downloaded: Napster Documentary” was quite interesting to watch.

Starting from the article “South Park wins Lawsuits over “What What in the Butt”, it was about the fight over a copyright video where the Brownmark Films in November, 2008 was got sued over a South Park episode entitled “Canada on Strike” in which the character Butters re-created an Internet video sensation from the singer Samwell. Brownmark claimed that the re-creation of its video constituted copyright infringement. In response to that Viacom said it was a parody and fell squarely within “fair use” exceptions to copyright. We all are familiar with the copyright term and that if we are using any other person work either the writing, visuals or in any other form we are bound to give the credit to that original person and we cannot use their work in any case.

Coming towards the next article “Yes, Copyright’s sole purpose is to benefit the Public”, this articles was based on the constitution about the copyright phenomenon and the debates of people on it. The key argument of this article is what the law does for both author and for the general public, who it impacts and how is it structured. And it is simply outrageous, and outside the monarchy of the logical thoughts, to argue that it was designed first to benefit the artists. Of course, it surely does benefit the artist as a byproduct of the method. But it also refer that if it benefits the public then it is great to benefit the author.

What I have understood from the term “Fair use Doctrine: is that it is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected work in certain circumstances. In the Copyright Act the whole list of the situations was given in which the use of copyright work will be considered un the terms of the “Fair use” and the person is not being charged for copying the work of any author.

In the last, the documentary “Downloaded: Napster Documentary” was based on the time when the use of internet was not that common among people. And in that period of time it was like a big thing for people to have the music of their choices available on internet and they can download those tracks too. This documentary was based on such a topic in which two of the characters named Sean Parker Shawn Fanning were dreaming for a file-sharing online service that brought down the wrath of rock stars and record companies.

From all of the above discussion, I have felt that we are now engulfed so much in the internet and we now become use to of having the information access to us that we do not consider copyrights anymore. My question to you all is

• What are your suggestions/opinions on these facts?
• Do you think that Copyrights should be placed for everything available on internet?
• Do you consider the Copyrights when you use any of the data from the Internet

Keeping in mind this week’s topic I am going to share an article on the Copyright news about Netflix sued for Copyright Infringement over Tiger King.

Link: https://www.intellectualpropertynews.com/copyright-news/

The topic we are given this week to talk about is circulating around the phenomenon of Digital Activism and Social Justice. The three of the articles and the Ted talks all are about the Digital activism and Social Justice and how technology have changed the behavior of humans on social media.

Starting from the articles i.e. “The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism”, “The Digital Cultural Shift: From Scale to Power” and “10 twitter Hashtag that changed the way we talk about social issues”. These articles enlighten that how digital activism is spreading rapidly because of the technology.

The cute cat theory of digital activism is a theory concerning Internet activism, Web censorship and “Cute cats” which is developed by Ethan Zuckerman in 2008. This theory stated that most people who use the internet are not really interested in the campaigns of activism rather they are browsing the internet for their own personal pleasures (searching for pornography and lolcats). This totally reflects the behaviors of people and their intentions for using the internet.

Coming towards the second article, “The Digital Cultural Shift: From Scale to Power”, it has been stated that many of the social justice movements in the 21^st century are running with the help of the internet in order to achieve greater scales and wider audience. The strategies and the approaches in the in the Digital Cultural shift report provide a path forward for addressing the way social movements integrate new approaches or remain stuck in a cycle that limits our effectiveness.

At this point a question raised in my mind that:

Are these strategies building power for long run or is it just for the present time amusement purposes?

Coming towards the last article i.e. “10 twitter Hashtag that changed the way we talk about social issues”, a list of 10 hashtag campaigns that has been run online for their specific purposes. Like some of the examples are #GivingTuesday, #YesAllWomen, #PrayForJapan.

After reading all of these articles the only thinking that came in my mind is about the use of technology and internet. The sole purpose of the internet once was to provide the general public with the information that is not available at the local levels and mainly for the study purposes. But now with the passage of time the trend of using internet has been changed a lot that I wonder what is going to come new in the next coming decades. The questions like

Are these technologies overcoming the purposes they are meant to fulfil at first place?

Are we people using the internet or the social activism right of ours in a right way?

Coming towards the Digital Activism Ted Talk, I heard Zeynep Tufekci on the topic “Online Social Change: Easy to Organize, Hard to Win” and she has raised the same questions that no doubt today a single email has the power to bring a worldwide change, online social activism are easy to go thing but these does not last for long. As I raised the question at first place that either these strategies are going to make long run changes or covering just the present?

Keeping in mind this week’s topic, I have chosen this article to share with you all which shares the information on the topic that How summer of 2020 has become a year of digital activism both online and offline. Link: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/summer-digital-protest-how-2020-became-summer-activism-both-online-n1241001

The material given for this week’s blog covers a new topic of the modern world or we can say a new problem. The readings and the movie “Snowden” both are on the same topic i.e. the data breach and hacking which can be considered one of the biggest threat to people of the world from technology.

Starting from the article “The Messy Media Ethics Behind the Sony Hack”, the author has said right about the fact that the gray area where most of the information resides in between the private and public or between prurient and illuminating might not be the exception but the new normal. Hacking the private information no matter what the reason is should be considered unethical and immoral act disregard of the reason that why such an action is being taken by the government or by the journalist at first place. In this article the author said that “The stance that journalists and academics take on these documents has the potential to guide our nation’s understanding of how we treat the compromise of the 21st century’s most valuable commodity, for both individuals and corporations: privacy.” And I totally agree with this point that our privacy is on threat in any case.

The other articles have mentioned the list of the hackings that have been made in the recent years and the data of the general public like their name, Id card numbers, debit and credit card numbers, date of births all have been stolen and then these very sensitive information is used by the hackers in order to earn money in the black market.

Coming towards the movie of the week i.e. “Snowden”, I have found the movie quite interesting, the character of Edward has played the role of whistleblower and leaked the highly classified information from the NSA when he was an employee there. He choose to take this step in order to expose his government in front of the general public and to let the people know that the things they consider private are not private because the government is always spying on them. In order to take such a big step he had to compromise his whole life, his career and his girlfriend. He moved to Hong Kong and from there he planned this whole thing.

 I feel like “the modern battlefield is everywhere” whether Snowden remain successful to open the eyes of the general public or not but in this modern world we cannot deny this truth anymore that we are constantly being seen by the agencies and every single act of ours is being captured either we like or dislike it. Why are we facing all these problems is only because of the advancements in the technology. It is only because of the advancements that now our most private activities or deeds are not private anymore. My question to all of you is

Are you okay with this change?

Does the movie attract your attention? Did you like or dislike the concept?

Keeping in mind this week’s topic, I have chosen this article in order to let you guys know that on what levels these breaches have reached so far and what are the consequences that people have to bear from it.

Link: https://auth0.com/blog/the-11-biggest-data-breaches-of-2020-so-far/

This week’s blog has revealed a new dark side of the technology and the social media. The episode of the Black Mirror: Hated in the Nation. The articles and other material all have given so much to think about.

Starting from the Black mirror episode, this episode brings forward the darkest face of the technology that cruel it can be. In the start of the episode Jo Power, a journalist was shown who was having so much negativity and death threats on the social media platforms right after publically lambasting a disability rights activist recent self-immolation. And then we have all seen how she killed herself. Then in the whole of the episode this hashtag game started and people without knowing the consequences about what they are voting for bring the lives of people to an end. Surprisingly, the device that is used for the killing purpose are the Autonomous Drone Insect (ADI), which are created to replace the extinct bee population. Later it turned out that they were locally hacked and all the deaths were made because of the voting people have made online. And in the end people who voted for #DeathTo all got killed and in this way more than 380,000 people were got killed because of the misuse of the social media platform.

Watching this episode made me feel like we are not far from this sort of future if we keep on going like this. I wanted to ask you all what are your thoughts about this episode? Do you see this coming in the near future?

After reading the article “How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet”, I again felt so bad that what people have started doing. Can’t they just see how badly they are behaving. Troll is the term used for fishing method online thieves used to find their victims. Many of the cases are mentioned there where many of the people who tried to do something different would end up getting the online threats of death, rape and doxing threats. It has been mentioned in the article that ““Trolls are portrayed as aberrational and antithetical to how normal people converse with each other. And that could not be further from the truth,”. Why people do not see that what their words can do to a person? Why we find it easy to make a comment on a person on any of the social media without thinking about the consequences?

In the next of the article, “How the Internet Created the Age of Rage”, again this article talked all about the people who comment ill while hiding themselves behind the screens. The article was full of examples where people through their comments are spreading the hate and psychologist says this is some sort of mental disorder that make people do stuff like this while hiding their own personalities. I think the excess use of technology have made people so involved in that they no longer know what humanity use to be like. People or should I say the social media people are left with no human feelings at all.

Again, I raise a question here that who is responsible for all of this at first place? What make people so upset and so full of hate that they can find no place but the internet to troll on? Is this every going to stop somewhere?

For this week’s news article, which I found very much authentic to the topic of how social media is spreading more hate than love and is covering the current scenario of the global pandemic we all are facing.

Link: https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/how-hatred-sells-more-than-love-on-social-media-11583778582160.html