Social Media: Venomous yet Sweet, by Ahmed Elghezlani

Communication has fundamentally developed thanks to the emergence of big tech. Now the world is more connected than ever, and social media, with all its platforms, has shifted connection from traditional emails to virtual face-to-face zoom meetings and, who knows, hologram room-chats in the near future; however, this incredible shift has unfortunately more disadvantages than positive sides. A great portion of social media users have become extremely addicted to some platforms to the extent that some lives ruined because of one Facebook post. On the other hand, other users have defended social media on the account that it has played a major role in solving many issues in society.  In this article, we will go through the issues stemmed from social media as well as the positive side of it.

Social media has many disadvantages, and addiction is a major issue. We all love having a social media account to stay in touch with our beloved ones, but most of us develop addiction to using these platforms such as Facebook which the more you swipe up, the more you dive into a bottomless rabbit hole; almost all the well-known platforms use this technique of scrolling or swiping up, because we human beings are curious by nature to discover and go deeper into things, so to speak. To fully dominate the virtual world, Facebook adopted its new son Instagram and taught it the same principles to make users spend more time logged in; principles such as no "dislike button", no one dislikes your posts, so you keep posting. Addiction triggers more issues as well, mainly psychological disorders such depression and anxiety. Youths and teenagers are more likely to have these two problems as a result of an excessive usage of some social media platforms; for example, recently this year a teenager in India threatened to commit suicide once the government discussed banning Ticktock; this is just one case of millions  of addicted users. 

To add salt to injury, social media cannot only make one addicted to it,  but it can also make them feel envy and hatred towards others. It is common nowadays to celebrate your new job or new car on social media, yet some social media users, who have been dreaming to live that kind of life, have developed dangerous levels of envy; but is it their fault though? Not very likely; some had no envy at all before using social media; it is the algorithm's fault, the ones who designed and coded social media platforms are the first to blame. The algorithm feeds on every user's status; for example, if you share, post or search about a particular topic such as "beautiful life", the algorithm, as a result, will suggest hundreds of posts  about that topic; not even on that platform you uses to search for that topic, but also on all the apps and platforms you will use in the future, "beautiful life" will haunt you until your life is beautiful no more. 

Oddly enough, some users strongly defend social media usage to the extent that some have categorized it under the umbrella of human rights and freedom of speech. It has become a sole window for indoors, in particular, to express their anger about society issues; for instance, this year many users used hash tags concerning "Black Lives Matter" protests in America, and as a result of angry social media users, the whole world knew and stood together against racism. Besides, thanks to social media quite a number of nonprofit organizations were able to collect donations for cancer patients as well as the children suffering from hunger in Africa, and many other issues solved with the aid of social media users; therefore, platforms, like Facebook, have tremendously made numerous contributions to many positive outcomes despite the risks stemmed from it. 

Thus, one has to be cautious when using social media; it can be very useful but also extremely dangerous at the same time. Social media users have to train themselves to live without their favorite platforms to avoid the risk of addiction; and most importantly they should not believe anything that appears on their feeds for fake news has become the new cancer of the 21th century.