Social networks for me

I remember a friend told me about Facebook and that she spent hours there, the truth in that first conversation I did not understand much, but days later she helped me to create my account, that would be my first social network, the truth is I did not believe that it was something that would remain in time and much less that later so many other networks would emerge, each one different and at the same time intertwined.

I recently wrote another post in which I touch on the subject of social networks. For me, social networks are good up to a certain point and I believe that many of them have deviated from the purpose for which they were created or perhaps after the demands and uses of their different users.

For example Facebook, allowed me at the beginning to catch up with the lives of many friends and even family members who were no longer close to me and it was great to see their photos, and chat with them through their internal messaging while I saw their profiles, now I post memes and very little of my life, because I learned the hard way, that can make us spend bad times if you expose much of your private life or details of addresses or places you frequent. The truth was a very embarrassing experience that I lived.

In the case of Instagram my personal account, ended up becoming a broadcasting account to help kittens find homes or perhaps to help them in emergencies, as for TikTok, for me it is a source of fun for the amount of crazy things I see there, which make me laugh, but in it I do not upload almost any kind of content, that is, I am a consumer of what they upload to it.

As for the old Twitter now X has served me to see news in real time and now to disseminate my publications.

Social networks can be useful for professionals and companies to make their services known, but I think that for the younger audience, teenagers, it has been more harmful than beneficial, as they have become the popularity meter, since the likes someone receives after uploading a photo or video is directly proportional to the popularity and acceptance they have.

Social networks, in the case of young people and children, have become places where they can suffer from cyberbullying and also be victims of a pedophile, to mention a few situations.

As for adults, we are not exempt from suffering some kind of situation due to social networks, such as believing in some fake news and spreading it, also being victims of scams, I myself was a victim of one, or exposing much of our personal information such as place of work, area in which we live, our children's school or uploading photographs in which this information can be seen, exposing us also to kidnapping or extortion.

On the other hand, I believe that social networks can be and have been useful, but they have also become sites where criminals have found a place and a new way to do their business, so we must be careful with what we share on them, as well as the people we accept as friends, as we allow them to see the information we share on them.

Finally, it is of utmost importance to educate young people so that they know the pros and cons of social networks. As parents, we must be attentive to what the children and young people in our family upload to social networks and who their friends are on them. I leave here my participation Weekend-Engagement #219