Social Media Practices Analysis

Almost everyone has one or more social media accounts such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and so on. The major news sources or mainstream news firms such as CNN, Fox News, BBC, Al-Jazeera, Sky and others have created pages on social media where they publish the news and other stories (Bakhurst, 2018). Before publishing on social media sites, one should be aware of what they publish and share because it reaches to many people. In Facebook, there is a share button where information that one posts can reach to billions of others who are not in their friends list. In Instagram also, there is the explore option where people can search for what they want and if an account is not private the posts can reach a wider audience.

They mostly attach a photo or video with a quote caption if on Instagram or a post on Facebook. People like posts that trigger their emotions or conflict their interests. They get a platform to air their opinions regarding the matter. Also, in Facebook, the news accounts insert a link accompanying a post that will lead the followers to their site to read the full news story. Actually, this is the most important practice by these social media accounts. In addition, exploring appropriate penalties and levy on the technology companies such as Facebook to remediate damaging social costs and so on. The social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram needs to be regulated by the government through laying some rules that prevent foreign interference or infestation of spreading false information regarding a serious matter such as election.

The government needs to regulate social media on posting and disseminating of fake news. (Timberg, Romm & Dwoskin, 2018). In my observation, bots accounts in social media are also on the rise and this needs to be stopped. Among the most evident ethical concerns include anonymity or privacy, data storage or sharing as well as consent (Moreno, 2013). On matters of privacy on social media usage one cannot be completely sure if the person they are communicating with is the person they think they are. People can easily conceal their identity on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, where they create an account with other people’s names and pretend to be them. Also, the creators of the sites observe everything the users do on the platforms.

There is a lot of stalking going on in social media platforms. People can also allow others post on their timeline any type of information or send a private message in the inbox if they want privacy. Twitter makes use of hashtags for tweets for related topics. The topics can trend if many people are using the same hashtags on their tweets. One tweet can reach all the followers a person has on the site. Instagram is mainly focused on sharing photos and videos. References Bakhurst, K. BBC - The Editors: How has social media changed the way newsrooms work? Retrieved from http://www. bbc. co. uk/blogs/theeditors/2011/09/ibc_in_amsterdam. Retrieved from https://www. nytimes. com/2017/10/13/reader-center/social-media-guidelines. html Timberg ,, C.