6 Ways Facebook Affects Your Health
6 Ways Facebook Affects Your Health
Share:

Facebook, the popular American social media website, came into existence in 2004. Ever since then the website has grown into such a big platform that we cannot imagine a world without Facebook right now. Facebook has also evolved from its College-School information exchange network origins to an all-encompassing media and communication giant which it is today. Scrolling through Facebook’s home page now shows you - status updates of your friends and relatives, photos of their babies and dogs, news and cat video clips, links to news articles and even links to short films.

There is almost nothing you can’t access via Facebook. But Facebook has come into news in recent times for a lot of negative reasons. The founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerber, was called into testify in the US Congress in 2018 with regards to complaints about election manipulations and host of other controversies. So what exactly are some of these other bad effects of Facebook we will see.

1. Fake News and Mis-Information

This is possibly one of the biggest bad effects of Facebook. Facebook is essentially a user generated content publisher. What this means is that the platform has no quality control over its posts and many times it is found that users are posting fake news that are inflammatory in nature and with bad real life effects as well. Facebook has tried to combat the fake news issue in their platform by collaborating with fact checking professionals and taking down FB posts that share “mis-information”. Facebook also introduced a Factchecker tool called “Checkpoint” during General Elections in India 2019. But critics feel that these efforts aren’t enough.

know Shocking effects of using headphones

2. Loss of income for content generators

 
Facebook thrives on content generated by its user and also professional content creators. Though technically speaking Facebook allows users to share content and thus enable greater reach for content creators, in reality Facebook has caused great loss to content generators. Reason is because users have become used to staying within the website of Facebook and consuming the content in FB. This causes monetization problem ie ability of the content creators to make money out of their users. This also means that Facebook holds control over the content generated.

3. Loss of innovations in Internet Social Media


Before Facebook became big and powerful, we had lots of Social Media companies who designed and made a variety of Social Media experiences for users. For example we had orkut, Snapchat, Vine, MySpace. But most of these companies failed to succeed because Facebook copied or lifted features of their services and applied them to Facebook. Between 2008 and 2018 Facebook either bought rival social media networks with unique features or if that wasn’t possible like in Snapchat’s case, they simply copied the best features of rivals and then watch the rival crash and fail. This has led to reduction in innovation in Social Media sector.

Do not eat stale chappatis, know its side effects

4. Less real world interaction by People


Because FB has been so versatile and featured, people started to get more and more hooked to the Facebook. This is also called as screen addiction and is not an issue limited to just FB but Facebook is the biggest cause of its origins. The effect of screen addiction is that people spend less time interacting in real life or face to face and spends more time online chatting with friends by text messages. Facebook also owns the popular chap application called Whatsapp.

5. Trolling and Targeted harassment of people


Facebook by design is a very open platform and sometimes this has led to its users coming under verbal attacks from Internet trolls. These attacks can be systematic nature and occurs in huge magnitude. Some of the worst affected by this are female users of Facebook. Facebook has tried to combat this problem by making harassment reporting feature more accessible for all users and better account privacy setting.

Coronavirus badly affects economy, China will destroy 84 thousand crore paper currency

6. Privacy


Critics have called into question Facebook’s privacy policies. Facebook stores all sorts of information about its users that it can calculate. What is worse is that Facebook collects these data not just form their own website and apps but also by tracking its user’s browsing habits outside their website. Facebook is known for tracking its users and sometimes even non-users through Facebook Share Plugins that is often attached in websites for easy sharing of the content in FB.

Know the benefit of eating corn seeds

Join NewsTrack Whatsapp group
Related News