ICAT111 & IURX113 – Text for Test 1 (Week 5) 2024

Surname __________________________________________ Initials _______________

Student number __________________________________

Instructions (you can also read this beforehand, to save time)

1. Make use of the text Is social media good for society? to answer this class test.
2. You are allowed to bring your own pre-prepared text to the test venue, but the text is also
attached at the back of this test. You may take off the text to make it easier for you to answer
the test.
3. You must hand in all test material (the text at the back and the filled-in test as well as your
prepared texts that you were allowed to bring) when you leave the venue.
4. Answer all the questions on this test.
5. Write neatly.
6. Pay particular attention to your language.

Is social media good for society?

1. Around seven out of ten people around the world (69%) use social media sites including
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. On social media sites, users may
develop biographical profiles, communicate with friends and strangers, do research, and
share thoughts, photos, music, links, and more. With so many people using social media
on a daily basis, an important question arises: is social media good for society? Here are
a few arguments advocating for the use of social media, and a few arguments against its
use.

Pro 1 Social media promotes community that can translate into or supplement offline

relationships

2. Using social media, people can have friends with similar interests in multiple cities,
provinces, or even countries. Closer to home, social media can help people find each other
in a busy world, from mom groups and soccer leagues to book clubs and university groups.
“Most young people will say that social media and networked games are a lifeline to
supportive connections with friends and loved ones. This was critical during the COVID-
19 pandemic when schools and sports were off limits,” explained Mizuko Ito, Professor of
Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Irvine.

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3. Studies have shown that not only does social media participation not completely obliterate
in-person friendships as once feared, but that online relationships are a key supplement
that adds to one’s well-being. People are able to share more of their lives with friends and
family and may receive crucial support from groups they do not have in offline life. 80% of
teens felt more connected to friends, 67% felt they had people to support them, and 58%
felt more accepted because of social media (Anderson & Jiang, ______).

4. Traditional barriers to friendships are reduced or completely removed for adults who are
no longer in school or do not have a pool of co-workers, particularly when working from
home. Shy, introverted, or socially reticent people can use social media to reach out to
potential friends with lowered barriers and risks. Likewise, relationships that might
previously have gone dormant now persist over time online. As such, social media users
tend to report that they have access to more social support and have lower psychological
distress.

5. Social media can also promote school and work communities. The platforms allow
students and parents to connect to each other as well as teachers and other school staff
outside of school hours to establish relationships as well as connect with outside
community members and experts for internships, interviews, and other opportunities.

Pro 2 Social media encourages civic and political responsibility

6. “Many of today’s youth take to digital spaces to develop their civic identities and express
political stances in creative ways, claiming agency that may not be afforded to them in
traditional civic spaces. The key difference between civic engagement by youth today and
older, more traditional forms of action is the availability of digital technology, which
provides a low-barrier-to-entry canvas for young people to create content that is potentially
vastly scalable,” according to a 2024 UNICEF report. Social media creates a more
equitable point of entry and space for continued civic and political activity than traditional
spaces. This easy access contributes to a sense of socio-political empowerment which, in
turn, makes young people more likely to participate in offline political activities, including
voting.

7. Social media allows for political activists to fundraise, partner with influencers to boost the
message, promote events including marches, share stories, and spread awareness of their
chosen issue(s). For example, social media use fuelled political protests including the Arab
Spring, Black Lives Matter, #LoveWins, #MeToo, and Occupy Wall Street.

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Pro 3 Social media bolsters inclusivity and diversity on- and offline

8. Social media brings everyone together into one online space. With tools including
hashtags and groups, people from diverse backgrounds who have similar identities,
interests, or goals can find each other easily. Similarly, people can explore people, cultures
and ideas with which they are unfamiliar without judgment from their offline communities.
Pew Research Centre found in a survey of adults in 11 nations across four global regions
that in many key respects, smartphone users – and especially those who use social media
– are more regularly exposed to people who have different backgrounds.

9. Furthermore, many companies extend their diversity, equity, and inclusion policies to
online spaces, allowing not only employees but also diverse customers, clients, and others
to be included equitably. Companies are currently producing bilingual content across the
globe to increase equality further internationally. Bilingual social media content is
becoming a marketing tool for organizations to learn about other cultures worldwide. It can
help them connect with their followers by using images that promote acceptance and
understanding of cultural diversity. Creating a diverse online space can translate into a
diverse work environment as employees and customers of diverse backgrounds feel
included and, in turn, interact with the company.

Con 1 Social media promotes cyberbullying that spills into offline life

10. Cyberbullying is the electronic posting of mean-spirited messages about a person (such
as a student) often done anonymously. Specific types of cyberbullying include but are not
limited to: flaming (online arguments with personal attacks), outing (revealing someone’s
sexual orientation without permission), trolling (being antagonistic to start arguments), and
doxing (revealing private information without permission). 66% of teens believe social
media companies are not doing enough to curb cyberbullying. And 33% of kids have
deleted a social media account to avoid cyberbullying.

11. Pew Research Centre (2022) found 59% of teens had been bullied online, including
offensive name-calling (42%), false rumours (32%), unsolicited receipt of explicit images
(25%), someone other than a parent constantly asking where they are, who they’re with or
what they’re doing (21%), physical threats (18%), and non-consensual sharing of explicit
images of the teen (7%). However, not only teens engage in cyberbullying or experience
the effects. Kids as young as ten face cyberbullying, specifically racist attacks, globally.

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The harms carry over into offline life. People under the age of 25 who were cyberbullied
were more than twice as likely to self-harm and enact suicidal behaviour than non-victims.

12. Cyberbullying victims of any age are subject to mental, emotional, and physical harms,
including distress, embarrassment, anxiety, shame, depression, loss of sleep, headaches,
and stomach-aches. Victims may be less productive or skip school and work. Some may
turn to drugs and alcohol to cope with the distress.

Con 2 Social media encourages the spread of misinformation

13. Social media platforms exploit and manipulate the impulse for like-minded people to gather
by programming algorithms to show more information of the same vein and by not
controlling the bots and trolls that spread misinformation. Human biases play an important
role. Since we’re more likely to react to content that taps into our existing grievances and
beliefs, inflammatory tweets will generate quick engagement. It’s only after that
engagement happens that the technical side kicks in. If a tweet is retweeted, favorited, or
replied to by enough of its first viewers, the newsfeed algorithm will show it to more users,
at which point it will tap into the biases of those users too—prompting even more
engagement, and so on. At its worse, this cycle can turn social media into a kind of
confirmation bias machine, one perfectly tailored for the spread of misinformation.

14. According to a 2022 study, “disaster, health, and politics emerged as the three domains
where misinformation on social media can cause severe harm, often leading to casualties
or even irreversible effects. For example, misinformation in these areas has higher
potential to exacerbate the existing crisis in society.” Director-General, Tedros Adhanom
Ghebreyesus, noted about the COVID-19 pandemic: “We are not just fighting an epidemic;
we are fighting an infodemic,” referring to the misinformation populating social media
feeds about the virus. The same might be said about any number of topics populating
social media feeds.

Con 3: Social media increases privacy risks across the Internet

15. Social media is a hotbed of privacy risks including but not limited to phishing, data mining,
malware sharing, and botnet attacks. The least amount of faith afforded the organizations
and businesses that collect private data, including the federal government, cell phone
service providers, social media, and retailers. Only 49% of people had any confidence that

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social media companies could protect their private information. Moreover, while 74%
indicated that control over shared private information was “very important,” only 9% felt
they had “a lot of control” over the information.

16. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) (2024) argued, “the extraordinary growth
of social media has given platforms extraordinary access and influence into the lives of
users. Social networking companies harvest sensitive data about individuals’ activities,
interests, personal characteristics, political views, purchasing habits, and online
behaviours. In many cases this data is used to algorithmically drive user engagement and
to sell behavioural advertising—often with distortive and discriminatory impacts.” Further,
as EPIC (2024) noted, “tracking and behavioural advertising by social media companies
is not limited to the platforms themselves. Firms like Facebook use hard-to-detect tracking
techniques to follow individuals across a variety of apps, websites, and devices. As a
result, even those who intentionally opt out of social media platforms are affected by their
data collection and advertising practices.” Thus, social media compromises everyone’s
data across the Internet, including location information, health information, religious
identity, sexual orientation, facial recognition imagery, private messages, personal photos,
and more. Much of that information can be used for identity theft, in-person robbery, and
any number of other crimes.

Adapted from: ProCon.org. 2022. Is social media good for society?

https://socialnetworking.procon.org/

Additional sources:

Anderson, M. & Jiang, J. 2018. Teens and their experiences on social media.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/11/28/teens-and-their-experiences-on-social-
media/ Date of access: 19 Feb. 2024.

Epic.org. 2024. Social media privacy. https://epic.org/issues/consumer-privacy/social-media-

privacy/ Date of access: 19 Feb. 2024.

Pew Research Center. 2022. Teens and cyberbullying 2022.

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/12/15/teens-and-cyberbullying-2022/ Date of
access: 19 Feb. 2024.