When former Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook nine years ago, odds are he did not picture it becoming one of the biggest websites used for ranting and bragging about immature actions today. I am guessing the same goes for the creators of Twitter. Tweets have quickly gone from “just setting up my twtter,” to “time to party,” or “#majorturnoff you are ugly.”
Although I am an avid user of both Facebook and Twitter, it blows my mind to see the statuses and tweets people upload on a daily basis. With family ranging from parents to even grandparents, I do not see how teenagers are even comfortable with posting about drinking and drugs.
I am not one to go around telling people how to live their lives, but relationship problems can stay away from social media. Constantly posting about how problems with your significant other is just going to cause you more problems if you drag every one of your Facebook friends or Twitter followers into it, and the odds are, not even half of them care that much about your relationship.
When social media sites were first introduced, teenagers and adults saw it as a way to get in contact with long lost friends and family living far away. Uploading photos and directly messaging family and friends to catch up used to be convenient for the old and the young, but lately I have noticed that the photos being uploaded and the posts on users’ walls have been far from anything I would want my grandparents to see. By no means am I innocent of never posting pointless or personal statuses or Tweets on social media sites, but I, unlike many of my friends try as hard as I can to keep most of my really personal problems to myself.
To me, social media is also a way for students to hide behind a screen and not stand up to people. Through Twitter I have seen that it is quiet easy for kids to create fake accounts, not knowing or understanding how easy it is for administrators or even law enforcement officers to figure out who created it. Accounts spreading rumors causing drama is more than likely not what Twitter creators had in mind for their site.
Social media is a great tool created to write what is on one’s mind in 140 characters or less. Posting photos and catching up with long lost friends and family are all great uses of sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Teens constantly posting about relationship problems, drinking and partying should be handled in their personal lives, not the lives of social media because when you post something online, it is there forever.