The Impacts Of Social Media On Public Safety: An Analysis

Positive Impacts of Social Media

Any website allowing any kind of social interactions is known as a social media. Today, an extremely rapid growth of the social media is taking place throughout the whole world. There are various websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace etc. that help people to keep in touch with friends and family. The number of members of these social networking sites is growing rapidly each day. Both the adults and the teenagers are joining these websites. There has been a change in the world in many ways with the introduction of the social media. Each and every individual of the world have been affected with its introduction in a separate manner. In today’s world social media is helpful to people in a lot of ways. On the other hand, every good practice has a negative influence and so does social media. There are a lot of positive effects associated with the negativities and these positive effects have made the world a better and stronger place to live in.

This research is aimed to ensure the safety of general public on the social media. The factors that can be effective towards putting the general public in problems will be discussed in the upcoming sections.

There are always a positive and a negative side of everything. The side a person chooses depends on the perspective of the person and how the person is going to perceive the matter. The same theory is applicable for the social media. To some people this is a revolutionary invention and they admire the invention so much, but to some other people, only the negative impact of the invention on the society is visible (Duggan and Smith 2015).

Relationships and Friendships

The social networks have really found a way to connect to long lost friends and relatives with whom there is no contact for some reasons or the other. With the help of the social media, it has become very easy to look for old pals and talk to them, know about their lives and let them know about ours (Lenhart et al, 2015).

Reduction of Communication Barriers

There are some sharing features available on the social media sites that can help people to communicate their thoughts and their perceptions on various topics to a large number of audiences (Perrin 2015).

Business Opportunities

A crucial factor in the lives of most of the people is the social media and the social networks. It has become like a habit that whenever the laptops or the desktops are opened by us, our favorite social media sites are accessed in order to check for any available new updates. This importance of the social media to common people has been noticed by different businesses and thus they also use the social media for advertisements of their firms and products (Scott 2015).

Negative Impacts of Social Media

Addiction

It can be seen that the social media is nowadays accessed by all the people and everywhere. Thus, extensive use of the social media may cause addiction to the users and they will be posting something and checking posts and pages and eventually social media will be the only important thing in their lives (Boyd 2014). 

Isolation

The use of social media has become extensive today and people are nowadays always on the phone chatting and posting and checking posts. This has reduced the interactions with people around. There has been reduction in face to face communications and meetings and it is always online (Fuchs 2017).

Effect in Business Productivity

With the use of social media, it has become easier for the businesses to search for their clients and communicate with them. As all this work has to be done online, the employees might be distracted with their social media sites and might be more interested in checking their accounts than doing their tasks given at work. This will in turn effect the productivity of a company (Pfeffer, Zorbach and Carley 2014).

Safety of General Public

The advancement of the social media is huge and there are a huge number of online frauds that are taking place nowadays. Thus, the extensive use of the social media is sometimes considered as the leakage of information. People can collect this information and commit any crime (Ngai, Tao and Moon 2015). For example, a person has posted on the social media that they are going on a vacation for 5 days. These 5 days can be used by a thief to break in their house and rob them or the by tracking the whereabouts of the family will be easier for any stalker and they can be harmed. A lot of other situations can arise. Thus, it is important not to make personal data public in order to be safe from the social media.

Phishing

One of the many techniques to extract personal data of an individual is phishing. With this technique, sensitive information of an individual such as their usernames, passwords, details of credit cards and often money are extracted from the systems for wicked reasons (Shiller 2015).

In this research, the analysis is mainly based on the people of the country and their responses. It is mainly about what the people of the country think about the safety of the general public using the social media. Thus, data has been collected for this analysis with the help of a questionnaire (See appendix). The questionnaire contained 13 questions and the responses of 62 respondents have been recorded as valid responses. Some of the questions will be analyzed quantitatively using appropriate statistical techniques and some other questions will be dealt with qualitatively.

Analyzing Public Safety on Social Media

At first, the demographic analysis of the respondents has to be done. Thus, the age group of the respondents has been analyzed first. It can be seen very clearly from table 1 that most of the respondents to this study belong to the age group of 16 – 25 years. There can be seen 45 respondents belonging to that age group. Only 4 responses have been recorded from teenagers such as people of age below 15 years. It can be expected that the young people are much more accustomed with the social media and their usage is maximum compared to the aged people of the society. Thus, most of the respondents belonging to the age group of 16 – 25 years have been an added advantage to the study. The number of respondents belonging to different age groups is shown diagrammatically in figure 1.

Table 1: Age Group of the Respondents

Age	Frequency
16 – 25	45
26 – 35	9
36 – 45	4
Under 15	4
Grand Total	62

Figure 1: Age Group of the Respondents

The next factor that will be analyzed is the number of passwords that a person might have in order to secure their online social media accounts. Now, protecting the accounts with the help of passwords is very important. This helps to keep data secure. For the increasing security, these passwords are requested to change at regular intervals. Thus, it is very important to have more than one password. It can be seen clearly from table 2 that the number of passwords is more than 5 for most of the people. 42 participants of the study have more than 5 passwords. Thus, it can be said that most of the participants have more than 5 passwords and they are quite aware of the problems that they can face if anyone hack into their systems and extract their personal data. The distribution of the number of passwords of the respondents is given in figure 2.

Table 2: Number of Passwords given by the Respondents

Number of Passwords	Frequency
1	1
2	3
3	3
4	12
5	1
More than 5	42
Grand Total	62

Figure 2: Number of Passwords given by the Respondents

Next, the respondents were asked about their thoughts of how safe they feel on the social media. Here, 1 indicates unsafe and 5 indicates safety. The respondents have rated their thoughts about safety on a scale of 1 to 10. As it can be seen from table 3, there is a mixed response to this question. A lot of people think that they are safe and a lot others do not think that they are safe. Figure 3 shows the distribution of the ratings given by the respondents diagrammatically.

Age Group Analysis

Table 3: Safety of the Respondents on the Social Media

Safety Scale	Frequency
1	2
2	15
3	13
4	19
5	12
Grand Total	61

Figure 3: Safety of the Respondents on the Social Media

The respondents were also asked whether they know about Phishing before they answered for this questionnaire. It can be seen that 56 respondents did know about phishing from before answering this questionnaire. Thus, it is clear that most of the people do have an idea of the online frauds that take place and hence it has to be found out whether even by knowing about the problems people are becoming the victims of the problem. Table 4 gives the number of people having the knowledge of phishing prior to answering the questionnaire. Figure 4 shows the same details diagrammatically.

Table 4: Number of people with Knowledge of phishing prior to answering the questionnaire

Knowledge of Phishing	Frequency
No	6
Yes	56
Grand Total	62

Figure 4: Number of people with Knowledge of phishing prior to answering the questionnaire

Next, in order to evaluate the victims of the major problem of phishing, a very disturbing result has been obtained. Though from figure 4, it can be seen that only 10 percent of the people are unaware of the problem of phishing, yet 24 percent of the people have been victims of the problem of phishing. Thus, there are a lot of people who even by knowing the consequences of phishing are not that interested in their personal security. These people have to be even more careful to ensure their safety. This data is shown in table 5 and explained diagrammatically in figure 5.

Table 5: Number of Victims of Phishing

Phishing Victim	Frequency
No	47
Yes	15
Grand Total	62

Figure 5: Number of Victims of Phishing

It can be clearly seen from table 6 that most of the victims of phishing belong to the age group of 16 – 25 years. Hence, from here, it can be said that these young people do not much pay attention about their safety and are not much bothered about it. If these young people do not start making their accounts secure, it is just a matter of time until they face a serious problem due to phishing. Figure 6 shows the distribution of the respondents who are victims and non victims of phishing belonging to different age groups.  

Table 6: Phishing Victims according to Age Groups

Age Group	Phishing Victim	Grand Total
No	Yes
16 – 25	36	9	45
26 – 35	6	3	9
36 – 45	2	2	4
Under 15	3	1	4
Grand Total	47	15	62

 Table 6: Phishing Victims according to Age Groups

Conclusion

From all the above discussions, it is quite clear that despite of the positive effects of the social media, there a huge number of negative effects that can affect the security of the general public. With the amount of sharing of personal information done using the social media, a person can be easily tracked by their enemies or can be used as a license to steal. From the analysis of the data, it can be concluded that there are a lot of youngsters who do not understand the grave danger that they may face one day if they do not secure their accounts. Despite of knowing the problems of phishing, there are people who do not take any actions to prevent it from happening to them. It is important that the people understand the problems and take necessary actions for their security. The general public has to be this much active for their benefit. Otherwise there will be serious problems in the near future. 

References

Boyd, D., 2014. It’s complicated: The social lives of networked teens. Yale University Press.

Duggan, M. and Smith, A., 2015. Social media update 2013. Pew research center, 19.

Fuchs, C., 2017. Social media: A critical introduction. Sage.

Lenhart, A., Duggan, M., Perrin, A., Stepler, R., Rainie, H. and Parker, K., 2015. Teens, social media & technology overview 2015 (pp. 04-09). Pew Research Center [Internet & American Life Project].

Ngai, E.W., Tao, S.S. and Moon, K.K., 2015. Social media research: Theories, constructs, and conceptual frameworks. International Journal of Information Management, 35(1), pp.33-44.

Perrin, A., 2015. Social media usage. Pew Research Center.

Pfeffer, J., Zorbach, T. and Carley, K.M., 2014. Understanding online firestorms: Negative word-of-mouth dynamics in social media networks. Journal of Marketing Communications, 20(1-2), pp.117-128.

Scott, D.M., 2015. The new rules of marketing and PR: How to use social media, online video, mobile applications, blogs, news releases, and viral marketing to reach buyers directly. John Wiley & Sons.