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| What are Social Media? | /what/ | what |
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This website is about quitting Social Media, we got that. But <i>what</i> does a Social Medium actually is? Here, we are not speaking of <b><i>all</i></b> Social Media platforms, but only some of them. | false |
The first few rows of the entry “Social Media„ on Wikipedia recite the following words:
Social media are interactive digitally-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation or sharing/exchange of information, ideas, career interests, and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks.
While challenges to the definition of social media arise due to the broad variety of stand-alone and built-in social-media services currently available, there are some common features:
1. Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.
2. User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions—is the lifeblood of social media.
3. Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social-media organization.
4. Social media facilitate the development of online social networks by connecting a user’s profile with those of other individuals or groups.
If we blindly and strictly followed the definition above, by quitting Social Media we would quit most of the platforms which populate the internet altogether.
Nevertheless, it is not quite so. This website focuses on some Social Media, specifically, we may affirm that here we focus on the worst ones, this is to say the ones whose negative aspects prevail over the positive ones.
Unfortunately, there is no easy term or definition to demarcate which Social Media platforms are included or not in the points made by this website; as a shorthand, to avoid over-complicating the matter—which is very subtle and complicate by itself— we will be calling “Social Media” the platforms most of the inhabitants of planet Earth would think about immediately after reading or hearing those two words, even if it's not completely correct.
By “Social Media”, we mean Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram, but, even if they are the main ones, it must acknowledge that there is a great number of other little or even tiny ones which are no better than the ones formerly written.
So, which platforms should be abandoned and which ones not?
The answer is not definite and clear, but it is easy to have an idea of how bad a networking platform is by confronting the Why page with the Privacy Policy of the service you are interested in.
Further reading
- Social Media statistics: active users, revenue, data about the main Social Media platforms
- Facebook ads library, look for ads and advertisers