Do You Believe Social Media? By Atilla Hadiansyah

Do you Believe Social Media?

By Atilla Hadiansyah

The most impossible thing in today’s digital age is to go days without checking social media. We may do this because we are jobless or because we want to see what is happening on our social network. As reported by the article. Djkn.kemenkeu.go.id, Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as “A collection of web-based programs that expand upon the conceptual and technical underpinnings of Web 2.0 and permit the production and distribution of user-generated content.” We can easily access social media by simply clicking login using our username and enjoying it only with a WIFI data signal without paying. Do you know how many hours you spend on social media each day? Of course we don’t feel it, and occasionally we have no idea how much time we spend on social media each day. It’s one of those things that makes us lose track of time because we’re too focused and too engrossed in looking at social media, so it’s impossible if we don’t check it every day.

Based on Indonesian data (2022) We Are Social in Indonesia, as many as 68.9% of the total population in January 2022, meaning that the number of Indonesians who are active on social media reaches 191 million out of 275.3 million people. This figure increases by 21 million (+12.6 percent) between 2021 and 2022. As of January 2022, there are 210 million Internet users in Indonesia, of whom use smartphones to access the Internet. According to reports, WhatsApp users spend around 30.8 hours per month, Facebook and Instagram 17-20 hours per month, TikTok 16 hours per month and Twitter 8.1-9.4 hours per month.

Social media has many positive benefits, such as being a place to socialize at home and abroad, opening a business, promoting business, updating the latest celebrity news and so on. Social media has a huge number of advantages for our daily lives, but there is also a dark side we are never aware of. All our activities on the Internet will be recorded about us like what we like, what we admire, what we follow and so on. Have you ever wondered why, after like and following social media profiles on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, Facebook, and other platforms, the homepages always display the same content? That is one trick for social media companies in marketing their products.

The virtual world created on social media is full of lies. For example, do you know what’s behind a photo or word someone has updated? The daily activities of someone who always shows off their happiness, but in reality it’s the opposite, haters who always leave negative comments and the emergence of hoax news that keeps popping up. A person may become depressed as a result and take harmful actions. We need to be aware of fake news on social media.

In social media we have to know whether it is real or hoax. The characteristics of a hoax are unreliable sources, news titles that do not match the contents, website addresses that are not credible and no information about the author. It is important for us to upload our own activities to social media because in a world made on social media, just 1 click to take a screenshot can be very dangerous. We have to be aware of the real world, where we spend time with family, relatives and friends, rather than standing alone and only caring about the virtual world. Therefore, we as human beings who understand the digital world must be smart in sorting out social media.