Mahamadou - Harmful content on social network sites needs to be immediately stopped or mitigated. With the advent of Information Technology, usage of social networking sites is increasing rapidly all over the world, particularly among the students. Although, it has many advantages like increased student participation, enables the search for information, provides flexible learning, enables the sharing of resources and contents, encourages discussion and debates, offers convenience and accessibility, repeatably, brings social and political awareness among the students, etc., but disadvantages are more harmful like distraction, miscommunication, reduction of human relationships, addiction, causes lack of motivation towards learning, low grades, impact on health, reduced focus on learning and retaining information.

Self-harm content, pro-ana sites and suicide ideation content have been a problem that the internet and social media have struggled with for as long as they’ve existed.

It’s a problem that’s growing, as we increase our exposure to online content, using social apps on our phones. There are more ways than ever for young people to access harmful content that is no longer confined to the darker corners of the internet. And in some cases it can have tragic, devastating consequences.

Dear Dr Manzoor Hussain

I totally agree with you. The increase participation especially due to ubiquitous devices in Social Networking Sites has a lot of benefits, however, it creates also an unsafe environment and could be the cause of users(mostly students) low productivity.

Therefore, It has become a necessity to deal with those issues at different level: Technologically and involving users themselves.

Yes i agree, with your point.but there are more ways than ever for young people to access harmful content..the risk is always unfavourable event.but easily aware of digital technology ,to identify the theft or illegal activities or privacy issues .

C K Gomathy If I understand you are suggesting that awareness campaigns are the key?

Besides, you have mentioned another critical aspect of the problem namely PRIVACY issues. In my opinion it needs as much attention as harmful content if not more.

It can be controlled but that will need a lot of collaborative work and requires collective responsiblitity.

• The use of social media is associated with various mental-health issues, such as depression, anxiety, stress, envy, and emotional exhaustion.
• The relationship between social-media use and issues such as depression exists both because people who are depressed tend to use social media more, as well as because social-media use can cause and exacerbate mental-health issues.
• There are several reasons why people keep using social media despite its harmful influence. These include, among others, people’s tendency to believe that using social media will make them feel better (even if it made them feel worse in the past), as well as people’s fear of missing out on things that are shared on social media.
• There are several indicators which signal that your use of social media is affecting you in a negative way. These include, for example, using social media as an escape from reality, fighting others over your use of social media, and letting your use of social media get in the way of important obligations.
• In order to mitigate the negative impact that social media has on you, you can reduce your use of social media by setting concrete goals for yourself and using various tools to enforce those goals, and you can also focus on using social media in a more positive way, which involves doing things such as talking to people that you care about, instead of passively consuming information.

Dear Hassan Izzeddin Sarsak ,

Indeed, I do agree that all must pitch in efforts.

Thank you for sharing your valuable contribution.

Zouhair Chiba thank you for this contribution about social media and mental-health related issues, I am intrigued:

• Could all/ many/ one of the various mental-health issues that can occurred from the use of social network platforms push someone to publish Harmful content (Hate speech, Harmful speech, ...).
• Any study that supports your third and fourth point??

Regards

Please to allow me to put this question, I am curious to known what are the algorithms used by Social networks for monitoring the content ? How those algoritms operate ? Are them private algorithms or public and open algorithms ?

Do you can give us further detail ?

Thank you Zouhair Chiba for these important question. I believe we might have insights by other researchers as the discussion goes on.

From 2013, Facebook uses Machine learning algorithm, before it was EdgeRank that was developed by Serkan Piantino . What to keep in mind is that the content is sort based on the community standards i.e. what is acceptable and what is not. Additionally, users also help in monitoring via the different options the platform offers.

From this rise another question, does Facebook has the right to choose what is/ or not an acceptable content over the users?

https://paulramondo.com/facebook-edgerank/