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Social Networking Sites and Their Negative Impacts on Young Users

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Social networking sites (SNSs) are increasingly used by young people. Critically evaluate claims that their use can have negative effects on users.

Recent years have witnessed the exponential increase of web-based social networks, also known as social networking sites (SNSs). By the end of 2011, there were approximately 2.3 billion people (around one third of the global population) using the Internet, and 1.03 billion (about 45%) of which have reported using a social networking site at least once a day (International Telecommunications Union, 2011:1). According to Papacharissi (2009:199), the increasing popularity and the growth of the leading SNSs such as Facebook, My Space, Twitter and LinkedIn are due to the fact that they offer users various platforms to create their own profiles to represent themselves to interact with each other through emails, instant messages and many other integrated communication tools. While a variety of definitions of the term SNS have been suggested, this essay will use the one first suggested by Boyd and Ellison (2007:210) who saw it as:

“web-based services that allow individuals to construct a public or semi-public profile, communicate with other users with whom they share a connection and view and navigate through their own list of connections as well as those of others.”

As more people are becoming SNS users, it could be argued that more negative than positive impacts on society and human relationships can be seen in daily life (Ybarra and Mitchell, 2008:350; Wodzicki et al, 2012:9 ). Minors, in particular, become enmeshed more easily than adults with the increasing use of SNS (Kolbitsch and Maurer, 2006:187). Therefore, the objective of this essay is to assert that SNS generally have negative rather than positive impacts on their growth. This essay has been organized in the following way. It will begin by evaluating a

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