Blog

Is Social Media Harmful or Helpful?

Posted on 1st April, 2024

I’d be interested to know your opinion on social media. For me as a writer it’s essential – it’s how I keep in touch with my readers, how my publisher promotes my books – and without it my sales wouldn’t be nearly as good. I don’t do anything more than post on Facebook, on my website, and very occasionally on Instagram, but I know others – much younger than me – use book-tok, tick-toc, YouTube, Twitter (X) and Threads to talk about their books.

There are influences who make seventy million dollars a year which seems incomprehensible until you see how this works. Mr Beast, who I like, asks people to subscribe a very small amount each month and then they could be called in to participate in one of his daft giveaways and potentially come away with a minimum of ten thousand dollars and a maximum of a million. As he’s got twenty million views for each video, if just 1/10 of those are subscribers then of course he is making a fortune.

There are YouTube sites where children are used and I only realised recently that there is no legal reason why parents should put any of the money away for their children when they grow up. These children can spend hours and hours in front of a camera which can’t be good for their development and end up with nothing. This is exploitation in my opinion.

There’s also a site – so I’m told – where young women sit in their underwear and men subscribe to watch them doing so. No nudity, no porn, just pretty young women scantily clad. They also make millions a year.

The darker side of social media are the trolls and vile people who attack users and there have been many instances of youngsters committing suicide because of this sort of behaviour from others.

More sinister is the fact that China and Russia have been proven to have interfered with both the last two American elections and the last English one after they managed to acquire the names and accounts of millions of users and then send them fake news. For a lot of people if they see the same news often enough they begin to think it might be true

Do you think that social media, in all its rambling forms, is a good thing on the whole or does it do more harm than good?

Loki says hi!

best wishes

Fenella J Miller