Essay

Q : Are social media and networking sites like twitter and facebook reliable sources of information, or are they just forums through which uninformed people can openly share their opinions and biases regarding various issues?

SNS is an abbreviation for Social Networking Service, which is created for the purpose of building online personal connections. It includes memedia and social media websites like Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, Cyworld and Me2day. Many people use it routinely for communication, sharing and searching information. It provides communication means, such as e-mail and instant messenger service. It has strengths, which are speed and excellent exportability of information delivery. But shadows always follow light. SNS has a big weakness and that is its inability to filter communication. Although SNS has useful information, it has a lot of wrong information that harms some people. It has some discussion which is reacted to emotionally. Let’s figure out SNS by giving specific examples.

Firstly, a lot of information floats around but there is no reliable information. As of June 2012, Facebook, which is the world supreme social networking service has over 950 million users who logged in to Facebook at least once during the past 30 days. If 50 percent of 950 million users upload 1 information per day, 475 million information is created on Facebook per day. But there is a lot of wrong information. The first example is various strange stories. Lastly, the strange story that is ‘North Korea has completed installing missile in front of the 38th parallel and the target of the launch is in the middle of Seoul’ spreads on various SNS. Above this, ‘human flesh story’, ‘earth destruction story’ and so on, many strange stories spread on SNS. Because of these strange stories, great and small incidents are enacted. The second example is ‘Gongdeok Station missing accident’. A father spread information about a missing daughter on SNS. Many people were trying to find...