The Reading Social Media and the “Spiral of Silence” by Keith N. Hampton, Lee Rainie, Weixu Lu, Maria Dwyer, Inyoung Shin, and Kristen Purcell. That was published on August 26, 2014. This reading provides evidence of social media and how spiral of silence plays apart in social platforms. Spiral of silence is a communication theory that a social group would isolate or exclude members due to different opinions, individuals fear of isolation, which leads to silence instead of voicing opinions. There was an 1,801 adult survey which focused on Edward Snowden’s phone and email records based the 2013 revelations of widespread government surveillance of Americans. The results showed that Americans were divided. Some people believed that the NSA contractor’s leaked about surveillance and whether it was justified. 86% of Americans were more wiling to talk about the surveillance program in person, and 42% of people were willing to post their opinions on Facebook and Twitter. People that use Facebook and other social media platforms were more willing to share their opinions if there were more people that agreed. Social media is not a common source of news.  15% of people got some information on Facebook, only 3% of people got some information of Twitter, but 58% of adults got some information from Tv or the radio.  

People that have Facebook can understand how there is some great, positive reasons of having social media and then there’s negatives. People can keep in touch, you can message someone that is across the world, you can video chat. You can share with others, sharing thoughts and ideas. You can organize events and sell products. Facebook can be a time waste, privacy issues, there’s security loopholes for personal details shared through social feeds. Freedom of expression, anyone can post what they want, most of time its offensive and inappropriate content.  There’s cyberbullying, there’s various reported cases that people committed suicide after being cyberbullying through social accounts. Facebook is a major target for advertising, there’s information stored in each 2profile that can build an advertising service. There are fake profiles, some people’s profiles either get hacked or there are fake accounts. There is a lot fake news on Facebook, instead of being culpable or not believing anything. It is not hard to google to fine a reliable source.

The film Generation Like talks about today’s internet and what teenagers are doing and how its affect the internet and companies. Teenagers today are putting themselves out there on an online profile for everyone to see.  A group of teenagers said that your profile is how you want people to see you and the cover photo shows your personality. The likes, follow, retweets show what is cool it shows a vulnerability for companies to take advantage of it. This is the biggest transformation with communicating with consumers in our lifetime. Companies can track people movements what they like and who their closest friends are. Also, they are taking that data and turning it into money. Teenagers do not understand the value in pictures and getting people to like their posts.  Sending a tweet, you are helping raise the value of twitter around 30 billion dollars, Facebook is around 142.23 billion its base on the volume of likes they can generate.

The film called The Facebook dilemma talks about how Facebook disrupted the democracy. Sandberg’s team started t develop new ways to collect personal data from users wherever they went on the internet and when they were not on the internet at all. There are data broker companies, at most Americans are not aware of. These companies go out and but data from every single one of us , what we buy, where we shop, where we live, what our traffic patterns, what our families are doing, what our likes are, what magazines we read. People do not even know that this process is happening, and this data is collected for the rest of our lives. This is now being shared with Facebook so Facebook can target ads. A law student in Austria got a copy of all his data which was over 1,000 pages, the most sensitive information for him was his messages with other people. Just because he deletes important information in these messages it came back up, there was messages about love, sexuality, anything. Facebook tries to give people the impression what you share is only with friends but, Facebook is always watching.