Social Media: Zero Control

How much trust do you have in, and how much do you rely on, social media (i.e. the internet)?

The reason I bring this up is because on Friday the 3rd of November 2017, the major instant messaging app WhatsApp temporarily went down due to unknown errors. Users all around the world were impacted, including South African’s (if you did’t notice maybe you haven’t slid into the DMs). Within moments, the news was trending on Twitter as #WhatsAppDown. People were jokingly claiming that they don’t know what to do now, now that they can’t message anyone. Is there not a bit of truth to that? Therefore, how much are you relying on social media?

Secondly, President Donald Trump’s Twitter account got deleted by an employee at Twitter HQ. It was the employee’s last day, and so I have no doubt it was for the banter. But this goes to show how accessible our online details are – even accounts as prominent as the President of the United States.

Twitter uses claimed that those 11 minutes that Trump’s account was deleted were the best 11 minutes of their lives, and that whoever deleted his account deserves a statue in his name. Jokes aside though, how much trust do you have in social media? President Trump would never have thought his account would get deactivated. When you conduct online banking and you are required to type in login details, do you ever think twice? In fact, whenever you need to type in private credentials, do you ever think twice – or does passivity takes it course?

We’ve all seen the movies where the CIA and FBI can monitor our every move via the internet and this is better advanced with social media. Comes to show this isn’t a far off reality.

That being said, what can you do, ey…? I guess it’s better to have such opportunities of the internet and accept the risks than to live as though it were North Korea.

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