Gigantic Social Media, Impossible to Regulate, Dangerous to Stop!!!

Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube, to name only four of the social media companies, are proof of the competence and creative innovation of America. The success of those companies are beyond believe. What started with nothing then some ideas in the minds of their creators and founders, they created four (in the scope of this article, because there are much more companies in the social media) companies, which now (in 2018) are used by billions of people all over the globe. What started out as American companies, are now spread throughout the world and integrated in societies in almost every country in the world. Actually, they are integrated in the personal lives of more then three billion people worldwide with an annual growth of 13%. (source)

The connection between the mobile phones and the social media

The explosive growth of the mobile phone, 5.135 billion people own one (68% of the world), almost three billion people are using it to access the social media and that number grows explosively. The mobile phones pushes the use of computers to access the Internet away. And the social media are pushing the rise of the mobile phones worldwide, the rise of the multiple billion mobile phone industries. The social media are indirectly responsible for hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide.

All over the world, in almost any country in the world, governments and telecommunications are making investments to access the Internet, and again, billions of dollar industries are boosted or created worldwide.

How it all started

Facebook, the current biggest social media company, was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin. Originally the name was thefacebook, founded by former-Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (while at Harvard) who ran it as one of his hobby projects with some financial help from Eduardo Saverin. Within months, Facebook and its core idea spread across the dorm rooms of Harvard where it was very well received.

Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California. The company started at September 4, 1998. The site was named after a googol -- the name for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros -- found in the book "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Edward Kasner and James Newman. The name Google was a misspelling from googol. Google was originally created in order to organize information on the Internet and help users find the information they were looking for. Google began primarily as a search engine, which crawls through new and old web pages and sorts them based on relevancy to a user's search.

Ex-Googler Evan Williams had a startup called Odeo. When Apple launched iTunes podcasting, and made Odeo's podcasting platform irrelevant, Evan and Biz and an Odeo employee named Jack Dorsey decided to create something called Twitter instead. Twitter started at March 21, 2006, San Francisco.

YouTube was created by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim in 2005, all former PayPal employees. The idea was born at a dinner party in San Francisco about a year before the official launch. The total number of people who use YouTube – 1,300,000,000. 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute! Almost 5 billion videosare watched on YouTube every single day. In an average month, 8 out of 10 18-49 year-olds watch YouTube.

The American dream again comes to life with the sky as the only limit.

What happens when you end the social media?

Let me answer this question with another question. What do you do when the American government is stopping electricity ... worldwide? I know it's a ridiculous question, but so is trying to stop social media in my eyes.

Or here is another question, more to the point. What do you think what 3.196 billion people will do if you rip their social media away from them? It's part of their way of life now for about half of the world's population in each country!

Or here is another question. What do you think if the privately owned social media companies decide to move out of America and continue somewhere else, out of reach of the American senate?

Here is another one. What do you think the economic damage it causes worldwide (including the United States) if the social media are stopped or mishandled?

I'm aware that I didn't answer the question of the headline, except asking more questions.

What are the dangers of the social media?

The potential of misuse of the social media is immense. The social media is reaching out to 3.196 billion people and that number grows yearly with 13%! That's the potential. But ... the damage is already occurring:

• the social media are already being misused by loads of people to influence their voting, political, social and buying behavior everywhere in the world

• the social media are already being misused by the social media networks themselves to influence voting, political, social and buying behavior everywhere in the world

• the social media are already being misused to suppress Internet content

• the social media are being used to introduce foreign and alien ideas to so many different traditional societies; for example the political-correct behavior are being used to filter content

• the social media are being misused to impose certain political systems, like socialism

• the social media are being used by governments, trying to control what's being published and what's not by regulating their usages and content. For example this happens in the EU, where politicians and European governments are trying to suppress populism.

In the coming midterm elections 2018 in America, the social media feel now so confident in their power over the masses and the American people, that they openly support the Democrats (political party) and ban, shadow-ban (= the act of blocking or partially blocking a user or their content from an online community such that it will not be readily apparent to the user), block and remove political related people and their content, which is not related or supported by the Democrats. Some of the social media companies and networks are going so far that they threaten (to remove) the President of the United States.

Ignorance is NOT a bless

Normally I love the idea that ignorance is a blessing. Meaning that I really don't want to know what my fourteen year old daughter is doing with her friends, or what my wife is doing when she is doing her shopping for six to eight hours and comes back with one dress and my socks.

But the ignorance of the Internet, computers and mobile phones, the actual usage of the social media by the law-makers is a curse and a dangerous thing to do. It's like that they don't understand electricity (because they don't use it themselves), so they like to forbid it or something foolish and ridiculous like that.