Dangers of Twitter

Twitter is now becoming one of, if not already, the largest social media network on the Internet. In this article I will be explaining and expressing my views of the positive and also negative reasons of using this site. I will be mostly taking the viewpoint from the average user for personal use, as opposed to businesses use. Some of the points that I will later make in this article will only apply to really heavy users of twitter, so please bear that in mind whilst reading this.

What makes it different ?

The main difference with twitter that separates it from other social networking sites, is that it allows the user to connect to anyone, and in doing so allows them to message or "mention" them, without any pre approval from the person the user desires to speak to. This might sound like a scary thing to be able to do to some people, and also unsettling, it is sort of the equivalent of yourself going up to someone in the middle of the street that you have never even seen before, and striking up a conversation ! This is something that you either feel comfortable with doing or do not, it is entirely down to personal preference, personally I think it is a little odd, but it is a great way of speaking to people online that have similar interests to you without any awkwardness.

Twitter has a great little algorithm built into it that allows the user to find people on the twitter database that shares the same interests as the user, this is a great way to get to know people that you are likely to have good conversations with. I sometimes think of twitter as an online friend making site, because of the previously stated reason. I think its a great way to come across people that you wouldn't normally find in every day life, this is mostly because of the limits to who you can meet in the real world because of your location's reach.

However, this might all sound great, but it does have one underlying issue. The main problem that I have found and recently realized, is that sometimes, Twitter can become a little addictive. After speaking to, and reading other peoples "tweets", I have noticed that I am not alone on this matter. I think that there is a real buzz of speaking to people that you have never even heard of before and striking a conversation with someone new. This might not sound so bad until you do what I recently did and asked yourself, "What is this really gaining me in life". The true answer to that question is absolutely nothing ! I think that I, like many twitter users, get so carried away with speaking to people online, that I and they forget that it can be having a really dramatic effect on your "real world" social skills and social life. The reasons for this are as follows, Twitter can be really time consuming thus keeping you away from meeting people in the real world, it can also give you a false sense of reality, making you believe that you have lots of friends when in reality you don't. I think that really heavy users of Twitter might need to take a step back and give themselves a reality check. The thing that you have to bear in mind is that 99% of the time, the people you interact with on twitter, even whether it be really regularly, you will most probably never meet them in person. This means one thing, this means that your "real world" social life cannot be improved through this social site.

Unfortunately, the bad points don't stop just yet. As I have already mentioned, Twitter is open to everyone, this results in young and impressionable individuals, to be at a high risk to "online groomers". However, there is an option for users to make the profile "by request only", which means that someone has to be pre approved before they can speak to the Twitter user. The problem with that is that many people either don't even know it exists as it is not set like that by default when the user first creates his or her account, or the user decides usually not to enable it.

Twitter for businesses, celebrities and online personalities.

Thankfully this article takes a more positive view form this point on. One huge advantage of Twitter being "open", is that it allows the user to get in touch, and stay up to date with their favorite celebrities or online personalties from YouTube for instance. It allows the user to even attempt to chat to someone really big in the media for instance, where else would you get an opportunity like that ! It is highly unlikely that they will reply, but its worth a try ! Twitter can also be a great asset for businesses to. It allows a business to create a so called "client database". The database can be used to send out offers, discount codes, news of new product releases, and also help and support. Some businesses value this database so much that on recent news a worker from an online company who gathered lots of followers for his personal account, got sued by the company of whom said that the "following" belongs to the company instead of him, even though it was his personal account. I will be unfortunately ending this piece on a negative note. This is because recently many people are trying to get traffic to their website or product page by spamming user's Twitter accounts. Twitter seems to not be able to do anything about this as any algorithm they would release would not be able to target just the spam links alone. Spamming really is making the whole overall experience of using twitter even worse.

Thats it for this article on the dangers of twitter. I hope you found it interesting, comments are welcome. Have a great day.