In 2014, it has been reported that 52% of online adults use social networking sites and a further 71% of online adults use Facebook as a means of social networking (Duggan et al, 2014). In a modern society, social media is a big platform that is used in everyday life as businesses, families and individuals commonly use social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. There are obvious positive sides to social media as it helps people around the world communicate with one another and widen the possibilities of gaining new information and skills all around the world by a simple click of a button. (Smarty A, 2013). However there is also a negative side and one of the reasons is that Facebook has said 8.7% of its 955m were fake and this is a total of 83.09m fake Facebook users online (Sweney, M. 2012) which is a high amount that could be a downside for social networking …show more content…
2012; Sweney, 2012; Ong et al, 2011). The essay shows that certain social media sites encourage individuals to deceive people online and in extreme cases harm people (Cox D., 2015) Also Beasley, B. and Haney, M. (2012) show how an individual can easily be anyone on the Internet, as it shows anyone can be someone they are not or an individual can portray the ‘perfect version’ of who they want their audience to see and not have to feel guilty about it because after all, it is just a ‘cyber life’. Overall, although there are positive sides to being a part of social media (Griffin, E. 2003) (Montana and Charnov, 2008) it remains to be that most users in social networking sites are not genuine at all or their online profiles lack authenticity due to them wanting to be socially desirable, as they have all the means necessary to be able to portray the person that they want to be and not portray the person that they really