Few real impacts[edit]
For Malcolm Gladwell[74] the role of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, in revolutions and protests is overstated. On the one hand, social media make it easier for individuals, and in this case activists, to express themselves. On the other hand, it is harder for that expression to have an impact.[citation needed]
Gladwell distinguishes between social media activis
m and high risk activism, which brings real changes. Activism and especially high-risk activism involves strong-tie relationships, hierarchies, coordination, motivation, exposing oneself to high risks, making sacrifices.[citation needed]
Gladwell discusses that social media are built around weak ties and he argues that "social networks are effective at increasing participation —by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires”.[citation needed] According to him “…Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice, but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice”.[citation needed]
Reliability[edit]
Evgeny Morozov, 2009-2010 Yahoo fellow at Georgetown University contends that the contents uploaded to Twitter may have little relevance to the rest of the people who do not use Twitter. On the article "Iran: Downside to the “Twitter Revolution”” in the magazine “Dissent” fall 2009,[75] he says, "Twitter only adds to the noise: it’s simply impossible to pack much context into its 140 characters. All other biases are present as well: in a country like Iran it’s mostly pro-Western, technology-friendly and iPod-carrying young people who are the natural and most frequent users of Twitter. They are a tiny and, most important, extremely untypical segment of the Iranian population (the number of Twitter users in Iran — a country of more than seventy million people.)”
Even in the United States, the birth-country of Twitter, has only 107.7 million accounts(Media Bistro, 2012) in Twitter. Since there can be many multi-account users and there are more than 314.7 million population in U.S.(U.S. Census Bureau., 2012), only limited groups of people use Twitter in U.S.. Indiana University dean and professor Matthew Auer casts doubt on the conventional wisdom that social media are open and participatory. He also speculates on the emergence of "anti-social media" used as "instruments of pure control."[76]
Ownership of social media content[edit]
Social media content is generated through social media interactions done by the users through the site. There has always been a huge debate on the ownership of the content on social media platforms since it is generated by the users and hosted by the company. Added to this is the danger to security of information, which can be leaked to third parties with economic interests in the platform, or parasites who comb the data for their own databases.[77] The author of Social Media Is Bu****it, Brandon Mendelson, claims that the "true" owners of content created on social media sites only benefits the large corporations whom own those sites and rarely the users that created them.[78]
