Social media is a revolutionary new way to communicate with our friends and family all across the world.  Social media has become less of a helping hand and more of a barrier to society. It has also has terrible repercussions that could doom our ability to communicate as human beings, and put our lives and privacy at risk. A different danger new forms of communication are being viewed by experts as detrimental to people’s grammar.

To post a picture on a personal account, one has to give some sort of private information, whether that is your name, your location, or your face. According to the U.S. census, more than two thirds of Americans have a Facebook page; that’s a vast majority of our population giving up privacy and putting themselves at risk. Thousands of cases of stalking over social media have already been reported. One could say that it is up to the user to put themselves in danger, but many popular sites require some sort of personal information to have an enjoyable experience, or any experience at all. This should be concerning since most of us are extremely susceptible to being stalked or worse, like being kidnapped. If social media is to continue to play such a big role in our lives, more measures should be taken to increase privacy.

Since social media started becoming popular, more and more cases of identity fraud and stolen information have popped up. This is because we are posting our addresses and information for everyone to see. Since 2005, the Bureau of Justice Statistics has reported a massive 369% spike in identity fraud with increasingly young victims. Many teenagers might post a picture once they get their driver’s license; actions like this have led to identity theft and are totally avoidable by taking precautions on social media.

Social media not only poses a problem to our communication and security but also to more basic things like grammar. Studies by American University have shown that only 40% of kids who text frequently use final sentence punctuation. This is a massive amount of kids who don’t use punctuation, and if this keeps happening, the standard for what good writing is will surely spike downwards once these kids become adults. In the past, most people would be seen as highly intelligent when they could do basic reading and writing; this might come back in the future when all we do is use acronyms and shortened words with no concern for punctuation.

Social media has proven to be detrimental to people everywhere. If we keep using it habitually we are putting ourselves in danger of stalking and fraud. Frequent texting with shortcuts is causing today’s kids to think it is okay to use improper grammar. We can take steps to improve security on social media sites and teach kids to stop posting private info. Simply preventing a child from posting an address, or asking them to text with grammar is effective. If we work together we can create a perfect blend of social media and safety.