The world revolves around the constant force of change. And if you ask me the biggest driving force for the change that has occurred over the last 2 to 3 decades is the outburst of a dot com Revolution. I strongly feel that this is by far the strongest of the industrial revolutions till date because it just did not change the lifestyles of a part of the population of the world, but instead, it changed the entire world as such. The dot-com revolution saw certain company shares booming up like a bubble just by adding a .com to their names. Well the bubble burst out in 2000, and the revolution took a hit, but instead of failing and falling down, it underwent a mutation, or it became a more immune and stable economic revolution. The brainchild of such an upsurge was the next generation .coms. The one which we commonly know as the Social media.
Surely I am not the first one to write about this. I will not be the last one for sure. But yes, Social media and the revolution associated with it changed the way the world looked into things, the perception of things and surroundings changed completely over a span of time. Things that were considered personal started becoming public. A part of the community that was naïve to make an opinion on something started becoming bolder and bolder, and slowly but steadily the social media became a virtual battleground where words became weapons, associated media served as the secondary line of defense.
Let me narrate a story of the Egyptian revolution that happened in and around 2010-2012. Animated and angered over the death of a Khaled Mohamed Said, a 28-year-old from Alexandria, Wael Ghonim, a 29-year-old Google marketing executive started a facebook page named, “Kullena Khaled Said” which translates to “We Are All Khaled Said”. He wrote on his page “Today they killed Khaled, Khaled Said was a young man just like me, and what happened to him can happen to me. All young Egyptians have for long been oppressed, enjoying no rights in our own homeland.”
Two minutes after he started his Facebook page, 300 people had joined it. Three months later, that number had grown to more than 250,000. What bubbled up online inevitably spilled onto the streets, starting with a series of “Silent Stands” that culminated in a massive and historic rally at Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. “We Are All Khaled Said” helped ignite an uprising that led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak and the dissolution of the ruling National Democratic Party. In turn, Ghonim — who was arrested during the height of the protests — reluctantly became one of the leading voices of the Arab Spring. That Is something great indeed. People’s voice being heard. This Is the true sign of democracy right.
Well now coming to statistics and reach, As on December 2015, Worldwide, there are over 1.55 billion monthly active Facebook users. That is a really big number. And what associates with such a big number is the data being uploaded. Facebook processes 500+ terabytes of data every day. That is some serious big data. Going with the number game again, there are over 83 million fake profiles in facebook!!
And now we have a problem!! The data associated with 83 million profiles can be/might be fake. So this amount of fake data can result in chaos and a lot of problems. That is one of the matters of concern today. Secondly, outdated data is another problem. I saw a post today which made me think and writes about this. This post was shared by one of my friends asking to stop Yulin festival. The original post that he shared is from June 20th. And the festival is stopped. And post doesn’t have any relevance now. But it is yet being shared. Now let us say that there was a guy who was falsely accused of a murder/robbery/crime. And a Facebook post surfaces. And later people realize that he isn’t involved. But they forget to delete the post. And even if they delete the post, multiple copies of it exist on the internet and they keep on getting shared. This person could still be on RADAR and can be affected by this. Quoting another recent incident, the Snap deal employee Dipti Surna was abducted and released after 2 days. But even today the missing news is surfacing on Facebook. This specifically is a bigger problem because false/outdated news can put people in trouble.
A solution that can workaround this problem is the need of the hour and hopefully, it gets addressed
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