Is Facebook a Controversial Issue?

Dr Mohammad Zahangeer Alam

Facebook was invented in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his classmates Eduardo Saver in, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.  It reports having more than 26 million registered members generating 1.8 billion page views each day. The typical user spends about 20 minutes a day on the site, and two-thirds of users log in at least once a day. Facebook launched a high school version in early September 2005. However, still in 2021, Facebook has been used positively and negatively.

Social capital has a wide range of outcomes, such as public health, lower crime rates, and more efficient financial markets. One study has reported that social capital was a significant decline for several years in the world. During this time, peoples experienced social disorder, reduced participation in civic activities, and potentially more distrust among community members. As a result, people felt the dearth of social capital. In these circumstances, social networks like Facebook may play a vital role in protecting social capital among the communities.

The broadcasting affordance began as a salient subject for the participants when receiving and providing social support through the site. Many participants noted that features such as status updates made it easier to exchange support-related messages with their Friend network. This convenience perceived as being especially beneficial to those who deal with a significant event such as a death in the family or an illness, or cases in which users wanted to quickly and efficiently broadcast information without the effort required by individual phone calls or emails.

People cannot live alone. They want to make a friendship with others for sharing personal interest, political news, new technologies, business, and educational materials. In these circumstances, Social Network Sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, Twitter, Friendster, Cyworld, and MySpace are significantly important. Among the various social networks, Facebook is a popular one.

In addition, it allows individuals to present themselves, articulate their social networks, and establish or maintain connections with others. These sites can connect towards work-related contexts, relationship initiation, connecting those with shared interests such as music and politics. Participants may use these sites to interact with people.

Facebook members can also join virtual groups based on interests, see what classes they have in common, and learn each other's hobbies, interests, musical tastes, and relationship status through the profiles.  Facebook can protect social capital, status updating, and the making of a new. But it has several drawbacks.  Although Facebook helps to make friendships, it makes weaker ties in between each other.

For instance, Mayer and Puller report that Facebook friendships appeared to reflect "just online interactions". This finding supported research indicating that Facebook can maintain or reinforce existing offline relationships rather than meet new people. People have been uploaded their fake pictures and share them via photo albums to construct an additional measure of friendship. Registered users can upload albums filled with photographs viewable by others.

Additionally, users may take the time to "tag" some of these photos. They have subsequently uploaded other pictures onto a personal profile and taken the time to identify alterations in the photograph. As a result, this series of actions do not necessarily reflect the "emotional intensity," "intimacy," and "reciprocal services" characteristic of a strong tie. It has become a lack of considerably more commitment.

The act of publicly posting a photo of someone suggests that self-esteem wishes his relationship with alter to be socially recognized, rather than simply counting her friends. Therefore, it is one kind of "picture friend" due to uploading fake pictures on the personal page.
Privacy on social media is a double-edged sword.

People always want to keep in touch with their friends and family through Facebook in their lives. They expect that information to be seen only by their close friends and family members. But Facebook's privacy policy says it accesses every information generated via Facebook activity, including IP addresses, messages, tags, and data such as when you created a photo or video as well as when you uploaded it.

It also says that it receives information from plugins and other applications and shares its data with customers and third parties such as advertisers. The Facebook privacy policy does not sates that deleted information would remove, but it would store by Facebook. Privacy concerns of Facebook increase an understanding of the attitudes and behaviors toward ''privacy-affecting systems''. This social network connects with third parties.      

It concludes that Facebook is essential for making friendships, protecting social capital, and viewing exchanges among each other. Sometimes, it has become less popular because of the uploading of fake photos, weak ties, and lack of privacy. In this aspect, people have to be concerned about making a friendship, information posting, and photo uploading through Facebook.


Dr. Mohammad Zahangeer Alam is an Associate Professor of the Department of Environmental Science Faculty of Agriculture, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Agricultural University