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Trust in ICT 2
require more flexible presentation services including interactions. For the multimedia documents with XML
description, the web browsers can implement the temporal and spatial models to present the documents.
6 Risks of knowledge society
Negative effects of social media
Social media relies on trustworthiness and reliability of information presented. The impacts of social media
include an individual's concentration, ownership of media content, and the meaning of interactions. Although
some social media offers users the opportunity to cross-post simultaneously, some social media platforms
have been criticized for poor interoperability or disparity of information, which leads to the creation of
information silos-isolated collections of data contained in a social media platform. Sometimes, it is argued
that social media have negative effects while allowing individuals to advertise themselves and form
friendships. The term "social" cannot account for positive features and hence the level of sociability should
be determined by the actual performances of users.
Since the dramatic decrease of face-to-face interactions, more social media platforms have been introduced
with the threat of cyber-bullying and online sexual predators being more prevalent. Social media may expose
children to images of alcohol, tobacco, and sexual behaviours. In regards to cyber-bullying, it has been proven
that individuals who have no experiences with cyber-bullying often have a better well-being than individuals
who have been bullied online.
Twitter is increasingly a target of heavy activity of marketers. Their actions, focused on gaining massive
numbers of followers, include use of advanced scripts and manipulation techniques that distort the prime
idea of social media by abusing human trustfulness.
British-American entrepreneur and author Andrew Keen criticizes social media in his book "The Cult of the
Amateur" [36] writing: "Out of this anarchy, it suddenly became clear that what was governing the infinite
monkeys now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest
and most opinionated. Under these rules, the only way to intellectually prevail is by infinite filibustering." This
is also relative to the issue of "justice" in the social network.
Social networking threats
Social networking tools have changed the way people interact in their personal life and business. Increasingly,
these tools play a significant role in how business gets done; however, they are also a high risk. Below are
top 10 social networking threats/risks that enterprises must consider when developing their policies [37]:
1 Social networking worms: While a multi-faceted threat challenges the definition of "worm", it is
specifically designed to propagate across social networks, enlist more machines into its botnet, and
hijack more accounts to send more spam to enlist more machines.
2 Phishing bait: Many users of the social networking services had their accounts compromised.
Although this was only a "tiny fraction of a percent," it is still a significant number considering that
famous social networking services have over several million users. To their credit, the social
networking services acted quickly, working to blacklist that domain, but many copycat efforts
ensued.
3 Trojans: Social networks have become a great vector for Trojans: Zeus – a potential and popular
banking Trojan that has been given new life by social networks. There have been several recent high-
profile thefts blamed on Zeus. URL zone can calculate the value of the victim's accounts to help
decide the priority of the thief.
4 Data leaks: Social networks are all about sharing. Unfortunately, many users may share too much
sensitive information about their organizations such as projects, products, financial, organizational
changes, and/or scandals, etc.
5 Shortened links: People use URL shortening services (e.g. bit.ly and tinyurl) to fit long URLs into tight
spaces. They may be clicking on a malware since the shortened links are easy to use and are also
ubiquitous.
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