How social media have changed the world? 

Social media has already changed the world, but with each update, with each new application or portal, they change it more and more. It is not only the society that has changed, people's everyday lives, their mentality and social relationships. Social media also has a huge impact on economic issues, politics and social movements.

Economy

As for the economic issue, the social media contributed primarily to the creation of new jobs. More and more companies need to promote their products, services or ideas and are often unable to do so without a specialist in a given field. Apart from bloggers or informers who simply promote products through texts, videos or photos, people who mainly deal with data analysis are behind marketing campaigns in social media. Recently, positions such as Digital Marketer, UX Specialist, SEO Specialist, Security Specialist / Hacker and App Developer are becoming more and more popular. These are people who prepare everything that the recipient sees on social media, starting from the interface and ending with personalized ads that are targeted at a given person thanks to information and data shared by them, often unknowingly.  

Ease of access to information and the ability to publish your own opinions have also revolutionized the economy. In social media, we can find out everything about each product, read the opinion of other customers, get to know a given brand and its values. What's more, we can also find a new job, but also get to know the employer thanks to the opinions of former and current employees. All information is publicly available, which undeniably improved the labor market.

Politics

Social media is a place where, theoretically, everyone can express their opinion on any topic, it is also a place where, without much compilation, you can create fake profiles, so-called bots, just to have more "people" behind you, and thus more puncture power. Increasingly, therefore, social media are used by governments and non-state actors to spread propaganda, disinformation and manipulate society. Research shows that in 2020 as many as 81 countries used social media for propaganda purposes or information warfare. 

Consider China, which is an interesting example due to the fact that Western social media, along with all Google applications, are banned in China. The "Great Firewall" allows the rulers to control Internet activities and what messages Chinese society has access to from abroad. Although a typical Chinese does not have access to Twitter or Facebook, in 2019 Twitter closed more than 107,000 accounts that spread disinformation about protests in Hong Kong, the US elections or the coronavirus pandemic. The released Tweets were published mainly in Chinese languages, and their messages were focused on disseminating geopolitical narratives beneficial to the Chinese Communist Party. According to Twitter, researchers and Western media, the accounts were created by the Chinese government and focused on spreading propaganda. 

Russia, on the other hand, has the Internet Research Agency, an agency that tries to influence the Internet. It is an organization based in St. Petersburg that deals with mass propaganda on social media. The agency's main goal is to directly influence public opinion. Using social media, disinformation is spread, false content is duplicated, as well as propaganda content that is in line with Russian politics and ideology. The agency has a budget of EUR 1 million annually, and the people working in it deal with all the most important social media divided into foreign sections. On January 17, 2019, Facebook's Head of Cybersecurity Policy issued a statement in which it announced the removal of 369 Facebook pages that promoted Russian propaganda and were targeted at users from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. 

As far as the United States is concerned, it does not operate in such an open and obvious manner. As the majority of social media is in the sphere of influence of the United States, no official reports proving illegal activities of the US government are published. However, we can observe how US politicians, who are particularly active on Twitter, publish content that targets disinformation themselves. It is worth mentioning here about Donald Trump, whose account was banned by Twitter in January 2021. The former US president had over 88 million followers and posted 59,558 tweets. In his tweets, he often published fake news and undermined the truthfulness of information provided by his opponents or other authorities.

Social movements

As social media helps to gather people with similar interests or views in one place, it is an ideal environment for the formation of activist groups, protests or social movements. Activities on the Internet support activities in real life, allow you to find more people supporting a given idea, and also help to promote the activities among people from all over the world.

In recent years, we have seen an increase in this type of activity in social media. This happened in East Asia during the Hong Kong Protest, and in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, and in North America during the Black Lives Matter movement. Regardless of the purpose or location, each of these movements has benefited from social media.