I would like to think that I am a private person on the Internet. I use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and many more social network platforms but I keep a lock on my security. I don’t like the idea of “hanging dirty laundry on social media”, so I keep my information shared with only friends that I know because that way people who I do not know won’t fine anything out about me. When Googling myself (which was for this blog post only!) I could not find any links to my social networking sites, which shows that there is not a lot of information about me on the Internet.
My Facebook has high privacy settings and is ‘White walled’ which means that anyone who I am a not friend with on Facebook will only see a blank white wall. I only accept people who I know on Facebook and I recently deleted a lot of people who I am not in contact with anymore. My Twitter is different because I hardly follow anyone that I know, I follow people who share the same interests as me. However I don’t post personal things about me on there and I have formed a lot of friendships through Twitter.
My Instagram is public which I know is bad as people can take your pictures and even make fake accounts of you however I hate it when someone I’m trying to find has their account as private which is why mine is not but I know that is not a good enough excuse! My LinkedIn is a competently different type of social media as I treat it like an online CV so I only connect with people in the radio industry because it may lead to things in the future.
I would like to end this blog post with a quote from ‘It’s complicated: The Social Lives Of Networked Teens’: “Just because teenagers use social media sites to connect with others doesn’t mean they don’t care about their privacy”. I feel that is defiantly correct in a lot of peoples circumstances especially mine.
Reference: Boyd, d., (2014). It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 54-76.
Network Society and the Media 
I think saying having an open Instagram account is “bad” isn’t necessarily true. It always depends on the content. Mine is private but the reason of my decision was simply that I don’t want t think about what people will think when I post something. Right now only people who know me follow me so I know they will understand my weird account 😀 but if you don’t share anything too personal, too private I think open accounts can be okay. Furthermore, so many people have it. One way or another there is access to photos of you.
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I also keep my instagram public, because I hate trying to look at someone’s page and it’s private. I understand having privacy settings turned on for Facebook, Twitter, etc., but I’ve always viewed instagram differently since it’s more complicated than simply tapping or right clicking a photo to save it. I think as long as you don’t put too much information about yourself and don’t post your exact location, that it’s possible to have something public and still be safe.
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