Social interaction has changed drastically since the times before the Internet. People once talked on landlines and now the most popular form of interaction is text messaging. Social media networks have made face-to-face talking somewhat extinct, it’s so much more convenient to communicate via these social media networks. One person can literally be talking to twenty different people all at the same time, without ever having to leave the comfort of their beds. But where social media provides benefits, there are also negatives.
One new form of social media is an app known as Snapchat. Snapchat allows users to take a picture or video and send it to another user of Snapchat knowing that the image or video will disappear after ten seconds. However, the makers of Snapchat did not count on the fact that smartphones have a feature known as “screenshot or screencap”. These features allow users to snap a picture of whatever is on the phones’ screen at the time, which in turn makes the seemingly disappearing Snapchat last forever. The makers of Snapchat attempted to make a social media app that was safe and fun for everyone, but leave it to my generation to find loopholes and ruin it for everyone.
Ten boys, between the ages of 13 and 15, have been arrested in Montreal for taking and distributing child pornography. The boys allegedly took Snapchats of their girlfriends in various stages of disrobe and sent them to other users of Snapchat. The other users in turn took screenshots of the images and sent them throughout the school. Nowadays, anything you post on the Internet is going to be there forever and could easily cause more damage than intended.