Positive Effects
Facebook
Facebook allows people to
connect online, potentially with people that you might otherwise be out of
touch with. It makes it easy to reconnect with others who might live far away
so regardless of a users location they will always be able to message friends.
Youtube
Youtube lets users share videos
of any sort, this includes short films that they've created to short clips
of funny situations that they might've bought on camera. A
lot of people have started to make a living on Youtube in recent years
after they're videos gained a lot of popularity.
Twitter
Twitter is a great way to stay
up to date on current events. With a new feature called 'moments' which keeps
recent news on and accounts of newspapers or programmes can tweet about a new
story almost instantly.
Negative Effects
Facebook
Facebook can connect people who might not otherwise be in touch, however it can give us a false sense of a meaningful relationship with people online which could potentially lead to us being more public about our personal lives and we might end up sharing things we wouldn't share with people in the real world. For example, a picture of you and your friends at a party might seem harmless when you first post it online but it may be seen as less attractive for a potential employer doing a background check.
Youtube
Sites such as Youtube can easily lead to reduced productivity as new videos are uploaded everyday and often shared around other social media sites. More often than not there is a new video that has gone viral and people feel that they need to see it to see what the hype is about. Youtube has a function where at the end of a video it will automatically roll over to another recommended video and since most videos are only 2-4 minutes long it doesn't feel like you are spending that much time on it.
Twitter
Twitter is generally used to connect to people that you might not know otherwise, unlike Facebook, you don't have to put you full name, birthday, hometown and other personal information on show. This means its easier to make an anonymous account and hide your identity. This can be used for cyber bullying people, its common for a Twitter account to be made specifically targeting a particular person person. The fact that a cyberbully's real identity can be hidden can lead them to be a lot more harsh than they might be if they were bully someone in real life. Cyber bullying can have extreme long term effects on a person and in some cases it has lead to a victim taking their own life.