facebook disadvantages essay

Top 10 Cons & Disadvantages of Facebook

by Daniel Raymond · April 17, 2024

Facebook has emerged as a colossus in social media, shaping how we interact, share, and perceive the world. Its staggering user base, which encompasses a significant portion of the global population, attests to its widespread appeal and influence. However, beneath its connectivity and convenience veneer, Facebook has several drawbacks that warrant critical examination. This article aims to dissect these disadvantages, offering a comprehensive overview of the challenges and pitfalls associated with this digital giant.

Table of Contents

The use of Facebook, while providing unparalleled platforms for communication and information dissemination, also introduces many issues ranging from privacy concerns to psychological impacts. Its pervasive presence in our daily lives has subtly reshaped our social interactions, often at the cost of personal privacy and mental well-being. Additionally, the platform’s business model, centered around data collection and advertising, raises serious ethical questions. These multifaceted disadvantages affect individual users and have broader implications for society, challenging the very fabric of privacy, free speech, and democratic discourse.

10 Disadvantages & Drawbacks of Facebook

When considering the disadvantages of Facebook, it is crucial to explore the various dimensions that these drawbacks encompass. From the subtle erosion of personal privacy to the platform’s role in disseminating misinformation, Facebook usage’s cons are varied and significant. This section will delve into the top ten disadvantages, each highlighting a unique aspect of how Facebook negatively impacts users and society. These points testify to the complex, often unseen challenges this social media juggernaut poses.

1. Privacy Concerns

Privacy concerns rank at the forefront of Facebook’s disadvantages. The platform’s business model, which relies heavily on data collection and targeted advertising, inherently compromises user privacy . Exploiting personal information is a breach of trust and raises serious ethical questions.

• Data Mining and Surveillance : Facebook’s algorithms continuously monitor and analyze user activity, creating detailed profiles for targeted advertising.
• Third-Party Data Sharing : The platform has faced criticism for sharing user data with third-party entities, often without explicit consent.
• Vulnerability to Data Breaches : History has shown that Facebook’s vast data repositories are susceptible to breaches, exposing sensitive user information.

Real-life example : A notable example is the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the data of millions of Facebook users was improperly accessed and used for political advertising purposes. This incident highlighted the extent to which user data could be exploited and the lack of robust safeguards.

Solution : To mitigate these privacy concerns, Facebook could implement stricter data protection policies, enhance transparency regarding data usage, and provide users with more control over their personal information. Additionally, regulatory oversight might be necessary to ensure compliance and protect user privacy effectively.

2. Spread of Misinformation

A significant issue with Facebook is its role in misinformation and fake news propagation. The platform’s algorithm, designed to maximize engagement, often prioritizes sensational and divisive content, regardless of its veracity.

• Algorithmically Amplified Falsehoods : Sensationalist and untrue stories receive amplified visibility due to engagement-driven algorithms.
• Echo Chambers and Confirmation Bias : Users are often exposed to information that reinforces their beliefs, limiting exposure to diverse perspectives.
• Manipulation of Public Opinion : Misinformation on Facebook has been used to manipulate public opinion, particularly during elections.

Real-life example : The spread of false information regarding COVID-19 led to widespread vaccine hesitancy, negatively impacting public health efforts. This situation underscored the platform’s role in shaping public perception, often with dire consequences.

Solution : Facebook must enhance its fact-checking mechanisms and alter algorithms to reduce the spread of false information. Educating users about media literacy could also be crucial in combating misinformation.

3. Mental Health Impact

Facebook’s impact on mental health , particularly among adolescents, is a growing concern. The platform can exacerbate feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and depression due to the curated and often unrealistic portrayal of others’ lives.

• Social Comparison and Envy : Constant exposure to idealized versions of others’ lives can lead to negative self-perception and envy.
• Cyberbullying : The platform can be a medium for cyberbullying, which has severe mental health consequences.
• Addiction and Reduced Well-being : Excessive use of Facebook has been linked to addiction-like symptoms and a decrease in overall well-being.

Real-life example : Studies have shown a correlation between high Facebook usage and symptoms of depression among young adults, as the platform often presents a skewed reality that can distort self-image and expectations.

Solution : Facebook could introduce features to promote positive interactions and provide resources for mental health. Limiting addictive design features and promoting digital well-being initiatives could also help mitigate these issues.

4. Diminished Real-world Interaction

While connecting people online, Facebook often detracts from real-world interactions and relationships. The convenience of digital communication can overshadow the depth and quality of face-to-face interactions.

• Over-reliance on Digital Communication : Heavy Facebook use can lead to a preference for online interaction over in-person connections.
• Weakening of Community Bonds : Local community engagement can diminish as online networks replace physical communities.
• Loss of Interpersonal Skills : Overuse of digital communication can lead to a decline in essential interpersonal skills like empathy and non-verbal communication.

Real-life example : A study indicated that increased time on social media platforms like Facebook is associated with decreased face-to-face interactions with family and friends.

Solution : Encouraging balanced platform use and promoting initiatives that foster real-world community engagement can help mitigate this issue.

5. Impact on Productivity

Facebook’s addictive nature can significantly impact productivity in personal and professional contexts. The constant stream of notifications and the lure of endless scrolling can be significant distractions.

• Distraction and Time-Wasting : The platform can be a significant source of distraction, leading to procrastination and decreased productivity.
• Workplace Interruptions : Using Facebook during work hours can reduce efficiency and work quality.
• Impairment of Cognitive Functions : Prolonged use can impact cognitive functions like attention span and memory.

Real-life example : Research has indicated that employees using Facebook at work showed a measurable decrease in productivity levels and a reduced quality of work output.

Solution : Setting boundaries for Facebook use, especially in work and academic environments, and using productivity tools to monitor and limit time spent on the platform can help address this disadvantage.

6. Impact on Sleep

Excessive use of Facebook, especially before bedtime, can adversely affect sleep patterns . The blue light from screens and the mental stimulation from engaging content can disrupt sleep.

• Disruption of Circadian Rhythms : Exposure to blue light from screens can interfere with natural sleep cycles.
• Mental Stimulation Before Bedtime : Engaging with stimulating content can make it difficult to wind down and fall asleep.
• Sleep Deprivation : Prolonged use can reduce sleep quantity and quality, especially at night.

Real-life example : Studies have found a direct link between heavy social media use, including Facebook, and poor sleep quality, particularly among teenagers and young adults.

Solution : Promoting digital wellness practices, such as avoiding screen time before bed and using features like ‘night mode’ to reduce blue light exposure, can help mitigate this issue.

7. Exposure to Inappropriate Content

Facebook users, particularly minors, are at risk of exposure to inappropriate content , including violence, adult content, and hate speech. Despite moderation efforts, harmful content often slips through the cracks.

• Access to Harmful Content : The platform’s vastness makes it difficult to moderate and filter inappropriate content entirely.
• Exposure to Extremist Views : The platform can be used to spread extremist ideologies, often targeting vulnerable users.
• Impact on Young Users : Younger users are particularly susceptible to the adverse effects of exposure to inappropriate content.

Real-life example : There have been instances where Facebook failed to promptly remove violent content, leading to widespread exposure, particularly among younger audiences.

Solution : Enhancing content moderation systems, implementing stricter age verification processes, and providing robust reporting tools can help protect users from inappropriate content.

8. Economic Disparities in Access

Facebook’s global reach is uneven, with access largely dependent on economic factors . This creates a digital divide, where individuals in lower-income regions have limited or no access to the platform.

• Limited Access in Developing Regions : Economic and infrastructural barriers limit Facebook access in less affluent areas.
• Digital Divide : The disparity in access exacerbates existing economic and social inequalities.
• Dependence on Connectivity : Facebook’s benefits are inaccessible to those without reliable internet connectivity.

Real-life example : In some developing countries, access to Facebook and other social media platforms is severely limited due to lack of internet infrastructure and affordability issues.

Solution : Collaborating with governments and organizations to improve internet infrastructure and affordability in underprivileged regions can help bridge this digital divide.

9. Business Dependence on Facebook

Many businesses have become overly reliant on Facebook for marketing and customer engagement. This dependence poses risks, including sudden changes in algorithms or policies that can adversely affect business visibility and customer reach.

• Algorithm Changes Impacting Visibility : Businesses often suffer when Facebook alters its algorithm, reducing the organic reach of their posts.
• Over-reliance on a Single Platform : Dependence on Facebook for marketing can be risky if the platform experiences outages or policy changes.
• Data Privacy Concerns for Businesses : Businesses also face challenges in managing customer data ethically within Facebook’s framework.

Real-life example : Several small businesses have experienced significant customer engagement and sales drops due to Facebook algorithm changes prioritizing personal over business content.

Solution : Diversifying online presence across multiple platforms and developing independent marketing strategies can reduce the risks associated with over-reliance on Facebook.

10. Environmental Impact

The environmental impact of Facebook’s massive data centers, which consume significant energy , is a growing concern. The carbon footprint associated with maintaining these facilities is substantial.

• High Energy Consumption : Facebook’s data centers require enormous operating energy, contributing to carbon emissions.
• Electronic Waste : The production and disposal of devices used to access Facebook contribute to electronic waste.
• Indirect Environmental Impact : Promoting consumerism through targeted advertising on Facebook can increase resource consumption.

Real-life example : Facebook’s data centers, like many in the tech industry, have been criticized for their high energy consumption and the resulting environmental impact.

Solution : Investing in renewable energy sources for data centers and promoting sustainable practices in its operations and through its platform can help mitigate Facebook’s environmental impact.

How Could these Disadvantages be Overcome Globally?

To overcome the disadvantages of Facebook on a global scale, a multifaceted approach that involves both the platform itself and its user base is essential. Strategies must encompass regulatory measures, technological advancements, and user education to create a more secure, ethical, and beneficial social media environment.

• Implementing Stricter Privacy Regulations : Governments can enact laws to protect user data and limit the extent of data mining and sharing.
• Promoting Digital Literacy : Educating users on the risks of misinformation, privacy breaches, and the impact of social media on mental health.
• Developing Ethical Algorithms : Restructuring algorithms to prioritize accurate information and positive content, reducing the spread of misinformation and harmful content.
• Encouraging Responsible Use : Promoting balanced social media use can help mitigate its impact on mental health and real-world relationships.
• Investing in Sustainable Technologies : Encouraging Facebook to invest in renewable energy and more efficient data centers to reduce its environmental footprint.

Top 5 Best Facebook Marketing Agencies

As Facebook continues to be a dominant force in social media marketing, choosing the right agency to manage your Facebook campaigns is crucial. These agencies are adept at navigating Facebook’s complex algorithms and advertising tools to maximize reach and engagement. Below are the top five Facebook marketing agencies known for their strategic insights and successful campaign execution, ensuring that clients’ investments translate into measurable growth and enhanced brand visibility.

• Lyfe Marketing : Specializing in crafting personalized marketing strategies, Lyfe Marketing excels in driving engagement and sales through Facebook. They focus on creating targeted ad campaigns that resonate with the desired audience.
• Sculpt : Known for its creative approach to Facebook marketing, Sculpt helps brands tell compelling stories that engage and convert audiences. They combine creativity with analytics to deliver content that enhances brand loyalty and boosts customer interaction.
• WebFX : WebFX uses data-driven methodologies to enhance Facebook advertising campaigns, focusing on maximizing ROI and conversion rates. Their services include everything from ad creation to detailed performance tracking, tailored to each client’s specific goals.
• Sprout Social : Renowned for its sophisticated analytics and social listening tools, Sprout Social helps businesses tailor their Facebook strategies to better understand and engage their audience. Their comprehensive solutions manage everything from publishing content to measuring campaign impact, ensuring optimal performance.
• Ignite Social Media : Ignite Social Media is dedicated to transforming social media marketing strategies specifically for major platforms like Facebook. They offer customized approaches that align closely with client goals, focusing on innovative content and community management to drive brand awareness and engagement effectively.

What is Facebook?

Facebook, launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates, rapidly evolved from a college networking site to a global social media powerhouse. It’s more than just a platform for connecting with friends and family; it has reshaped how we share information, engage in public discourse, and conduct business. Its influence extends beyond the digital realm, impacting politics, culture, and the very fabric of society. However, this pervasive influence has drawbacks, as highlighted by the disadvantages discussed earlier in this article.

Facebook’s functionality encompasses several key aspects:

• Social Networking : Connecting users with friends, family, and acquaintances.
• Content Sharing : Users can share text, photos, videos, and links.
• Messaging and Communication : Facilitates both private and group messaging.
• News and Information : A platform for news dissemination and public discourse.
• Business and Advertising : Tools for businesses to promote their products and engage with customers.

Real-Life Example : During the Arab Spring, Facebook played a pivotal role in organizing protests and disseminating information, showcasing its power as a tool for social and political change.

Videos about Facebook

Various videos on the subject of Facebook can be found across platforms like YouTube, TED Talks, and educational websites. These videos cover various topics, from tutorials and user guides to in-depth analyses of Facebook’s societal impact, privacy concerns, and its role in global events. Documentaries and expert interviews offer insights into the company’s practices, ethical considerations, and the psychological effects of social media.

In conclusion, while Facebook has revolutionized how we connect and communicate, it has significant disadvantages. These range from privacy concerns and misinformation to the impact on mental health and environmental sustainability. Addressing these issues is crucial to ensure that Facebook’s role in society is beneficial and sustainable.

The future of Facebook, and social media in general, lies in balancing technological innovation with ethical responsibility. Users, developers, and policymakers must work collaboratively to create a digital environment that respects privacy, promotes accurate information, and supports the well-being of its users.

Recommended article: Top 10 Cons & Disadvantages of TikTok

Daniel Raymond

Daniel Raymond, a project manager with over 20 years of experience, is the former CEO of a successful software company called Websystems. With a strong background in managing complex projects, he applied his expertise to develop AceProject.com and Bridge24.com , innovative project management tools designed to streamline processes and improve productivity. Throughout his career, Daniel has consistently demonstrated a commitment to excellence and a passion for empowering teams to achieve their goals.

• Next story  Top 10 Cons & Disadvantages of LinkedIn
• Previous story  Why Project Managers Choose iOS for Work?
• Pingbacks 0

This is really interesting! Thank you Daniel

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

This will close in 60 seconds

• Technology Blog

• How to Tips

What Are The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Facebook?

Facebook, arguably the most famous social networking site, comes with its own pros and cons. Here in this article, I will try to show some of the advantages and disadvantages of Facebook .

Facebook has helped to create a brand for many individuals and businesses. Moreover, it’s a major source of entertainment for people around the globe. Since Facebook is a global social networking site available in various parts of the world, location is not a barrier.

Also, with the Facebook translation feature, you can easily connect with Facebook users from different countries and with people who speak a variety of different languages.

Page Contents

The Advantages of Facebook

Facebook for Networking

Facebook is arguably the most powerful social media and social networking site out there. You can use Facebook to connect with your family, friends, work colleagues, and you can even meet new people on Facebook.

Most people who know how to use a computer and internet have a profile on Facebook.

Moreover, it’s easy to find like-minded people  by seeing their interests, and you can easily connect with them using wall updates, private messages, and video chats.

Facebook for Dating

Facebook is also known for finding dates.

Indeed, with a social network powered by over 1 billion active users, it’s easy to find a date that shares common interests and hobbies.

Finding dates in this way, much of the time you won’t get into incompatibility issues. (Much of the time…)

One should be careful about fake Facebook profiles , though, as they are usually created by stalkers or spammers.

(Perhaps this is a disadvantage, but Facebook is also becoming one of the major vehicles for failed relationship and breakups.)

Facebook for Business

Facebook is one of the largest sites in the world where we are not only allowed, but encouraged to connect with everyone.

Anyone can take advantage of Facebook to maintain a good relationship with others who identify with certain tastes or products. This is very important because as a business, you can sell or promote a product/service to a highly targeted audience, thus increasing the possibilities of making money on the internet .

Facebook allows the establishment of partnerships between various projects. Moreover, using a Facebook fan page, you can increase your brand value and social media presence for your business. If used properly, Facebook can help you find new leads and clients.

Facebook Video Chatting

Facebook can also be used as video chat tool.

Recently, Facebook implemented the Facebook video chat feature in partnership with Skype. Now you can make video calls to your friends using Facebook’s inbuilt video chat service.

Facebook for Image and Video Hosting

You can also use Facebook as a site to host images and videos. You can set privacy levels for individual albums to control who can see what you share.

Moreover, you can always download your complete collection of Facebook photos and videos using the  Facebook backup account feature.

Facebook for News & Information

The real advantage of Facebook is that it’s a real-time social networking site. This makes it one of the best sources to stay updated with the latest news and information. Major news usually goes viral on Facebook, and most brands use it to announce important things regarding their products/services.

Bloggers and internet marketers can subscribe to popular blog fan pages and keep themselves aware of the latest updates. In fact, I have one profile just to gather news.

Facebook as a Personal Portfolio

Facebook’s Timeline gives a completely new look regarding your personal profile branding.

With the Facebook Timeline cover , you are allowed create a dramatic first impression as the cover pic will quickly tell people what you are all about.

Also, you can make certain updates public, and if done strategically, you can use it as a portfolio. For example, if you want people to recognize you as a Facebook business expert (provided you are one), you can set your privacy to Public for your most commented and liked “Facebook for business tips, articles, and discussions”.

This way all your new profile visitors will see your expertise, and they will be connecting with you because of your useful and targeted updates. This will also help you get more subscribers and potential clients.

The Disadvantages of Facebook

Facebook Privacy

One of the major concerns and disadvantages of Facebook has to do with Facebook’s privacy .

In the past, it has created a lot of buzz due to sudden changes, but now Facebook has simplified its privacy settings.

Another thing to consider has to do with the availability of really personal information, whether it’s in video, pictures, or text.

Here’s a good rule:

• Never give out too much personal information.

All throughout the internet, we should always keep in mind the privacy of our personal data. After it’s placed online, we lose all control.

• How To Remove Yourself From Facebook Public Search

Private Status Published Publicly

Even though Facebook has simplified its privacy settings, many unknowing users still end up publishing private images and status updates publicly.

Also, people usually keep their Facebook friends list  visible to the public, and this helps Facebook stalkers find more information about you.

Read our guide:  How To Hide Facebook Friends List From Others .

Fake Facebook Profiles

Facebook is full of fake profiles.

There is no limit to these profiles. Most of them are created by stalkers or marketers looking to gain more friends and use it for their marketing purposes.

There are many ways by which you can identify a fake Facebook profile. (We will cover this in an upcoming article.)

Not Using Facebook List Feature

Many users still don’t use the Facebook list feature which is very helpful to keep your status updates targeted to a specific group of friends (e.g college friends, office friends, etc.)

I’m sure you don’t want to get fired from your job because of silly status updates about how much your boss sucks.

Time-consuming

Of all of  Facebook’s disadvantages , I believe this is one of the major reasons why people deactivate  or delete their Facebook profile. Being one of the best ways to stay updated about what your friends are doing, people spend too much time on this vast social networking site.

Facebook offers many entertainment applications and games which engage users to a great extent. Apart from that, Facebook chat and Facebook video chat are another two time-consuming features.

If you want to use Facebook to your advantage, set yourself a  time-limit.  Spending too much time on Facebook might make you a Facebook addict, and you might end up wasting too much time.

Weighing the scales, where we put the advantages and disadvantages of Facebook, we can conclude that, if Facebook is used in the right proportions, and with proper care, it can be a powerful tool for marketing and networking.

In particular, any online or offline business can leverage the power of Facebook for business success. It’s why Facebook has become, in a short time, one of the most widely used marketing tools in today’s business world.

While there are some disadvantages, they can be overcome with some knowledge about the platform, and a little bit of self-discipline. In other words, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

How do you use Facebook? What’s your opinion on Facebook? Is it helping you or are you simply spending too much time on it? 

Do let us know if you think of any other advantages and disadvantages of Facebook. Share your opinion in the comments!

Tech Stuff To Read Next:

• A Beginner Guide to Secure Facebook Account

• Facebook Safety Tips to Keep Yourself Safe

• 5 Top Internet Safety Tips And It’s Not What You Think

Facebook Addiction: Symptoms & Signs of Facebook Abuse

Article by Harsh Agrawal

Harsh has written 159 articles..

If you like This post, you can follow shoutmetech on Twitter . Subscribe to shoutmetech feed via RSS or EMAIL to receive instant updates.

Comments on this entry are closed.

I think that Facebook is a helping tool for the digital marketer as well as a normal users. Normal Users can use Facebook like lifetime free cloud storage to store our files, images, etc unlimited. And digital marketers use this to grow the community and personal branding and also use it for earning.

Stay Connected

Popular posts, list of facebook shortcut keys and facebook emoticons.

TunnelBear Review – Best Free VPN for Mac, iOS, Windows & more

Follow These Steps To Remove Yourself From Facebook Public Search

Top 10 Greatest WhatsApp Tips and Tricks You Can Use Today

5 Best Android Launchers You Must Try

Most Popular

13 days ago

How to Write An Informative Essay

How to cite scientific papers, quillbot vs turnitin, quetext vs grammarly, native american weapons, the pros and cons of using facebook essay sample, example.

Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with people who are far away. According to surveys, friends who reside in different countries and use Facebook to communicate with each other display a more optimistic mood and feel calmer about those who are close to them, compared to those who do not use any social networks, or use only email (IFR Database). People who use Facebook tend to feel like they are in touch with the rest of the world regardless of distances, and this sensation makes them feel better.

Facebook is a reasonable option for people who want to stay updated with the news of the topics that are of interest to them. Joining various communities regarding all kinds of activities, and receiving updates from them turn Facebook into an easy-to-use, completely-customizable newsline. Hence, Facebook can be a useful tool for those who need to receive operational and fresh information.

At the same time, Facebook is known to be a factor that distorts one’s perception of reality, declines the satisfaction of one’s life and personality, and negatively affects relationships between people. According to the research held by Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan and Philippe Verduyn of Leuven University, people who use Facebook often display a growing dissatisfaction with their lives, whereas respondents who use Facebook infrequently and socialize with peers in real life felt happier and healthier (The Economist).

The same research showed how the most common emotion experienced by people who regularly use Facebook is envy. This is due to the fact that people usually do their best to make their lives look better than they are in reality, and at the same time believe in the reality of “virtual lives” created by other Facebook users.

Facebook can be dangerous for teenagers and children. Parents who would like to protect their children from negative information on the Internet should consider how Facebook is full of links to other media resources, some of which can be explicit. Whereas it is possible, to some extent, to control a child’s use of Facebook, it is impossible to predict where browsing these links could lead them (TheOnlineMom). Due to the same reason, parents have a right to feel worried about the friends of friends. One can know all the friends of their children, but these friends have other friends, who can have a negative influence on these children.

Facebook is a tool which should be used with caution. Though it is a convenient way to stay in touch with friends and acquaintances who live far away, and to stay updated about events which are of interest for a particular person, it can also have negative impacts on one’s personality. For example, Facebook causes its regular users to feel envious about the lives of other people; it can also provoke dissatisfaction with one’s own life, especially compared to people who socialize more in real life rather than online. The relationship Facebook has with the world is bittersweet: but we may witness its relationship turn for the worse in the coming decades.

“Get a Life!” The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, 17 Aug. 2013. Web. 07 Mar. 2014. <http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21583593-using-social-network-seems-make-people-more-miserable-get-life>.

“The Pros and Cons of Facebook for Kids.” TheOnlineMom. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Mar. 2014. <http://theonlinemom.com/secondary.asp?id=1275>

“What’s Wrong About Facebook?” IFR Database. 25 Jun. 2011. Web. 07 Mar. 2014.

Follow us on Reddit for more insights and updates.

Comments (0)

Welcome to A*Help comments!

We’re all about debate and discussion at A*Help.

We value the diverse opinions of users, so you may find points of view that you don’t agree with. And that’s cool. However, there are certain things we’re not OK with: attempts to manipulate our data in any way, for example, or the posting of discriminative, offensive, hateful, or disparaging material.

Comments are closed.

More from Analytical Essay Examples and Samples 2024

Nov 28 2023

Hirschi’s Social Bond Theory

Nov 27 2023

Another Brick In The Wall Meaning

Themes in The Crucible

Related writing guides, writing an analysis essay.

Remember Me

What is your profession ? Student Teacher Writer Other

Forgotten Password?

Username or Email

Facebook Essay

To make this Facebook essay easy to understand for any reader, the author will start with terminology.

Facebook is among the most popular social media networking sites today. It is popular due to its multiple applications and the ease of communication it offers to the user. It allows people to share pictures, events and statuses on a single platform.

Facebook has several benefits, such as forming groups, chatting with friends and finding information on multiple topics. The platform is also highly informative due to the multiple pages on a host of topics, including but not limited to health, education, science, exercise, etc. It is also perfect for keeping in touch with relatives and friends who can stay connected to a single platform.

Below, this essay about Facebook will dive deeper into the platform’s advantages and how it can help kids, students, and adults communicate.

More recently, mobile companies have enabled users to connect to Facebook through their phones. Mobile phone technology such as GPRS now allows users to access Facebook from any location. This feature has made Facebook extremely popular among today’s generation.

Staying connected has never been so simple and effective than it is on Facebook. Talking to friends and relatives or family members is now possible with a single Facebook account which is a perfect platform to chat and communicate.

A more recent addition to the online chat program is the video calling feature which has gained immense popularity. Not only can one talk to people but also see them live with the help of this video chat feature.

Individuals no longer have to yearn to keep in touch with their friends and dear ones. A single Facebook account enables users to achieve several functions all at once.

Another very important feature of Facebook is the online gaming portal which it offers to its users. There are hundreds of thousands of games on Facebook which one can play at any given time. The interesting aspect is the ability to play these games with friends.

There are multiple games like Poker, Diamond Dash, Zuma, Farm Heroes Sage and others on Facebook.

Playing these games is a unique and special experience since it allows users to interact with friends and engage in healthy competition. There are no additional costs and users can play games absolutely free of cost.

Facebook is becoming a highly successful platform not only for making new friends and finding old ones, but for accessing global and local news as well. Most of the news and media companies have launched their Facebook pages.

This feature has added the extra benefit to Facebook, making it educational and purposeful. Besides being a medium to interact and communicate, Facebook has become a marketing platform for many popular brands. Today, one can easily access all the famous global brands on Facebook.

Several small time businesses have become successful on Facebook. People, who do not have the capital to open a store, have launched their products on Facebook, gaining financial success and recognition.

One can buy practically anything on Facebook from shoes, bags, accessories, clothes, phones, laptops, electronic etc. Many of these online stores offer the facility to make online payments and deliver goods to the buyer’s home.

Thus, through Facebook, people can engage in a host of activities such as playing games, interacting with friends, chatting, video conferencing, marketing, buying, selling and numerous others. Facebook is no longer only a social networking site to stay connected with friends and family.

It has become a platform with online marketing options for the users. When used responsibly, Facebook is an excellent medium for several purposes with extremely low cost and high benefits to the users.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, July 5). Facebook Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-facebook/

"Facebook Essay." IvyPanda , 5 July 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-facebook/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Facebook Essay'. 5 July.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Facebook Essay." July 5, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-facebook/.

1. IvyPanda . "Facebook Essay." July 5, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-facebook/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Facebook Essay." July 5, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-facebook/.

• Facebook Should Be Banned
• Social Networking and Depression
• Netflix Customer Services
• 7Up Advertisement Campaign
• Measuring the Impact of Social Media: Challenges, Practices and Methods
• Advertising Strategy for Cartier Bridal
• Strategic Plan - Social Media in Women and Child Hospital
• Advertisements Analysis and Comparison

Essay on Social Media for School Students and Children

500+ words essay on social media.

Social media is a tool that is becoming quite popular these days because of its user-friendly features. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more are giving people a chance to connect with each other across distances. In other words, the whole world is at our fingertips all thanks to social media. The youth is especially one of the most dominant users of social media. All this makes you wonder that something so powerful and with such a massive reach cannot be all good. Like how there are always two sides to a coin, the same goes for social media. Subsequently, different people have different opinions on this debatable topic. So, in this essay on Social Media, we will see the advantages and disadvantages of social media.

Advantages of Social Media

When we look at the positive aspect of social media, we find numerous advantages. The most important being a great device for education . All the information one requires is just a click away. Students can educate themselves on various topics using social media.

Moreover, live lectures are now possible because of social media. You can attend a lecture happening in America while sitting in India.

Furthermore, as more and more people are distancing themselves from newspapers, they are depending on social media for news. You are always updated on the latest happenings of the world through it. A person becomes more socially aware of the issues of the world.

In addition, it strengthens bonds with your loved ones. Distance is not a barrier anymore because of social media. For instance, you can easily communicate with your friends and relatives overseas.

Most importantly, it also provides a great platform for young budding artists to showcase their talent for free. You can get great opportunities for employment through social media too.

Another advantage definitely benefits companies who wish to promote their brands. Social media has become a hub for advertising and offers you great opportunities for connecting with the customer.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Disadvantages of Social Media

Despite having such unique advantages, social media is considered to be one of the most harmful elements of society. If the use of social media is not monitored, it can lead to grave consequences.

Thus, the sharing on social media especially by children must be monitored at all times. Next up is the addition of social media which is quite common amongst the youth.

This addiction hampers with the academic performance of a student as they waste their time on social media instead of studying. Social media also creates communal rifts. Fake news is spread with the use of it, which poisons the mind of peace-loving citizens.

In short, surely social media has both advantages and disadvantages. But, it all depends on the user at the end. The youth must particularly create a balance between their academic performances, physical activities, and social media. Excess use of anything is harmful and the same thing applies to social media. Therefore, we must strive to live a satisfying life with the right balance.

FAQs on Social Media

Q.1 Is social media beneficial? If yes, then how?

A.1 Social media is quite beneficial. Social Media offers information, news, educational material, a platform for talented youth and brands.

Q.2 What is a disadvantage of Social Media?

A.2 Social media invades your privacy. It makes you addicted and causes health problems. It also results in cyberbullying and scams as well as communal hatred.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Facebook is a harmful presence in our lives. It’s not too late to pull the plug on it

Undaunted by scandals, the social media giant plans to tighten its grip on our everyday activities. We don’t have to just submit

F acebook is in perpetual crisis mode. For years now, the company has confronted waves of critical scrutiny on issues caused or exacerbated by the platform. Recent revelations have lengthened the charge sheet.

That list includes the mass data collection and privacy invasion by Cambridge Analytica ; the accusations of Russian interference during the 2016 presidential election; unrestrained hate speech, inciting, among other things, genocide in Myanmar ; the viral spread of disinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines, with Joe Biden proclaiming about Facebook and other social media platforms: “They’re killing people”. Add to that Facebook Marketplace: with a billion users buying and selling goods, ProPublica found a growing pool of scammers and fraudsters exploiting the site, with Facebook failing “to safeguard users”.

The latest wave of investigative reporting focused on the company, meanwhile, comes from the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files series. After pouring over a cache of the company’s internal documents, the WSJ reported that “Facebook’s researchers have identified the platform’s ill effects”. For instance, the company downplayed findings that using Instagram can have significant impacts on the mental health of teenage girls. Meanwhile, it has been implementing strategies to attract more preteen users to Instagram. The platform’s algorithm is designed to foster more user engagement in any way possible, including by sowing discord and rewarding outrage . This issue was raised by Facebook’s integrity team, which also proposed changes to the algorithm that would suppress, rather than accelerate, such animus between users. These solutions were struck down by Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, because he prioritised growing engagement above other objectives.

What’s more, the WSJ reported, Facebook employees “ raised alarms ” about drug cartels and human traffickers in developing countries using the platform, but the company’s response has been anaemic. Perhaps because executives are, yet again, hesitant to impede growth in these rapidly expanding markets.

This is consistent with claims by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who said at the weekend, in an interview with 60 Minutes , “Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety.” It also emerged that Haugen has filed at least eight complaints with the US financial watchdog over Facebook’s approach to safety. Haugen testified before the US Senate on Tuesday, backing up her revelations. “I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy,” she said. “The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.” We shouldn’t be surprised that making money hand over fist is any company’s primary motivation. But here we have further evidence that Facebook is a uniquely socially toxic platform.

Despite the executive team’s awareness of these serious problems, despite congressional hearings and scripted pledges to do better, despite Zuckerberg’s grandiose mission statements that change with the tides of public pressure, Facebook continues to shrug off the great responsibility that comes with the great power and wealth it has accumulated.

Each surging wave builds on the last, hitting Facebook even harder, enveloping it in scandal after scandal. In response, the company has decided to go on the offensive – rather than truly address any of its problems.

In August, Zuckerberg signed off on an initiative called Project Amplify , which aims to use Facebook’s news feed “to show people positive stories about the social network”, according to the New York Times . By pushing pro-Facebook stories, including some “written by the company”, it hopes to influence how users perceive the platform. Facebook is no longer happy to just let others use the news feed to propagate misinformation and exert influence – it wants to wield this tool for its own interests, too.

With Project Amplify under way, Facebook is mounting a serious defence against the WSJ Facebook Files. In an article posted on Facebook Newsroom by Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs, , accusations of “deliberate mischaracterisations” by the WSJ reporters are lobbed in without supplying any specific details or corrections. Similarly, in an internal memo sent by Clegg to pre-empt Haugen’s interview, Clegg rejected any responsibility for Facebook being “the primary cause of polarisation”, blamed the prevalence of extreme views on individual bad actors like “a rogue uncle” and provided talking points for employees who might “get questions from friends and families about these things”.

It’s all spin, with no substance. A trained politician deflecting accusations while planting seeds of doubt in the public’s mind without acknowledging or addressing the problems at hand.

In another response to the WSJ, Facebook’s head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, made a strange analogy between social media and cars: “We know that more people die than would otherwise because of car accidents, but by and large, cars create way more value in the world than they destroy,” Mosseri said. “And I think social media is similar.” Mosseri can no longer deny that platforms like his are forces for destruction. His tactic is to convince us that a simple cost-benefit analysis comes out in his favour. He happens to elide the fact that cars cause more than crashes; they are also responsible for systemic social and environmental consequences at every level. Of course, this is exactly the kind of self-interested myopia we should expect from a tech executive under fire.

Beyond pushing back against critical reporting, however, an initiative like Project Amplify should be understood as Facebook attempting to pave the way for its deeper penetration into every facet of our reality. After all, when asked last year by Congress why Facebook is not a monopoly, Zuckerberg said it’s because he views all possible modes of “ people connecting with other people ” as a form of competition for his business. And if we know anything about Facebook, they are very good at capturing market share and crushing competitors – no matter what it takes.

Facebook needs users to form an intimate relationship with the platform. In quick succession this summer, it announced two new products that represent the company’s next planned phase of existence – both its own and ours.

First is the “ metaverse ”. Named after an explicitly dystopian sci-fi idea , the metaverse is, for now, pitched as essentially a virtual reality office – accessed through VR goggles like Facebook Oculus – where you go to see colleagues, attend meetings, and give presentations without having to leave home. Zuckerberg proclaimed that over the next five years, Facebook “will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”

Second is Ray-Ban Stories, Facebook’s attempt to succeed where Google Glass failed. Ray-Ban Stories are pitched as a frictionless way to stay constantly connected to Facebook and Instagram without that pesky smartphone getting in the way. Now you can achieve the dream of sharing every moment of your day with Facebook – and the valuable data produced from it – without ever needing to think about it.

Importantly, access to both kinds of reality – virtual and augmented – are mediated by Facebook. The executives at Facebook would like you to believe that the company is now a permanent fixture in society. That a platform primarily designed to supercharge targeted advertisements has earned the right to mediate not just our access to information or connection but our perception of reality. And Facebook’s aggressive attempts to combat any scepticism, combined with its reality-shaping ambitions, shows how desperate it is to convince us to accept the social poison it peddles and ask for more.

Days before Facebook’s latest congressional hearing – this time on the mental impacts of Instagram on teenagers – Mosseri announced his team was pausing Instagram Kids, a service aimed at people under 13 years old, and developing “parental supervision tools”. It seems yet again that they will do the bare minimum only when forced to do so. Speaking about this change of direction in her Senate hearing, Haugen was sceptical: “I would be sincerely surprised if they do not continue working on Instagram Kids, and I would be amazed if a year from now we don’t have this conversation again.”

For Facebook, all this negative attention amounts to an image problem: bad publicity that can be counteracted by good propaganda. For the rest of us, this is indicative that Facebook doesn’t just have a problem; Facebook is the problem. Ultimately, an overwhelming case is growing against Facebook’s right to even exist, let alone continue enjoying unrestricted operation and expansion.

We must not forget that Facebook is still young. It was founded in 2004, but didn’t really come into itself, becoming the behemoth we know today, until going public in 2012, buying Instagram for $1bn (£760m) that same year and then acquiring WhatsApp for $19bn two years later. True to its original informal motto – “Move fast and break things” – Facebook has wasted no time wreaking a well-documented path of destruction.

When Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp temporarily went offline this week due to a technical problem , we saw just how dependent we have already become on these services for so many everyday activities. It was a shock to suddenly be without them. The company would probably see this as evidence that our lives are too intertwined with its services for them to ever go away. But, as the company has proven time and time again, our interests and its interests are rarely aligned. We should instead recognise that allowing a rapacious company to design and own critical infrastructure with zero accountability is the worst of all possible options.

If its executives want to compare social media to cars, then at the very least this dangerous technology must be subjected to the same level of heavy regulation and independent oversight as the automotive industry. Otherwise, Facebook must be reminded that it’s not too late for the public to pull the plug on this social experiment gone wrong. Right now, almost any alternative would be better.

Jathan Sadowski is a research fellow in the emerging technologies research lab at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

• Social networking
• Social media
• Digital media

Most viewed

30,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Meet top uk universities from the comfort of your home, here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

• School Education /

Essay on Advantages And Disadvantages of Social Media

• Updated on  
• May 4, 2024

‘Social media is not about the exploitation of technology but service to community.’ – Simon Mainwaring. 

Essay on Social Media: According to a 2022 study, an average Indian user on the internet spent 194 minutes daily on social media platforms . Social Media has become an integral part of our lives, sometimes very informative and a great tool for education. On the other hand, there are several disadvantages of social media which make us vulnerable to the content offered on these platforms. Every minute we spend on social media scrolling people and their content can have a lasting impact on our mental health. In this essay on the advantages and disadvantages of social media , we will try to cover all the domains of online platforms.

Table of Contents

• 1 What is Social Media?
• 2.1 Advantages of Social Media
• 2.2 Disadvantages of Social Media
• 3 Short Essay on Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media
• 4 Social Media Impact on Students: Advantages and Disadvantages
• 5 Paragraph on Social Media

Quick Read: How to Calculate Percentage in ICSE Board Class 10?

What is Social Media?

Social media are online platforms and applications that allow us to create and share content, and participate in social networking activities. These platforms facilitate the creation and exchange of user-generated content, such as text posts, images, videos, and other multimedia, enabling individuals and groups to connect, communicate , and interact with each other in virtual communities and networks.

Social media platforms have become essential tools for businesses, organizations, and individuals to promote their products, services, and personal brands, as well as to connect with their audiences and communities.

Also Read: Speech on Importance of Social Media

Essay on Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media in 300 Words

All the hours we spend on social media offer us exposure to the latest trends and activities across the globe. Our traditional way of communication and sharing information has been revolutionized by social media. Everybody agrees that social media platforms offer us information and lessons that we might not be able to grasp from books or experts. But the scale or balance of social media is tilted towards the disadvantages it offers us. This essay on advantages and disadvantages of social media highlights all the aspects.

Advantages of Social Media

• The advantages of social media include easy and instantaneous communication. It helps people connect with friends, family, and colleagues regardless of geographical barriers.
• It allows users to share their thoughts, experiences, and ideas with a broader audience, fostering a sense of community and belonging.
• Social media serves as a platform for networking and professional growth, enabling individuals to connect with potential employers, clients, and business partners.
• It plays a crucial role in spreading awareness and information. It disseminates news, promotes social causes, and raises awareness about important issues.

Disadvantages of Social Media

With all the advantages of social media listed above, it also brings certain disadvantages.

• Misleading and fake information is one of the major disadvantages of social media. This can have serious consequences, including the spread of misinformation during crises or the manipulation of public opinion.
• Excessive use of social media can lead to addiction and negative impacts on mental health.
• Constant exposure to curated and often idealized versions of others’ lives can contribute to feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem.
• It can also lead to decreased productivity and social isolation, as some users may prioritize virtual interactions over real-life relationships.
• Another concern is privacy issues and data breaches. We as users share personal information, making us vulnerable to data breaches and invasions of our privacy. This can lead to identity theft and other cybercrimes, posing significant risks to users’ security and well-being.

Also Read: Essay on Effects and Impact of Social Networking Sites in 700+ Words

Short Essay on Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media

Also Read: Essay on Media: Short and Long Sample Essays

Social Media Impact on Students: Advantages and Disadvantages

Social media has had a big impact on reducing the ability of children to pay attention for long periods of time. The constant switching between different applications, videos, games, and messages trains the brains of young minds to have a short focus.

The youngsters grow accustomed to the quick bursts of novelty and the dopamine that social media provides them. Their minds get restless and easily get bored when they are asked to concentrate on something for more than a few minutes at a time. In the future, continuous reading, lectures, or work will become challenging for them.

The nature of multimedia sites like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube overexcites the brains of children. Rapid receiving of fire streams of fresh content is designed to grab and keep their attention at all costs. All this overloads the senses and cognitive abilities of young minds.

Further, the apps also encourage endless scrolling and switching of content by auto-playing the next video or suggesting a new watch. Children develop the habit of constantly shifting their focus instead of concentrating on a single task.

However, social media also offers some benefits to children. It helps the kids generate new ideas and perspectives worldwide. It allows the young ones to learn about trending events and issues that society cares about. There are numerous tech videos that are created with the concept of being fun, engaging, and easy to learn simultaneously.

Further, social media also provides creative outlets for the children to express themselves through photos, videos, writing, and art. It allows them to develop interests and easily connect with people around them who share their passions.

As it said, excess of everything is bad; therefore, parents and teachers must guide children on the balanced use of social media. They should teach young minds to promote the habits of single-tasking and good focus. If it is not done, then the distracting nature of applications will increase the reduction in attentiveness.

In conclusion, social media comes with predominantly negative conditions as well as some positive sides. Proper guidance and a correct learning approach will help the child differentiate between the two in the correct manner and will help increase their ability to focus on whatever they do.

Also Read: Essay on Social Media

Paragraph on Social Media

Also Read: Social Media Bane Or Boon? Short and Long Speech for Students

Ans. Here are some of the popular advantages of social media: Enhanced Connectivity with friends, family, and acquaintances from all around the world; Dissemination of information and raising awareness about various issues; Space for professionals to connect with like-minded individuals; It offers businesses a cost-effective way to promote their products, etc.

Ans. Here are some of the disadvantages of social media: Cybercriminals carry out various online scams and phishing attacks; Addiction and Time Wastage; Negative Impact on Mental Health, etc.

Ans. To write an essay on the advantages and disadvantages of social media, you need to describe what social media is, and how it has revolutionized our ways of communication, disseminates news, promotes social causes, and raises awareness about important issues. Apart from its advantages, describe its disadvantages, such as security issues, cyberbullying and online harassment, addition and time wastage, etc.

Explore More Interesting Essay Topics

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Shiva Tyagi

With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Contact no. *

Connect With Us

30,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today.

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

January 2024

September 2024

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

Have something on your mind?

Make your study abroad dream a reality in January 2022 with

India's Biggest Virtual University Fair

Essex Direct Admission Day

Why attend .

Don't Miss Out

Question and Answer forum for K12 Students

Facebook Essay | Essay on Facebook for Students and Kids in English, Is Facebook Good or Bad?

Facebook Essay: Facebook is a long-range interpersonal communication site that associates individuals from one side of the planet to the other. It has made the planet earth a worldwide town. With only a single tick, you can associate with somebody living abroad.

Facebook has become one of the most popular people-to-person communication destinations. Notwithstanding, it accompanies its own arrangements of advantages and disadvantages. While it has helped a ton of people and businesses to make their image, it is likewise being utilized for wrong exercises.

It expects to unite the world with the force of the local area. You can likewise become more acquainted with what is happening all throughout the planet. You can even pen down your musings on that stage.

You can read more  Essay Writing  about articles, events, people, sports, technology many more.

Essay on Facebook Benefits and Disadvantages

The Internet has brought a big revolution to society and the communication world. Facebook is a piece of it. Facebook is for the most part known as the main online media. It is an online stage where we can get associated with individuals and can cooperate with them. It has made the world little and simple to get to. Anybody can get associated with anybody now. It has opened another entryway for business, correspondence, and relationships.

There are huge provisions that Facebook has. Anybody can join there for nothing. You need a web associated versatile or PC. You can join with your email or telephone number. When you joined, you will discover loads of individuals’ records there who you know, all things considered. Facebook consistently energize adding individuals that you know. Then, at that point, others will discover your record of their feed and will send you a companion demand. In the event that you acknowledge their companion demand, they will go to your companion list. An individual who is in your companion can make an impression on you.

At the point when you share a photograph or compose something on your profile or timetable, individuals of your companion rundown can see these. Not just see they can respond to them. Indeed, even they can remark on their viewpoint in the remark box. Facebook has a decent element named bunch. You can make a gathering and can add your companions there. It is an extremely simple and basic technique to make online home bases or offer things to a designated crowd. You can make a page for your business to advance on the web. Pretty much every business has a Facebook page now. They advance their items online with individuals. Counting all, there are heaps of provisions of Facebook that you can appreciate.

Benefits of Facebook

Facebook is encountering sensational development presently where the quantity of clients has arrived at one billion. It accompanies a ton of advantages like video calling with your nearby ones and transferring your photographs and recordings without charge.

Above all, it permits you to reach out to individuals from the opposite side of the world without spending a penny. It is additionally an incredible method to associate with old school companions and school companions.

Further, you can likewise make new companions through this stage. At the point when you associate with individuals from everywhere the world, it opens ways to find out with regards to new societies, qualities and customs from various nations.

It additionally gives you includes for a bunch of conversations and visits. Presently, Facebook additionally permits clients to sell their items or administrations through their site. It is an incredible method of expanding deals and setting up your business on the web.

Disadvantages of Facebook

Other than this load of good sides, there are a few disservices of Facebook. Facebook has turned into a period killing machine for understudies. In an understudy life, you need to stay away from web-based media like Facebook or Twitter. The youthful age is being dependent on Facebook. They are going through quite a while with it. What’s more, it has been an integral justification for their investigation hamper. The gatekeepers ought to know about this. They should restrict their child’s Smartphone utilizing time. Something else, that could be truly downright awful is their schooling.

Conclusion on Facebook Essay

To summarize it, in the event that we use Facebook to the right extent and with legitimate consideration, it very well may be an integral asset for anybody. In addition, it tends to be extraordinary for promoting and systems administration. Further, any business can likewise use its ability to make its business achievement. Be that as it may, it is fundamental to recollect to not allow it to turn into a fixation.

Small Essay on Facebook

Facebook is among the most famous online media organizing locales in the present occasions. Facebook is profoundly famous because of its different applications and the simplicity of correspondence it offers to the client. It permits clients to share pictures, occasions and situations with a solitary stage.

Facebook has various advantages like the capacity to shape gatherings, talk with companions and discover data on different points. Facebook is likewise profoundly instructive because of the different pages on a large group of points including yet not restricted to wellbeing, schooling, science, practice and so forth

It is likewise an optimal correspondence stage for family members, companions and individuals from a family who can remain associated with a solitary stage.

A later expansion to the online visit program is the video calling highlight which has acquired monstrous ubiquity. Not exclusively would one be able to converse with individuals yet in addition see them live with the assistance of this video talk highlight.

One more vital element of Facebook is the internet gaming gateway that it offers to its clients. There are a huge number of games on Facebook which one can play at some random time. The intriguing angle is the capacity to play these games with companions.

Facebook is turning into an exceptionally fruitful stage not just for making new companions and discovering old ones, however forgetting worldwide and nearby news also. The greater part of the news and media organizations have dispatched their Facebook pages.

FAQ’s on Facebook Essay

Question 1. Why do you like Facebook?

Answer: Individuals Are Addicted To Facebook Because It Is A Social Network platform. Having Facebook causes you to feel like you are very much educated with regard to everything everywhere. Facebook allows you the opportunity to stay in contact. You can stay in contact with your loved ones.

Question 2. What is Facebook?

Answer: Facebook is an interpersonal interaction webpage that makes it simple for you to interface and offers with loved ones on the web. Initially intended for undergrads, Facebook was made in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg while he was selected at Harvard University.

Question 3. What are the uses of Facebook?

Answer: Facebook is a site that permits clients, who pursue free profiles, to interface with companions, work associates or individuals they don’t have the foggiest idea, on the web. It permits clients to share pictures, music, recordings, and articles, just as their own considerations and feelings with anyway many individuals they like.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Facebook for Children?

Children believe that facebook is a protected environment, but are they right.

Posted July 14, 2017

Social networks allow users to interact with their friends on an individual level, within specific groups, and in a public manner. Currently the most poplar social network is Facebook . There is a minimum age requirement of 13, but this is frequently violated and many children open their own Facebook pages at a much earlier age. I recently turned to Facebook to leave a birthday message for a 14-year-old boy, only to find that, according to the date of birth on his profile page, he was now 33. It seems Facebook use has become such an accepted and popular hobby that parents feel their child will be a social outcast if they are not part of the Facebook scene. Children generally believe that Facebook is a protected environment, where almost all potential advantages of the Internet exist. There, they enjoy their own private territory, over which they have total control, without interference from adults, particularly their parents. Moreover, they feel that they can control exactly how and what the world learns about them, for example they can choose which flattering photographs to upload, and which pieces of personal news to share. Running their social network activity is fast and easy, and they feel connected to their friends whenever and wherever they choose. It offers a great feeling of empowerment.

Chatbox: Tommy, the wonder child

Tommy is 11 years old and already has 500 friends on Facebook. However, to be honest, he has actually met only 40 or so face to face, and to be even more honest, aside from Facebook, he is not really in contact with them at all, because, after all, who needs to meet people in person when you have Facebook? Tommy lives with his mother and sister, but hardly sees them. His mother is involved in her work as a lawyer, while his sister is constantly busy with her friends. The family members do keep in touch with one another: they send each other WhatsApp messages and it works out pretty well. In his face-to-face social interactions Tommy is very shy , easily embarrassed, and prone to stuttering . On Facebook, however, he is very eloquent, doesn’t stutter and never gets confused or embarrassed. He spends around five hours a day on Facebook. One hour at least is dedicated to updating his profile. He once spent over two hours editing his profile photograph until he was happy with the result. When he finally uploaded it, it garnered 400 likes, so his extra effort was worth it.

On a previous occasion, everything went wrong. Tommy uploaded a post, but received no likes or shares … nothing at all. He hinted to some people to come forward and help him out, but the situation didn’t change dramatically, so Tommy decided to remove the post. It was, he felt, the worst thing that could happen to anyone. In another more successful post, Tommy told his friends all about the nervous breakdown his sister had suffered following their parents’ divorce . He revealed everything: the shouting, the crying, the weeks she spent in a psychiatric hospital. His sister was devastated, but that didn’t really matter because he had received so many shares and likes. He was the king of Facebook for three blissful days.

Now, when he posts on Facebook, he feels an increasing degree of tension, particularly as he waits for responses. Will his friends feel excited? Will they like it? He feels that his entire self-worth is on the line. And then, when the first likes and shares begin to trickle in, he feels suddenly so alive and everything seems good, in fact amazing.

Somewhere, deep inside, Tommy knows that there are some people on Facebook who are more poplar than him. He monitors some of them: they are better-looking than him, and their lives seem much more exciting than his. Sometimes this depresses him. A month ago he received a friend request from someone who looked nerdy, whom he did not recognize, and who had fewer than 200 friends. Naturally, Tommy did not approve him, as he was not about to put his own social standing at risk. When he looks at his friends’ pictures, he sometimes wonders what they really look like. Would he recognize them if he met them in the street? He knows why this issue troubles him: he puts a lot of work into editing his images with Photoshop to make sure that he looks fantastic and he wonders if his friends on Facebook would actually recognize him if they met face to face.

Tonight, Tommy is going to meet one of his online friends: a boy called Jon. This will be their first face-to-face encounter, although Tommy knows that they have a lot in common, including their passion for collecting Star Wars memorabilia; in fact, they met through a site dedicated to this interest. Jon has invited Tommy to his home to see his collection. It is in a part of town that Tommy doesn’t know well, and he has decided not to tell any of his friends and family—online or offline—about this meeting, so that it will be all the more exciting when he puts up a post about it later on. He is sure that he is going to have a great time and the whole thing is making him feel very grown-up.

Many young people spend a lot of time on Facebook and so it is not surprising that what they encounter there determines much of their self-image and self-esteem (Valkenburg, Peter, & Schouten, 2006). Anyone who puts up any content on Facebook will be anxious to know what the world thinks of it (and by extension, of him or her). Strategies have been developed, particularly among young people, to garner positive feedback (Ong et al., 2011). These include tactics such as adding catchy photos, keeping messages short, ending posts with a question, posting message at a time when friends are usually online, and “hinting” to friends to give positive feedback. If the post does not receive what its “sponsor” defines as enough likes and shares, they may well remove it. Another very interesting component of the Facebook experience is the feeling that you are the center of the world. You write something and immediately get feedback in the form of “Wow,” “Great,” or “You’re the king!” This feeling returns people to their earliest childhood , in fact to babyhood, when they believed that the entire world revolved around them. On Facebook, when young people write about their personal experiences, the “world” reacts immediately. This degree of focus on the self by young people is worrisome, as it is very likely to encourage narcissism (Mehdizadeh, 2010).

For most Facebook users, an integral part of the experience is the viewing of other people’s profiles, comparing and contrasting them with their own. This activity may well lead to their experiencing a decline in their sense of satisfaction with life (Krasnova et al). Young people frequently forget or do not even realize that their friends are also busy with their own PR activities and thus the image they present is not a true reflection of their life or degree of happiness .

On Facebook nearly everything translates into numbers (in the form of likes, comments, friends, and so on), which is likely to cause young people, especially those who suffer from social difficulties, to create distorted perceptions of friendship . They may fail to understand the quality of true friendship and the importance of investing in it, and instead opt for a quantitative definition of such, where friends are collected like points.

See more on this issue in my new book, Internet Psychology: The Basics

Amichai-Hamburger, Y. (2017). Internet Psychology: The Basics. New York: Routledge

Krasnova, H., Wenninger, H., Widjaja, T., & Buxmann, P. (2013). Envy on Facebook: A hidden threat to users’ life satisfaction? In 11th International conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik (pp. 1–16).

Ong, E. Y. L., Ang, R. P., Ho, J. C. M., Lim, J. C. Y., Goh, D. H., Lee, C. S., et al. (2011). Narcissism, extraversion, and adolescents’ self-presentation on Facebook. Personality and Individual Differences, 50, 180–185.

Mehdizaden, S. (2010). Self-Presentation 2.0: Narcissism and Self-Esteem on Facebook. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 13, 357-364

Valkenburg, P. M., Peter, J., & Schouten, A. P. (2006). Friend networking sites and their relationship to adolescents' well being and social self-esteem. CyberPsychology and Behavior, 9, 584−590.

Yair Amichai-Hamburger, Ph.D., is the director of the Research Center for Internet Psychology. He has worked many years as an industrial consultant, advising many leading organizations.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Therapy Center NEW
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Understanding what emotional intelligence looks like and the steps needed to improve it could light a path to a more emotionally adept world.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

IELTS Writing Task 2: Advantage/Disadvantage Sample Essay

In this post, we’re going to look at an IELTS Writing Task 2 advantages and disadvantages sample essay. In this type of Task 2 question, you will read a description of a common situation or practice. From there, you’ll describe the advantages and disadvantages of the idea you were presented with. For more background info and advice on this particular question type, you can go to my post on the Task 2 question types in IELTS Writing.

In this article, I’ll show you a sample advantage/disadvantage prompt and a model essay that responds to the prompt. The model essay is an example of band 9 level writing—this is the highest score you can get on the Writing section. I’ve patterned the essay after this IELTS Writing Task 2 template , which was created by Magoosh IELTS expert Rachel Kapelke-Dale.

IELTS Writing Task 2 Advantages and Disadvantages Sample Essay

Before we get started, you should of course first read the sample prompt.

IELTS Writing Task 2 Advantages and Disadvantages Sample Essay Question

With modern transportation, workers and students are increasingly mobile, and have more and more opportunities to study and work abroad. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this development. Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Write at least 250 words.

IELTS Writing Task 2 Advantages and Disadvantages Model Essay (Band 9)

Nowadays, both work and study can easily take a person out of their home country. This can be good because people can explore new cultures now more than ever. At the same time, world travelers may become disconnected from their own home countries. In this essay, I will take a closer look at the aforementioned key advantage and key disadvantage.

To be sure, ordinary people now have unprecedented access to life abroad. It is easier than ever to work or study in a foreign land for months and even years. Many large international corporations offer overseas work to their employees, just as nearly all universities provide study abroad options at partner campuses overseas. Ultimately, nearly any adult anywhere in the world can potentially immerse themselves in another language or culture, with support from their bosses or teachers.

The problem is that international workers and students sometimes become unconcerned with the affairs in the nations they are from. This kind of apathy can prevent people from doing their civic duty. As one example, people from countries with compulsory military service may spend years abroad and even renounce their citizenship to avoid protecting their homeland. Even more commonly, people who go abroad may choose not to vote in elections back home, failing to make their voice heard on important matters. So modern mobility can undermine one’s ability or desire to make a difference back home.

Learning about other cultures by actually living abroad is a powerful tool for better intercultural understanding. However, as valuable as this is, sometimes going abroad can cause people to ignore the importance of their own culture and country. Not all students and workers should go abroad, and the ones that do should not forget their role in their country of origin.

Word count: 294

Scoring Rationale

This IELTS Writing Task 2 advantages and disadvantages sample essay is held to the same standards as any other Writing Task 2 essay. These standards are listed in the official rubric for IELTS Writing Task 2 . If you read the level 9 description carefully and compare it to this essay, you should see the reasons it has a top score. But I’ve also included scorer commentary immediately below.

Scorer Commentary (Advantage/Disadvantage IELTS Essay Sample, Band 9)

The score report below is based on the official IELTS Writing Task 2 rubric . This report also looks very similar to the Magoosh IELTS essay scoring service .

Overall Band Score: 9

What was done well in the essay:

• This essay has over 250 words. This is a small but important way to avoid needlessly losing points due to the IELTS Writing word count penalty .
• The essay does a good job of covering both the advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of easy access to foreign experiences is explored in the first body paragraph. The disadvantages of becoming too distant from one’s home community is similarly explored in the second paragraph.
• Each paragraph has a clear topic sentence, followed by supporting details, examples, and a concluding sentence that wraps things up nicely.
• Transitional phrases such as “to be sure” and “even more commonly” are used to clearly link ideas between paragraphs and within paragraphs.
• Vocabulary and grammar are used very fluently; this essay is free of any serious errors in this aspect of English.

More IELTS Writing Task 2 Example Responses

If you found this example essay helpful, you’ll love the rest of them. Click the links below to access model responses for the other common Task 2 question types.

• Two-Part Question Essay
• Causes/Solutions Essay
• Discussion Essay
• Agree/Disagree Essay

David is a Test Prep Expert for Magoosh TOEFL and IELTS. Additionally, he’s helped students with TOEIC, PET, FCE, BULATS, Eiken, SAT, ACT, GRE, and GMAT. David has a BS from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and an MA from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. His work at Magoosh has been cited in many scholarly articles , his Master’s Thesis is featured on the Reading with Pictures website, and he’s presented at the WITESOL (link to PDF) and NAFSA conferences. David has taught K-12 ESL in South Korea as well as undergraduate English and MBA-level business English at American universities. He has also trained English teachers in America, Italy, and Peru. Come join David and the Magoosh team on Youtube , Facebook , and Instagram , or connect with him via LinkedIn !

View all posts

More from Magoosh

2 responses to “IELTS Writing Task 2: Advantage/Disadvantage Sample Essay”

will it be correct to include brain drain and the problem of excessive number of immigrants in the disadvantage part?

Hi Paromita,

If you can support these ideas in the essay and explain why they are disadvantages, then that could work if your reasoning is sound.

Hope that helps! 😀

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Home — Essay Samples — Business — Facebook — The Impact and Future of Facebook

The Impact and Future of Facebook

• Categories: Facebook Social Media

About this sample

Words: 532 |

Published: Feb 7, 2024

Words: 532 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, history and background of facebook, business model and revenue streams, social and cultural impact of facebook, corporate social responsibility and sustainability.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Prof. Kifaru

Verified writer

• Expert in: Business Sociology

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

7 pages / 3396 words

1 pages / 434 words

3 pages / 1757 words

5 pages / 2912 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most influential figures in the tech industry, having founded Meta Platforms Inc. (formerly known as Facebook) and propelled it to become a dominant force in the social media landscape. His [...]

In digital age, tech giants wield significant influence over our lives, shaping how we communicate, consume information, and conduct business. Companies like Meta (formerly Facebook), Google, and Amazon have amassed immense [...]

Social media platforms like Facebook have become an integral part of our daily lives. With over 2.8 billion active users worldwide, Facebook has revolutionized the way we communicate, share information, and connect with others. [...]

In today's digital age, social media platforms like Facebook have become an integral part of our daily lives, enabling us to connect with friends, family, and even strangers from around the world at the touch of a button. [...]

Facebook is a social networking site that allows its user to connect easily with their friends and loves ones. At the age of 23, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook and developed a few other social networking sites, while attending [...]

“ Facebook is a social networking site which was launched on February 2004” by college students Mark Zuckerberg. “ Between Fall 2005 and Fall 2006, Facebook expanded to high school networks, first work networks, later to [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

I Love Facebook. That’s Why I’m Suing Meta.

By Ethan Zuckerman

Mr. Zuckerman is an associate professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is the director of the UMass Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure.

While it’s become fashionable to dump on the aging social media platform Facebook, I quite enjoy using it. Many of my high school and college friends use it to celebrate birthdays and share news of their children and their travels. Eight years ago, I reconnected with a college housemate on the platform, and last year we got married. Thanks, Facebook.

But like many people, I wish I had more control over how Facebook delivers my friends’ updates to me. Facebook’s inscrutable feed algorithm, which is supposed to calculate which content is most likely to appeal to me and then send it my way, forgets friends I want to hear from, becomes obsessed with people to whom I’m only loosely connected and generally feels like an obstacle to how I’d like to connect with my friends.

When the British software developer Louis Barclay developed a software workaround to address this problem, I was intrigued. Mr. Barclay’s tool — a piece of software known as an extension, which can be installed in a Chrome web browser — was simple. Christened Unfollow Everything, it would automate the process of unfollowing each of my 1,800 friends, a task that manually would take hours. The result is that I would be able to experience Facebook as it once was, when it contained profiles of my friends, but without the endless updates, photos, videos and the like that Facebook’s algorithm generates. I could curate my feed by following only those friends and groups I really still want to see updates from.

As nice as this tool would be for me, I saw in it a bigger purpose: If tools like Unfollow Everything were allowed to flourish, and we could have better control over what we see on social media, these tools might create a more civic-minded internet.

There are many serious concerns about what social media is doing to us individually, and to society. Congress has passed or proposed sweeping measures, from forcing a sale of TikTok to asking platforms to ensure young users aren’t harmed by the content they experience online. These broad measures do violence to freedom of expression, and they may put even more control over what we read and view in the hands of these powerful companies. If a court finds that users have a right to choose what they experience on social media, a new path forward is possible: We can decide how social media works for us and for our children through tools we can control.

Unfortunately, Mr. Barclay was forced by Facebook to remove the software. Large social media platforms appear to be increasingly resistant to third-party tools that give users more command over their experiences. Many of them, in fact, have stopped supporting third-party tools directly.

In 2023, Reddit and Twitter effectively prevented developers from using the companies’ data portals by imposing a pricing change that makes such tools impractically expensive. Some companies go even further by threatening developers who release their tools independently. In 2021, the developer of Swipe for Facebook, an Android app intended to provide a streamlined Facebook experience, said that the platform sent him a cease and desist letter, leading him to remove the product from the Google Play store. Another app, Simple Social, was also removed from Google’s store. Platforms like Facebook no doubt are concerned that these third-party apps could block ads or sponsored content, and may also be worried about losing valuable users.

After talking with Mr. Barclay, I decided to develop a new version of Unfollow Everything. And rather than wait to see whether Meta, Facebook’s parent, would take legal action against me, I — and the lawyers at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia — asked a federal court in California last week to rule on whether users should have a right to use tools like Unfollow Everything that give them increased power over how they use social networks, particularly over algorithms that have been engineered to keep users scrolling on their sites. (Meta declined to comment for this article.)

The Stanford University scholar Francis Fukuyama and his colleagues refer to such tools as “middleware.” They make the point that a competitive market for these tools could be a more fine-grained way to improve social media than big-footed regulatory approaches. They also wrote that Congress would probably need to take action to require platforms to be more receptive to this sort of software.

My lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is dedicated to creating user-empowering middleware to forge a future where you could choose to read Facebook through a filter that de-emphasized divisive political arguments and emphasized personal updates, or to read X through a filter that checked news headlines to see if they came from reliable journalistic outlets. Our goal is to let users pick the algorithms that filter out the content they don’t want to see and select content that interests them, rather than giving this power to platforms like Facebook.

Such tools are protected under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which safeguards platforms like Facebook from direct liability for the behavior of their users and has been critical in allowing Facebook and others to build billion dollar businesses. But the remainder of the section often goes ignored. We argue that it establishes the rights of users, families and schools to self-police the content they encounter online, using technical means to block material they find objectionable. This protection should encompass tools like Unfollow Everything by anticipating the needs of users to assert control when the interests of content providers are not aligned with the interests of users.

Should the court in California rule in our favor, my lab will release Unfollow Everything 2.0 at no charge, and users will have the chance to participate in a study to examine whether their use of Facebook changes with the tool and whether they feel in more command of their experience.

A healthy internet is a balance between the intentions of the powerful companies that run it and the individuals who use it. Giving users more control is important to establishing more of an equilibrium in an online world that is increasingly out of kilter.

Ethan Zuckerman is an associate professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is the director of the UMass Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. He is the author of “Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

• Newsletters
• Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

It’s Weird Times to Be a Happy Mother

Some reasons why i’ll rarely admit this in public..

I recently published a book about caregiving that is, in part, a rigorously researched explanation of why I love motherhood, despite living in a country that gives parents so little support. One might imagine that constructing and then promoting my arguments as to why caring for others can be meaningful and emotionally enriching, even when it’s challenging, may have led me to feel comfortable saying I like being a mom in casual social settings. It hasn’t. When I am with friends or acquaintances, or connecting with others online, the admission gets stuck in my throat, where it remains with all the other things that are better left unsaid.

It’s a feeling that traces all the way back to the time when my first son was born. I became a mom in 2012, which I unscientifically suspect was right around the time negative messages about motherhood became more common than positive ones. Or at least it certainly felt like this, in the liberal, largely coastal circles I inhabited online and in real life. To voice any delight about my relationship with my son felt a mix of tone-deaf, out of style, and potentially alienating to others.

Over a decade into motherhood, I now see that there are concentric circles to my hesitation to voice positive feelings, layers of potential relational, political, and personal harm I would fear I would unleash if I came clean. I worry about making others who struggle with motherhood feel bad; I worry about undermining the fight to get mothers and other caregivers more systemic support; I worry about turning back the clock on feminism; and I worry about outing myself as sentimental, and therefore intellectually unserious and uncool. Making it all the harder is that this fear doesn’t feel like a product of my tendency to second-guess things, but rather pretty realistic.

When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others

By Elissa Straus. Simon & Schuster.

Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page. Thank you for your support.

The relational piece is the most immediate. When a close friend admits to me that she is struggling with motherhood, the feeling tends to come coated with a heavy dose of physical and emotional exhaustion, shame, maybe even regret. For so long, motherhood was locked up in easy metaphors of goodliness and saintliness. To deviate from this one-note portrayal and refuse to meet unrealistic expectations, to not want to be endlessly giving and enthusiastic about it, was, in this formula, to be a bad person. Ambivalence about either one’s children, or about how motherhood changes the way one can experience the world, was not seen as a healthy part of a huge life undertaking, but a sign that one was not dedicated enough. Even though we have let go of these simplified and unrealistic definitions of a “good mom,” particularly in online discourse, those old-fashioned notions can still get under the skin for those having a hard time. To be in that state, and to hear that I am loving motherhood—a matter of personal disposition as much as it is luck in having children with milder temperaments—might, very understandably, only make things worse.

On a more public level, I fear that me, or anyone, saying I like motherhood, even though it can be tough, has the potential to undermine political efforts to get necessary and overdue support for parents from the government and workplaces. In our current system, moms are suffering because they are moms, which makes managing a job or affording a (not terribly indulgent!) life pretty difficult. For those in the laptop class, they may have scheduling flexibility at work, but that tends to come with an expectation to always be available. Or, for those who work onsite, there is often little flexibility and, too often, very little advance notice of weekly schedules, giving moms a tight 24 hours to figure out caregiving support for the week. We lack universal paid leave, we lack universal and affordable child care and elder care—a one-two punch for all those sandwich-generation parents out there. To say you are having a good time can feel like you are dismissing all the unnecessary suffering that moms experience in the United States because of a lack of societal support. Inversely, to complain about being emotionally spent has become a message of solidarity, a protest chant against everything that makes life so impossible for moms.

Cutting deeper than the threat to pro-mom activism is the threat to feminism. So much of late-20 th -century feminism—though, as I learned when researching my book, mostly white feminism—was about allowing women to have other identities outside of motherhood. To insist on motherhood as a path to meaning, purpose, let alone joy, can feel like I am doing the bidding of conservative forces in our culture, who don’t just advocate for embracing motherhood, but a return to a patriarchal domestic structure in which Dad is on top. What I’d like to do is see what embracing care could look like outside the patriarchy, to look inside the homes women like Betty Friedan encouraged us to escape, and see what is worth appreciating there. With the erosion of reproductive rights and the new popularity of tradwives on social media, pointing out all that is worth celebrating in motherhood can feel dangerous, for people with my politics. And yet, if we don’t do it, what vision of feminism are we promoting for the next generation? Another one in which care is sidelined, marginalized—left to underpaid working-class women, mostly women of color, while wealthier, mostly white women leave the home and do the big, important stuff? I don’t want that either—and yet, still, how to express this?

This disquiet lingers even in solitude, particularly when I am reading smart writing by a smart woman in which motherhood is presented as something that limits or subtracts. It’s not that I have a problem with them feeling that way, or writing about it. I don’t expect anyone to feel the same as I do about this relationship or any of my other relationships, including my relationship with my parents or my husband. The problem isn’t that I feel unseen, so much as I often detect an unspoken assessment that intelligence and motherhood are incompatible. Or, as is the case in many fictional portraits of maternal ambivalence, a feeling that being honest about one’s desires and seeking them out can’t happen in the context of caring for one’s kids. To like motherhood makes me dumb and repressed, I temporarily conclude, cheeks on fire even though nobody is watching.

Because, even when I believe loving motherhood makes me tragically unhip, or when I hesitate to discuss my experience with it with others, my affection for it never wavers. This is the point in the essay when I tell you why. I, like so many women, went into motherhood with a defensive posture. I had no ambivalence about becoming a mom, and am fortunate enough to have a pretty easy time connecting with my children. My big fear was not exactly the act of parenting itself, but how becoming a parent would stop me from living an otherwise interesting and meaningful life.

As it happened, my relationship with my kids has been as philosophically, spiritually, or intellectually vital as anything else I’ve done, leading to the kind of realizations we’ve long wanted to seek elsewhere, away from the home, away from the family. Through them, I’ve cultivated a healthy relationship with uncertainty, with attention, with  feeling closer to the source of life, whatever it is, with all its wonder and fragility—all moments of revelation that came by way of a mix of stress, rupture, wholeness, and ease. If I had let motherhood stay small, confined to the sidelines, then those stressful moments would have felt like forces holding me back on my way to an interesting and meaningful life. But by letting motherhood become big, those challenges—and yes, my kids annoy me sometimes, and yes, I appreciate working and other time I spend away from them—became part of a larger narrative arc.

I really do want to be able to say all this in the company of others—and not just in writing but during unscripted, person-to-person exchanges. While I am so glad moms feel liberated to talk about the hard parts of parenting, I worry that only talking about the hard parts make it so the experience of taking care of our children is kept small, devalued, something not worthy of our curiosity, nor our collective investment. I often long for a whole new language, a whole new vocabulary and even context for discussing motherhood, but I haven’t figured it out yet. Whereas once, we diminished motherhood by easy praise, we now often diminish it with easy complaint. Is there a way to think more expansively and holistically in our conversations about motherhood? To be open to the ways in which the good and the bad are not oppositional, but essential, inevitable parts of a rich, friction-filled experience we may not always like but can love and grow from? I’m still working on it.

Follow Bleeding Green Nation online:

• Follow Bleeding Green Nation on Twitter
• Follow Bleeding Green Nation on Facebook

Site search

• DraftKings Sportsbook
• DraftKings Daily Fantasy Sports
• Community Guidelines
• Fantasy Football
• Eagles NFL picks center

Filed under:

• NFL Schedule

Pros and cons of the Eagles’ 2024 schedule

More good than bad!

Share this story

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Twitter
• Share this on Reddit
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: Pros and cons of the Eagles’ 2024 schedule

The Eagles’ 2024 schedule has been revealed and now it’s time to take a closer looks at the pros and cons!

• The Eagles don’t have to play a single opponent coming off their bye. Last year, the Eagles and Chiefs had their bye week at the same time before playing each other. So, no rest disadvantage, but no rest advantage, either.
• The Eagles will have a bye week rest advantage over the Cleveland Browns in Week 6. The Browns also have to travel to Las Vegas in Week 4 and Landover, Maryland in Week 5 before visiting Philly. That third straight road game tends to be difficult for teams.
• The Eagles will have a rest advantage over the Falcons in Week 2 with Philly opening the season on Friday and Atlanta playing on Sunday. Of course, the Eagles will be dealing with a long trip home from Brazil ... but playing on Monday gives them more of a buffer to handle their return.
• The Eagles don’t have to deal with an obnoxiously difficult stretch of games like “The Gauntlet” from last year. The toughest part of this year’s schedule is either back-to-back road games against the Los Angeles Rams and Baltimore Ravens ... or the three-game sandwich of Cincinnati Bengals on the road, the Jacksonville Jaguars at home, and then the Dallas Cowboys on the road.
• The Eagles have a rest advantage over the Rams in Week 12 with the Birds coming off their post-Thursday Night Football mini-bye. The Rams also have a cross-country trip to play the New England Patriots in Week 11.
• The Eagles don’t have to play Thursday Night Football on the road.
• The Eagles playing TNF in Week 11 (as opposed to closer to their Week 5 bye) helps to space out their rest a little.
• The Eagles don’t have to get on a plane (in the regular season, at least) after their Week 12 trip to LA. Four of their last six games are at The Linc ... and the two road games are in Baltimore (1 hour, 43 minute drive according to Google maps) and Landover, Maryland (2 hour, 8 minute drive according to Google maps). And those relatively short drives are 21 days apart. The Eagles can potentially use this stretch to get hot going into the playoffs.
• Getting back to last year’s Gauntlet for a second, it wasn’t just the opponents that made it tough. It was also the Eagles having to play three straight games at a rest disadvantage at one point (coming off MNF to play the Buffalo Bills , coming off SNF to play a San Francisco 49ers team coming off a mini-bye, playing a Dallas Cowboys team coming off a mini-bye). They don’t have to deal with a challenge like that this year. In fact, they don’t play a single team coming off their TNF mini-bye!
• Slight edge in a key game? Only a matter of hours but the Cowboys host the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on SNF before traveling to play the Eagles in Week 17. The Birds, meanwhile, will be coming off a 1:00 PM start in Landover, Maryland before hosting Dallas.
• The Eagles have one of the easiest schedules in the league, according to a metric that’s more relevant than merely using last year’s record for strength of schedule:

NFL Strength of Schedule for all 32 teams based on average opponent ranking by current Super Bowl odds. pic.twitter.com/52cJKmIsne — Deniz Selman (@denizselman33) May 15, 2024

• The Eagles are losing a home game by playing in Brazil. And not just any old home game ... but one against a team they could potentially be competing with for positioning in the NFC playoff picture .
• The Eagles have a very early Week 5 bye. If they don’t get the No. 1 seed, the Super Bowl will potentially be their 17th straight game without a break.
• The Eagles have a slight rest disadvantage against the New Orleans Saints in Week 3 coming off MNF.
• The Eagles only play at The Linc once prior to October 13.
• From Week 3 through Week 13, the Eagles play seven of 10 games on the road.

For items that didn’t cleanly fit in either of the first two categories ...

• Going through the Cowboys’ schedule, I see them losing around six games. I think the Eagles are in a good spot to lose fewer than six , thus keeping the non-repeat NFC East winner streak alive.
• Speaking of the Cowboys, it’s odd to see that the Eagles won’t be playing them in prime-time. Of course, both games are in the range of being subject to flex scheduling.
• None of that dumb shit where the Eagles play the same NFC East rival twice within three weeks this season (like they did with the Giants last year).
• There’s a school of thought that it’s better to play your toughest on-paper opponents later in the season because there’s a greater chance of a key injury (or several) that impacts them. Playing the Rams and Ravens when they do could be considered favorable, then. Less so for the Packers and Bengals.
• Six 1:00 PM starts this year! That’s such a relief after only THREE last season. Perhaps you don’t care when the games start. Or you actually prefer the late starts. If that’s the case, sorry for you. As someone who is staying up way after the final whistle, I really like the earlier starts. Not trying to complain about my job, which I’m very fortunate to have. But last year’s schedule was tiring with all the late games. Only three 1:00 PM starts was pretty egregious. There’s room for a little more balance than that and I’m glad it’s here this year.
• Each of the last two seasons, the Eagles had a stretch where they went from playing on Thursday to Monday (10 days without playing a game). Not happening this year.
• Can’t imagine many fans will be going to that 1:00 PM Saturday preseason finale. Sitting in the hot summer sun to watch a bunch of long shot players? You’ll have to be a real sicko for that.

This schedule configuration appears to be much better than last year’s slate.

What say you?

How do you feel about the Eagles’ 2024 schedule?

More from bleeding green nation, loading comments..., sign up for the newsletter sign up for the bleeding green nation daily roundup newsletter, thanks for signing up.

Check your inbox for a welcome email.

Oops. Something went wrong. Please enter a valid email and try again.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The Historic Trump Court Cases That We Cannot See

By Neal Katyal

Over the past month, in two courtrooms some two hundred and fifty miles apart, the government was hearing arguments in two of the most consequential court cases in American history. In New York, at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, a judge was presiding over the first criminal trial of a former U.S. President. Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., at the United States Supreme Court, the nine Justices were mulling over a grave question of constitutional law—whether a former President is immune from criminal prosecution.

The two courtrooms could hardly be more different, with the polished white marble of the U.S. Supreme Court contrasting with the more ramshackle wooden court furnishings in Manhattan. And yet both rooms are similarly opaque, with most Americans unable to see what’s happening inside of either one. Cameras are prohibited, and so the only way to observe the proceedings is to wait in line outside, in hopes of snagging one of the few seats reserved for members of the public. (The Supreme Court saves room for fifty public spectators; the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse has been able to accommodate around ten.) This is despite the fact that the American people pay for these courtrooms with their tax dollars, and the fact that prosecutions are brought in their name. The New York case is called the People v. Donald J. Trump.

Like grownups who abstain from tequila because of a bad experience with it in high school, the bans on cameras are the lingering effects of some early issues with courtroom photography. In 1935, Bruno Hauptmann was put on trial in New Jersey for kidnapping and murdering the nearly two-year-old son of the aviator Charles Lindbergh. At that trial, cameras were allowed under certain conditions: they could film during trial recesses but not while witnesses were testifying. And yet camera footage of the trial testimony leaked, and Hauptmann’s trial became a media circus. This defiance of court restrictions, paired with the bright flashes in the courtroom and the general mayhem caused by the cameramen, ultimately led the trial judge to ban photography for the rest of the proceedings. Many states followed suit.

Once television became ubiquitous, in the nineteen-fifties, the prohibitions on cameras began to seem antiquated. Some states rolled back their anti-camera legislation, and, today, most permit some form of audiovisual coverage in court, whether it be still photography during testimony, audio recordings, or live broadcasts on television. Federal appellate courts, too, permit live broadcasts, as does the International Criminal Court. But not so New York. In 1952, the state adopted a statute still in place today, banning all cameras in the courtroom—a law so broad that one court-reform organization, the Fund for Modern Courts, has called it “an extreme outlier among the states.” The U.S. Supreme Court, for its part, prohibits cameras but makes live audio of oral arguments available. That puts the Court in better audiovisual stead than New York, and yet there’s a lot that happens in court that cannot be captured by either audio or transcript.

As a member of the Supreme Court bar, I was able to sit at the front of the courtroom for the arguments in Trump v. United States, the Presidential-immunity case. I could see Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s face twist into an expression of utter incredulity as Trump’s lawyer D. John Sauer claimed that a President sending a Navy SEAL team to assassinate a political rival was not an indictable crime. I was able to watch Michael Dreeben, the lawyer for the special counsel Jack Smith, painstakingly describe the counts in one of the federal indictments against Trump, relating to his abuse of the Justice Department. Dreeben outlined how Trump tried to pressure top Justice Department officials into sending letters to state legislatures expressing doubt about the election counts, and how Trump threatened to fire those officials if they didn’t comply. After Dreeben relayed this information, almost two hours into the proceedings, I could see the Court dynamics shift. The Justices began to listen far more closely to him, sitting up in their chairs.

I’ve personally seen more than four hundred oral arguments at the Supreme Court. Why bother trudging all the way to One First Street when I could just listen to audio recordings or read a transcript? Because neither is any sort of substitute for watching the way in which these arguments are delivered, and for observing the dynamics on display in the courtroom. The Court itself isn’t satisfied with just reading a bunch of written words in briefs; it insists on seeing advocates deliver their arguments in person. More than fifty Americans should get that same basic opportunity.

The judiciary is the least democratic of the three branches of the government. Supreme Court Justices, who have lifetime tenure, are appointed, not elected. And so they are required to justify their decisions in ways that elected officials are not. President Joe Biden can sign an executive order without explaining his reasoning behind it. (It might cause a P.R. crisis, but it’s certainly within his power to do this.) By contrast, when the Justices overturn a longtime legal precedent, or when they create a new one, whether major or minor, they must issue written opinions explaining their decision-making process. This process might be as significant as the opinion itself. Oral arguments are, undoubtedly, a major part of that process, and yet most Americans are barely even aware that oral arguments are happening—let alone what arguments are being made—creating a situation in which the public receives a pile of controversial opinions, every June, with little context. One can imagine that if oral arguments were televised, Americans might spend the year doing what the Justices do: thinking through a bunch of complicated, nuanced questions before ultimately reaching their own conclusions.

The Court today is relying far too much on the idea that Americans are going to seek out audio feeds of oral arguments. This is unrealistic in an age of TV and Instagram. It’s not 1936, and Americans aren’t huddled around a radio in the family room. Without the visual component, it is unlikely that they are going to pay attention to the arguments in a Supreme Court case, even if the decision that’s eventually rendered may directly affect their lives. It would serve the Court well for Americans to be confronted with the same questions that are raised during oral arguments. It would also serve Americans well to see how the Court, which is increasingly seen as a politically motivated entity, is genuinely grappling with questions about governance, such as how to draw the line between an official Presidential act (like appointing a Cabinet member), and a private one (like taking a bribe from said Cabinet member).

The public is missing even more when it comes to Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan, which, ironically, is all about whether Trump committed crimes in his efforts to keep information from the American people, in the run-up to the 2016 Presidential election. Last week, the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels went on the stand and told the full story of her relationship with Trump, from their initial sexual encounter, in 2006, to the hush-money agreement that she negotiated with Trump and his former lawyer Michael Cohen some ten years later. We were unable to watch her tell it, or to watch how she handled being cross-examined, in the same way that we were unable to watch Hope Hicks, a witness called by the government, tearfully testify about her old boss, or the former tabloid C.E.O. David Pecker speak to the dozens of stories that the National Enquirer has killed about Trump and other politicians over the years. We can read quotes published online, but it is much harder, from behind our computer screens, to read between the lines. Did Hope Hicks start crying because she felt bad about turning on Trump, or because she was overwhelmed by the trial, or because of something else? Different reporters have had different takes, but we’ve been denied the opportunity to watch her testimony and decide for ourselves. And, of course, we’ve been unable to observe the behavior of the defendant, Donald Trump: how he comports himself in the room, how he reacts to the testimony of witnesses, how he carries himself, and so much more. (Just imagine how different the O. J. Simpson “gloves don’t fit” testimony would have been, had it been reduced to a transcript—or even a highly descriptive newspaper article.) Journalists have done their best to describe what’s happening in the room, and yet even the most faithful retellings can be subjective, skewed by something as simple as where the writer was sitting in the courtroom, and what kind of view they may have had. Some reports, for example, say that Trump keeps falling asleep during the trial; others disagree.

On Monday, Cohen is on the stand—more important testimony that we will not see. There’s also a chance, albeit a small one, that Trump himself will eventually testify in the New York trial. If he does, the American people will not be able to witness some of the most significant trial testimony given in our lifetimes. And if he does not testify, cameras would be the only way for us to see Trump’s true reaction to the case being presented against him. Instead, the lack of cameras has catalyzed a lopsided spin cycle outside the courtroom. Trump leaves the courtroom each day, where the reporters waiting outside for him do have cameras, and he characterizes the proceedings in a gravely slanted way, which then gets broadcast on cable news. The lawyers for the prosecution cannot publicly grandstand like this; rules of prosecutorial ethics require them to make their arguments inside the courtroom, not outside of it. The result is a structural asymmetry, which isn’t just confined to the two sides of the court case. The characters appearing on the witness stand, from Daniels to Cohen, are all subject to innuendo and character attacks, with the public unable to fact-check how these individuals are portrayed by the media. The same goes for the Supreme Court. Don’t believe what I said about Justice Barrett’s facial expression during oral arguments? Tough luck, you can’t go back and check the video, because there isn’t one.

Even if one accepts these rules for a normal trial, you’d think that there’d be an exception for ones that are so clearly in the public interest. Trump is not just a former President but a candidate for President, and twenty-four per cent of Republicans say they would not vote for him if he were convicted of a felony by a jury. The immunity case, too, is of grave concern to the public, as the Justices are essentially deciding whether Trump’s other trials should move forward. The risk is of a double darkness—that a Supreme Court the American public cannot see will render a decision preventing Americans from even hearing the rest of evidence against Trump, by stopping his trials from taking place altogether.

What possible rationale can there be for having a courtroom placed out of view of the people who paid for it? To be sure, confidentiality is sometimes required, from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to the modern-day jury room. But courtroom proceedings are, by their nature, meant to be transparent, centered on a fact-gathering and argumentation process. Expecting cameras in the courtroom is not unlike expecting body cameras to be worn by police officers, who, like judges, are sworn to uphold the rule of law.

Some fear that courtroom cameras will prompt witnesses to be intimidated and scared. I understand this concern; indeed, I once shared it. From 2020 to 2023, I was privileged to serve as special prosecutor in one of the most high-profile trials in modern history, the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd . Up until this case, Minnesota had never televised a criminal trial. As prosecutors in the case, and in accordance with Minnesota law and practice, we requested that cameras be forbidden. We feared, in particular, for the safety and comfort of a seventeen-year-old witness, who had taken the video of Floyd’s murder.

The judge, fortunately, overruled us. Americans were able to see, with their own eyes, what happened in that courtroom. They could see the evidence that both sides were able to muster, examine Chauvin’s demeanor in court, and assess the credibility of the on-the-scene witnesses and medical experts. The result was public confidence in the outcome of the trial. When Chauvin was ultimately convicted, there were no mass riots or protests, despite speculation beforehand that either outcome would result in unrest. The trial underscored the importance of courtroom cameras, just as the initial video of Floyd’s murder, recorded by that young witness, was critical in drawing public attention to the incident in the first place.

There have been concerns, too, that televised legal proceedings create perverse incentives for lawyers and judges, who may be tempted to play for the public, and distort the truth-seeking function of the court. That is a possibility, although the democratic benefits strongly outweigh that risk, just as they do for Congress (televised) and the President (extensively televised). And the reverse is more likely, as courtroom participants are incentivized to act with greater care when their actions will be viewable by millions. In 2017, I argued against President Trump’s Muslim ban in the federal appeals court in Seattle, and the oral argument was covered on live television. If anything, the cameras induced us attorneys to be even more conscious of keeping the proceedings solemn. Ultimately, cameras would allow Americans to see what I get to see when I am in court: a bunch of judges who are trying their hardest to resolve difficult cases in a straightforward and honest way. Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan, is a perfect example. Those in the courtroom describe an even-keeled and balanced judge, but Trump goes out every day blasting him as a biased accomplice of President Biden. Televised proceedings would empower Americans to make these judgments for themselves.

The mechanism to fix all of this is not difficult to implement. Changing the rules in New York would likely require the state legislature to lift its ban on cameras, although it is conceivable that a court may try to do so on its own, as Minnesota did in the Chauvin case. Televising Supreme Court arguments would not even require legislation; it could be done by mere Court rule. And, should the Court not act, legislation has been introduced by Senators Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin to force them to do so. The bill, known as the Cameras in the Courtroom Act, would require the Supreme Court to permit television coverage of oral arguments and other open sessions. It’s accompanied by another bill, the Sunshine in the Courtroom Act, which extends to all open federal court proceedings. Both bills are pieces of bipartisan legislation; Grassley and Durbin don’t agree on much, but they agree on this. Even the Justices themselves have, in other contexts, recognized the importance of governmental transparency in a democracy. The person who famously said that sunlight is the best disinfectant was none other than Justice Louis Brandeis. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

The day the dinosaurs died .

What if you started itching— and couldn’t stop ?

How a notorious gangster was exposed by his own sister .

Woodstock was overrated .

Diana Nyad’s hundred-and-eleven-mile swim .

Photo Booth: Deana Lawson’s hyper-staged portraits of Black love .

Fiction by Roald Dahl: “The Landlady”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Jeannie Suk Gersen

By Susan B. Glasser

By Amy Davidson Sorkin

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Our expert, award-winning staff selects the products we cover and rigorously researches and tests our top picks. If you buy through our links, we may get a commission. Reviews ethics statement

• Services & Software

What Is Shared Hosting and How Does it work?

Learn all about shared hosting and how it works to determine if it's the right web hosting solution for your website.

Shared hosting is entry-level web hosting that stores multiple websites on a single server to make web hosting affordable for the average person expecting fewer than 400,000 views a month on their website.

Let's look at how shared hosting works and what you need to consider before purchasing a specific hosting plan.

What is shared hosting?

A website must be placed on a specialized computer called a web server to be published online. The service that provides server space to websites is called web hosting .

Shared hosting is a type of web hosting that hosts many websites on one server. Each site gets a section of the server and a percentage of its resources. Shared resources include disk space, random access memory or RAM, and the central processing unit or CPU.

Websites on a shared hosting server split the costs of maintaining the server. Dividing this cost between numerous websites means shared hosting plans can be provided to individual site owners at lower prices when compared with other kinds of web hosting. For instance, shared hosting plans usually cost $2 to $5 per month to start, whereas a dedicated server sets you back $80 or more per month.

The shared hosting server is maintained by your web hosting company. This ensures optimal performance for all sites on the server and removes the need for individual site owners to perform complicated server configuration and maintenance.

WordPress hosting is a type of shared hosting

WordPress hosting is optimized for websites using the content management system WordPress. This open-source software is used to create, publish and organize website content like web pages and blog posts. Most WordPress hosting plans use shared hosting.

All WordPress hosting plans come with this software pre-installed on your web server. Many plans also offer automated updates to the core WordPress software. They may also offer additional benefits, such as:

• Specialized caching tools to improve WordPress loading times
• Custom site templates, referred to by WordPress as themes
• Site extensions, called plugins, for enhanced functionality
• Customer service teams with specialized WordPress experts

Some web hosts provide WordPress hosting for the same price as regular shared hosting. Others charge more for it, typically $1 to $5 extra each month, to pay for the additional level of software maintenance.

Hosting companies may also offer managed WordPress hosting through a virtual private server for sites needing more web server resources.

A note about WordPress.com: WordPress.com is a for-profit hosting company that uses the free WordPress.org software. This is technically WordPress hosting, but I rarely recommend it because the plans are expensive, especially if you want e-commerce functionality.

Who should use shared hosting?

I recommend shared hosting for anyone creating a for-fun hobby site, blog or small business website. The simplicity and affordability make it a great choice if you don’t expect massive amounts of traffic to your website.

If you expect to have more than 400,000 monthly visitors, consider other types of web hosting as alternatives. Similarly, if you plan to host numerous large files such as videos, you may want to choose a different type of hosting with more storage space.

Another instance where you may want to consider other web hosting options is if you need to store highly sensitive data. While the security risks of shared hosting are low, they are higher than the risks associated with other types of hosting. This could lead to your data being compromised.

Advantages of shared hosting 

Affordability.

Shared hosting often starts at $2 to $5 a month, billed annually. These plans often rise to $10 to $20 a month upon renewal, which is still considerably less than the typical $30-plus a month of the next level of web hosting, VPS hosting.

Accessibility

Shared hosting plans provide the tools you need to start building your website right away. Most use cPanel, an intuitive dashboard that provides one-click setup options for popular CMS tools like WordPress and Joomla, easy access to email settings and other essential tools for website management.

Your hosting company will maintain the web server by performing hardware maintenance, software configuration and updates. Server maintenance requires significant technical expertise, so letting the hosting company handle it makes website ownership much easier.

Some shared hosting companies further streamline your website operations by providing plans with WordPress pre-installed, caching and automated backups.

Capacity for growth

Most web hosting services provide multiple shared hosting plans for sites of different sizes and traffic levels. For example, SiteGround offers plans rated for sites with 10,000, 100,000 or 400,000 visitors a month.

When your site outgrows one plan, you can easily upgrade to the next one.

Disadvantages of shared hosting 

Lack of server customization options.

Web hosting companies configure shared servers to their own specifications. They maintain full control of this configuration to optimize the servers’ performance and security for as many sites as possible.

If you want to make changes to your server, such as installing a different operating system, you’ll want VPS -- virtual private server -- hosting or another option that lets you configure your server. For example, if you want to run your server on Windows to make it compatible with Windows programs, you might choose VPS hosting, as most shared hosting plans use Linux.

Potential performance issues

Shared hosting servers split a limited amount of bandwidth and other resources between dozens, hundreds or even thousands of sites. If one or more of those sites experiences a traffic spike, they can hog resources like RAM, CPU power and bandwidth, slowing other sites down.

Downtime -- time when your site won’t function -- and crashes can happen if a website on the server experiences a sudden surge in traffic. Web hosting companies go to great lengths to prevent these issues, but they can still occur.

Possible security issues

If one site on a shared server is compromised, the entire server can be at risk. This can lead to your data being leaked or damaged. Your site may even go down in the case of a severe security breach.

Websites on shared servers are partitioned off from each other, and the best web hosts take security precautions, like installing firewalls, to prevent these issues. This minimizes the risk but doesn’t eliminate it completely.

Potential blacklisting

Your website will share an IP address with all of the other websites on its server. If one site breaks the terms of service for Google or another search engine, the IP address may be blacklisted, leading to your site being blacklisted as well.

Similarly, if websites on your shared server are sending large numbers of spam emails, the IP might be put on email blacklists. This can result in your marketing emails being directed to spam folders or not being sent at all.

Limited capacity for growth

For most websites, shared hosting provides more than enough room to grow. However, if your website experiences exponential growth, you’ll eventually need to switch to a form of web hosting like VPS hosting or dedicated server hosting capable of handling larger web traffic loads.

Factors to consider when choosing a shared hosting provider

Some of the things to consider when choosing a shared hosting company and plan include:

• Uptime: The best web hosting services guarantee 99.99% uptime, meaning your site will experience less than 45 minutes of downtime per month.
• Secure sockets layer certification: The SSL protocol encrypts your website data and all data sent through your website by users for enhanced security. This is the minimum security requirement for high-quality web hosting.
• Site scanning/malware scanning: This scans your site regularly for malware and other security issues, ensuring its continued safety.
• 24/7 customer service: You should be able to access customer service at any time of day or night. Most companies provide live chat, email and/or phone customer service. You can even contact many web hosts via social media.
• Pricing: Most web hosting companies offer steep discounts for your first term and require you to pay for at least one year to receive a discount. Be sure to think about future price hikes and introductory promotional rate periods when calculating your overall costs.

Other features you may want to look for include email hosting for creating custom email addresses at your domain and automated website backups so you don’t lose your data if something goes wrong with your site.

Our shared hosting recommendations

Here are three of CNET’s top recommendations for web hosting. You can find more detailed information about these and other web hosting companies in our guide to the best web hosting companies.

A2 Hosting provides four shared hosting plans. All of these plans include at least 100GB of storage, unlimited data transfer, SSL certification, a high-quality firewall and 24/7 security monitoring. A2 Hosting customers also get access to 24/7 customer support via phone, live chat and email.

A2 Hosting’s most affordable shared hosting plan starts at $3 a month and goes up to $13 a month upon renewal. These prices are based on annual billing, so you’ll need to be prepared to pay for 12 months upfront to receive these rates.

Ionos also offers four shared hosting plans. Every plan includes at least 10GB of storage, a free domain for one year, email hosting, SSL certification, daily backups and site scan. Ionos customers can access 24/7 customer support via phone or live chat. 

The most affordable Ionos shared hosting plan starts at $4 per month and renews at $6 per month. However, you can access the introductory deal only by signing up for a three-year term.

InMotion Hosting

InMotion Hosting has a variety of shared hosting plans available, including WordPress-optimized plans. All plans include at least 100GB of storage, email hosting for 10 or more accounts, SSL certification and hacking/malware protection. InMotion Hosting offers 24/7 support via phone, live chat and a ticketing system.

Its most affordable shared hosting plan starts at $2.29 a month and renews at $9 a month. The corresponding WordPress hosting plan starts at $3.49 a month and renews at $11 a month. However, you’ll need to sign up for a three-year term to get these low prices.

Shared web hosting is a budget-friendly solution, but may not be right for more demanding sites 

Shared hosting is an affordable, accessible type of web hosting ideal for hobby sites, blogs and small business websites. If you plan to use WordPress for managing your content, you can get even more out of shared hosting by choosing a specialized WordPress hosting plan.

However, shared hosting isn’t perfect. There are small but noteworthy risks in performance and security, as well as strict limitations on server customization. 

You may want to choose another type of web hosting if:

• You expect large amounts of traffic.
• Your website will store video or other large data files.
• Your website will store highly sensitive data and you want to maximize its security.
• You want to customize things like the operating system used to host your website.

Check out our guide to what web hosting is to learn more about how to choose the best hosting type for your site.

Shared hosting FAQs

Is shared web hosting good.

Shared web hosting is a great option for hobby sites, blogs and small business websites expecting relatively low traffic levels. For example, the highest-tier SiteGround shared hosting plan accommodates 400,000 monthly visitors. If you’re expecting more traffic than that, you’ll want to consider another type of web hosting.

What is the difference between hosting and shared hosting?

Hosting is the act of putting a website on a web server. Shared hosting is a specific type of hosting that involves placing numerous websites on a single server.

What is the difference between self-hosting and shared hosting?

Self-hosting involves building and running your own web server. Shared hosting is when you rent space on a shared server built and maintained by a web hosting company.

When should I use shared hosting?

You should use shared hosting if you’re starting a portfolio website, blog or small business website expecting fewer than 400,000 visitors per month.

Services and Software Guides

• Best iPhone VPN
• Best Free VPN
• Best Android VPN
• Best Mac VPN
• Best Mobile VPN
• Best VPN for Firestick
• Best VPN for Windows
• Fastest VPN
• Best Cheap VPN
• Best Password Manager
• Best Antivirus
• Best Identity Theft Protection
• Best LastPass Alternative
• Best Live TV Streaming Service
• Best Streaming Service
• Best Free TV Streaming Service
• Best Music Streaming Services
• Best Web Hosting
• Best Minecraft Server Hosting
• Best Website Builder
• Best Dating Sites
• Best Language Learning Apps
• Best Weather App
• Best Stargazing Apps
• Best Cloud Storage
• Best Resume Writing Services
• New Coverage on Operating Systems

I was accepted to Yale. Here's everything I included in my successful Ivy League application.

• I got into Yale University after submitting a successful college application.
• I included my SAT score and high GPA in the application, along with an essay about my culture.
• Ultimately, I tried to highlight all the ways I would be a benefit to the Yale community.

I recently reviewed my Yale admissions file after being a student there for three years. It was strange but enlightening to read what the admissions officers really thought of my application.

Since then, many people have respectfully requested to hear about my stats, extracurriculars , and essays.

I believe that everyone's college application journey is unique and that mine is just one sample, but I equally understand the urge to hear about other people's experiences. I devoured hundreds of college decision reactions on YouTube just three years ago, hoping to find that secret formula.

So, I'm now sharing a deeper look into my college application. But I want to first emphasize that as complicated and stressful as the process of applying to college may be, the best application you can ever show others will be the one you enjoy writing the most. I know I enjoyed every second of writing mine.

My GPA and standardized test scores were important factors in my application

With colleges such as Yale and Dartmouth reinstating standardized testing requirements , the reality is that academics will always be the first line of assessment for admission.

The GPA I submitted to Yale was 98.23/100. An admissions officer commended my GPA in the context of my financially underprivileged upbringing.

I also tried to take the most rigorous workload possible while also prioritizing my mental health , ultimately sending in six AP test scores. My SAT score was 1590.

I credit a lot of my academic achievements to the fact that I surrounded myself with peers who were very serious about their education.

My pre-calculus teacher's recommendation — the one that the admissions team rated higher — emphasized that I held the second highest grade in her class over her 20-year teaching career.

I tried to highlight my passions in my extracurriculars

My activities were a confusing mosaic of interests and impulses, but one that perfectly captured this 17-year-old boy who was still very unsure about who he was and what he wanted.

I researched human visual perception at a local community college , I performed spoken word poetry, and I hit about 80% of the notes in the choir (on a good day).

Related stories

My primary extracurricular, however, was the one I connected with most. At the start of the pandemic, I founded a language-learning program for children called "Spanish Meets You." I used the proceeds I made from the program, which featured tutoring and pen-palling services, to host community giveaways of essential health supplies — such as masks, face shields, and hand sanitizer.

"Spanish Meets You" evolved from my experience growing up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, which was predominantly Hispanic and Asian. I loved going to cookouts and finding a diligent spread of both spicy tamales and fried rice. Despite our cultural differences , the two groups were united in our challenges and our respect for each other.

When I submitted my application, I worried that I didn't have a coherent theme for my extracurriculars, nor enough leadership — but based on the admissions team's comments, my genuine passion for one or two activities mattered in the end.

I wanted to capture who I truly am in my college essay

When I started drafting my essay, I knew I wanted to capture what was unextractable from my résumé: my curiosity, thick skin, and mistakes.

I decided to make the topic of my college essay about Chinese New Year, a holiday I celebrated with my 14 floormates in this tiny Brooklyn apartment building that we all called home for two decades. Every year, I would wait for my father by the door with mandarins, only to be disappointed by his absence.

Ultimately, however, I learned to enjoy this holiday — even if my celebration was unorthodox. My 14 floormates and I are unrelated by blood, but I remember we would gather over food every holiday, tell stories, and play a game of JENGA. Their laughter still ricochets in my ears hundreds of miles away as I now sit in my college dorm room , wrapping up my junior year.

I tried not to overthink the other essay questions

I would jot down whatever came to mind in the first 30 seconds, asking myself: "How would 7-year-old Brian answer this?"

Whenever I took too long to craft a response, it was a sign that I was probably sacrificing genuineness to make a false good impression.

One of the essays asked about my favorite intellectual concept. Instead of showing off by detailing some obscure scientific theory, I moved forward with writing about the diversity of motherhood in the animal kingdom, tying it back to my close relationship with my own mother.

My application was focused on proving how I would fit into the Yale community

Colleges are searching for those who will enrich the lives of their peers in different ways.

Therefore, in my application, I tried to highlight all the parts of me that would prove to Yale I would benefit their campus and their students. In doing so, I was accepted and met students doing just that.

One of my friends, for instance, is studying law. She also loves to rap and surprise her friends with midnight ice cream. Another is a science journalist who gives the best dating advice .

I would say Yale wouldn't be home even if one of them were missing. Everyone is here; everyone ends up where they are.

For students applying to Ivy League schools , I implore you to tell your dynamic, unique story — to think about how your rhythm will fold into a community's song.

Watch: How the Latin Kings gang actually works, according to a former member

• Main content