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To save you the trouble of Googling, below is a list of the top up and coming social media platforms. These websites are perfect for sharing with friends and family, so you can keep the entire gang updated on your life, interests, and other passions.

Swarm by Foursquare

When Foursquare split its existing platform in two, it gave rise to Swarm. Swarm is purely a check-in app with a social slant. You can tag your location, see where your friends are, and invite them to join you later on. It’s the ideal app for social butterflies and party people.

Panda 5

If you’re a news buff, Panda 5 is the app for you. Using your Twitter feed, this app helps to curate websites and accounts that you might enjoy. It’s a community-driven application, fuelled by the current trends in news. You can browse multiple websites at once, check out what’s trending, and personalize your content curation for your own enjoyment and sharing posts.

Shots

This app rose to popularity at the end of 2016. Shots is essentially a more relaxed version of Instagram. The app encourages users to take selfies, film VHS-style videos, and even video chat with a friend. Why is Shots so chill? Because comments and likes aren’t featured. That way, users can feel free to post whatever content they want with no fear of judgment or unkind feedback!

Yotpo

For all artists, small business owners, and public figures, Yotpo is the ideal app. This social media app allows you to curate Instagram photos so they all appear on your official website. Yotpo follows the logic that satisfied customers and enthusiastic fans are key to successful visual marketing. The only downside? Yotpo isn’t free and comes with a price tag of $299 after the demo ends.

In 2015, Snapchat updated their Terms and Conditions to assert a “worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to host, store, use, display, reproduce, modify…and publicly display” all content sent through or uploaded to the app. In short, users relinquished all control of the messages and photos send over Snapchat to the company itself. As the nearly identical Stories features from Instagram and Facebook gain prominence, a look into these competitors’ data policies shows similar privacy dangers. Under the privacy policies of both companies, the photos and videos posted on users’ stories are collected, stored, and potentially used.

Instagram stories

After being acquired by Facebook, Instagram launched its “Stories” feature in August 2016 to accusations of copying. The new tool appeared to be a direct replica of Snapchat’s Story feature. They both shared a time limit, location tags, filters, and other elements. The company also borrowed another tactic from Snapchat: the practice of saving all photos and videos from user’s Stories to the company’s servers. While users can control who will see their story, with the option to set their account to private or hide stories from select followers, they have no control over whether Instagram stores their photos and what the app does with them.

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Facebook Stories

After rolling out stories on the recently acquired Instagram platform, Facebook announced the roll out of its own Snapchat Stories spinoff. This new service, as with Instagram Stories, includes filters, effects, and a time limit. While it is not clear whether Facebook stores all photos and videos on its servers as Instagram and Snapchat do, a quick look at the company’s Data Policy makes it clear that the company is collecting some of this information. Under the policy, Facebook is allowed to collect “things you do and information you provide.” Using the information, the platform is able to “communicate with you,” “provide, improve, and develop services,” and “show and measure ads and services.”

Safety Tips

With these privacy concerns in mind, social media safety becomes more important than ever. Users should keep in mind the community guidelines of each platform. These guidelines typically prohibit material that is intentionally offensive, insulting, or threatening, violates the privacy of another user, displays individuals engaged in dangerous or illegal activity, or potentially threatens anyone’s immediate safety. In short, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram’s privacy policies should make users hyperaware of the permanence of information posted online.

However, the progression of technology has allowed everyone to gain equal access to information, from technology to pop culture to politics.

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It seems as if every news feed is saturated with biased political information posted from all ideologies. With the proliferation of news media amongst millennials and older generations alike, this political information has become a primary news source for people as they decide who they want to cast their vote for in November.

Is this a bad thing? Well, you can decide for yourself.

Nearly everyone has access to holistic political information, which means that people are generally more educated. Even if they don’t read the news articles, they see the titles and the click baits, and they can decipher the general message that the article is going to send. This results in them going to the voting booth better informed, and they are not voting off of stipulation.

Plus, these social media platforms are facilitating discussion. Have you ever scrolled through your newsfeed without seeing two random kids from high school beefing about Trump vs. Hillary? Me neither. The conversation catalyzed by social media allows people to better understand each other’s values. This can also help inform the populace and educate them about their voting decision.

There are also a few negative byproducts associated with social media selecting our president. First of all, as stated earlier, these articles are incredibly biased. Several of these articles include skewed information that is utilized to promote a particular partisan agenda. This can mislead people to believe false information, and it can muddle their honest decision for whom they pick for their votes.

So, is it okay if social media selects a president? Whichever way you feel about it, it’s an inevitability. News technology is constantly innovating, reaching out to new populaces. Will this lead to a more informed or more ignorant electorate? Find out in November.

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