Safety for Social Media 

The use of social media sites and apps continues to increase with their wide acceptance and popularity. Young users develop contacts, connect with friends, join groups based on common interest, share articles and personal information and even organize and host events, all of which leaves social networking sites continuously evolving and growing. With such fast expansion and adoption, however, comes greater risk. Racist, defamatory, abusive, provocative and inappropriate comments and content being published has become a regular and frequent occurrence. 5 The threats to cyber wellness also extend to social media sites and because of their widespread use, are commonly faced by users of such sites. This makes it necessary to know how we can promote safe experiences and avoid the adverse effects of using social media. In this module you will learn about some popular social media sites and apps, understand how to use them responsibly and become familiar with the legal provisions that guard the safety of Internet users. 

Social Media Safety Tips

1. Your profile should not have any contact details or personal information on it. 

2. Avoid making any online friends who you do not know personally.

3. Avoid posting personal pictures of yourself or family members. 

4. Do not update your location on your social media profile when you visit a place and guide your friends not to tag/include you in the same, if they update their location.

 5. Use privacy settings on such social media sites to make personal information (such as friend list, relatives, specific details like address, phone number and so forth) is accessible only to you or a carefully chosen set of people.

 6. Have a strong password for your account and keep different passwords for different websites. If you have more than one email account, keep a different password for all of them. 7. Any emails dropped into your SPAM folder must be deleted. You can read the subject line to identify if the email has not been transferred to spam by mistake. 

8. If you are using Internet in a cyber café or using a public computer, remember to delete your user name and password, if saved. Also, go to History and delete recent history to remove your login details.

 9. If you use a smart phone, do not let others use your mobile unless they require it to make calls only and disable GPS for social networking apps. 

10. Keep ‘Geotagging’ disabled to avoid revealing your location