One of the earliest social media networks that really took off was MySpace, created in August 2003 (Shah, “The History of Social Networking”). MySpace could be compared to as the grandfather of social media because it was one of the first social media networks on the Internet. MySpace truly took off, with 75.9 million members on the website at its peak. (Smith, “By The Numbers: 17 MySpace Stats and Facts Then and Now”). MySpace truly set a standard for social media for its successors. However, many problems also arose when the Internet became more used by the world through social media.
One of the problems with the rising use of social media is how easy it now is to provide information to others online. There are now more cases of identity theft and other privacy breaches now in society. A more recent privacy concern is ‘catfishing’, the act of using a fake picture and pretending you are that person, which can sometimes lead to sexual assault or other crimes. By using social media, it became quite easy to provide personal information to others online and it has now led to all these concerns over privacy. While social media may have been intended to be a tool to connect with others, it has given way to all these issues. Social media, however, continues to grow with usage estimated to be at about 65% for adults in America (Perrin, "Social Media Usage: 2005-2015”).