Social media has undoubtedly revolutionized the lives of hundreds of millions of people. These platforms allow us to communicate instantly and publish all the content we want, which can be exposed before the eyes of anyone.
Privacy is reaching a point where we want to expose ourselves less and less and that only our closest circle see everything we publish. It is normal considering that social networks are a giant world where anything can go viral.
At first there were few options to filter our content, but over the years these platforms have been introducing different functions that allow us to choose who views everything we publish.
From less to more
When this whole world was initially seen as a novelty, what stood out the most was the messaging. Social networks like Messenger or Tuenti were the queens in this regard. The first only had the function of exchanging messages between the contacts, while the second was more innovative and took a step forward, allowing us to publish photos or states on our profile that could be seen by all the people we have added to.
Another social network that has a similar function to that of Tuenti is Facebook , which although at first it may seem that it is not so popular, it is the social network with the most users in the world.
There is also the world-famous TikTok, this Chinese social network that was previously known as Musically. This application has been a revolution since the number of videos within TikTok seems infinite: from dances and fun challenges to telling any type of personal experience and sharing it.
This social network stands out for the ease with which these videos go viral. Years later, Instagram, the social network specialized in the publication of photographs , would release its function known as “Reels”, which is exactly the same as TikTok videos.
For example, in WhatsApp , the world instant messaging social network, we can eliminate the option of reading confirmations so that the person we are talking to does not know when we read their messages. We can also remove the last connection to avoid being controlled.
Ways to filter our content
However, it was from the creation of Snapchat that the dynamics of social networks began to change. This social network allows you to create short videos or photos and post them for 24 hours. After that time, the content was deleted by itself. It was at this time when the rest of the social networks got on their feet and began to innovate.
On the one hand we have the famous “stories” , the function that Snapchat performed but with another name. This can already be used on Twitter as well as on Facebook and Instagram. Later, this last social network would end up including within this function a new section called “best friends” , which allows us to filter who we want to see everything we publish in our stories.
Recently, Twitter has announced that it plans to include this same function but with a different approach, which would allow us to choose the people we want to just open the application when we get the tweets of these people that we have chosen first.
As for Facebook, this social network has private walls, which allow us to choose which people we want to see all the content we publish on our profile.
Our privacy is very important
In conclusion, everyone is free to decide what to do with the privacy of their accounts on their social networks. All of them have different settings that allow us to decide if our account is public or private, among other options.
You can choose who can comment on your posts, if everyone or just your followers or people you follow. The same goes for mentions.
This does not mean obviously that we cannot publish content for what everyone sees, but we must be more selective when deciding which content is published and which deserves more privacy that is only in the eyes of a select few.