Just a day after Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made a statement about regulations within the tech sector, people all over have been responding, both with positive and negative outlash. In the statement, Benioff said that companies like Facebook should be regulated just as cigarette companies are, with the view of helping curtail the addiction rate of these technologies.
The comment wasn’t directed only at Facebook. In fact, Benioff said that these restrictions should be imposed on all the popular social media sites that people tend to use today. Speaking at the World Economic Forum’s, Benioff outlined how cigarette companies have restrictions because they pose a certain amount of harm to a person’s health. He applied the same concept to social media, stating that the overuse of these tools can have ill effects on health, and the people being affected by these are increasing with every passing day. Being someone who leads a tech company himself, Benioff further went to state how he knew the dangers of overuse of social media could pose, which is why it is up to the developers to employ measures which could help drop the addiction rates.
A survey conducted by Webroot recently shed light on this problem of social media addiction through the shocking statistics that they released. According to their research, over seventy-five percent of millennials feel that they are currently addicted to one or more social media sites. The number of people in the older generations who are addicted is currently only at forty-four percent, but this number too is on a rapid rise.
As it currently stands, social media companies are not responding to these statistics with any hint of concern. To them, social media is about connecting people and nothing else. If people feel like social media sites are a better way for them to keep in touch with others, then they are doing their jobs of offering them a platform to do that. As opposed to curtailing their usage, these sites are aiming to get more and more people hooked on and spending more time on them.
Benioff is not the only person to come forward and talk about the importance of imposing restrictions on social media. Over the past few month, several notable names in tech have come forward to shed light on this issue, and pose solutions that would benefit the people using them, and not harm the companies offering these tech services.
