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BREAKING DOWN FACEBOOK What Is ‘Decentralization’ and How Will It Change Social Media? score from each section on multiple exams, not just scores from one exam. This can really boost your teen’s ACT results and give them— and you — some peace of mind. If all the work is done, there’s nothing to do but wait. Keep busy making fun memories with the family with weekend game nights, camping, and movie marathons. You won’t regret spending extra quality time before the next big step in your teen’s life. For their whole life, you’ve likely encouraged your child to have ambitions of their own, and you want to see them follow through on those dreams now that they’re entering young adulthood. The year or two before college is a pivotal time in your teen’s life, and it’s important for them to feel confident about their choices, whether daily or long term. You might find they’re still afraid to make decisions, scrutinize consequences carefully, or commit to one course of action. Allowing your child to make more and more of their own decisions, like doing their own laundry or choosing which college to attend, will help them understand the discipline and self-determination an adult needs to function well in the real world. They might not do this perfectly, but don’t be too critical about their scheduling, and congratulate themwhen they successfully reach a goal or follow through on an important decision. FACILITATE DECISION-MAKING TO EMPOWER YOUR TEEN.
If your teen can set and accomplish daily tasks on their own, they’ll feel more confident about following their ambitions because they’ll have a positive track record to build on. By strategizing to reduce your teen’s anxiety on exam results, creating positive memories with them, and supporting their independence, you can make their transition to young adulthood an exciting adventure for them— and you — to look forward to.
Nowadays, getting locked out of your Facebook account often means losing access to your Spotify, Tinder, or any of the other sites you can sign into through Facebook. The amount of personal data social media has access to grows all the time, and it can affect your private and professional network. Thankfully, a few tech CEOs, such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, believe social media decentralization could give users greater control over their personal information. Social media decentralization was once a pipe dream for activists, but Dorsey has recently revealed his hopes for redesigning his social media software to put the power back in the users’ hands. Zuckerberg also admitted in a Harvard interview that decentralized software is “quite attractive.”
Currently, Facebook and Twitter live in relative anarchy. Their sheer size makes them nearly impossible to audit or manage, which makes falsified information and propaganda infamously easy to pass around. This anarchy also makes it much easier to conceal illegal activity. In an age where identity theft, financial fraud, and selling user information are more digital than ever, it’s important that users and businesses alike have full confidence in the security of their online pages where clients interact with them— especially if information, goods, or services are exchanged. A decentralized system could split the massive, unregulated wilderness of Facebook and Twitter into user-managed“neighborhoods.” Rather than relying on one centralized server that holds over 2.45 billion users, businesses and individuals could host their information on their own computer. This would give businesses
and individuals much greater control over their information and how they share it.
That’s not to say there aren’t risks associated with decentralization. If unprepared, private hosts could be left defenseless against hackers. Some critics even suggest that a push to decentralize could just be an attempt by Twitter and Facebook to dodge responsibility by moving data off of their own servers. While decentralization offers solutions to some of the problems of social media, it’s an approach that requires cautious implementation. Only time will tell if decentralization’s benefits outweigh its risks.
2 • www.yolofskylaw.com
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