U.S.

Social media platforms are facing a myriad of criticisms, ranging from accusations of contributing to rising anxiety and suicide rates among Amer­ican teenagers to profiting from selling personal data and compromising indi­vidual privacy. The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 demonstrated that prominent racial justice and equal­ity movements could be organized through digital activism, which gained widespread support and online en­gagement. Social media is an instru­ment of political change, but these changes are dangerously consequen­tial. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Capitol riots in the United States, and increase in political polarization, the world is abandoning the perception that social media does not significant­ly impact domestic and world politics.