Is Facebook Dangerous or Not?
Alyson Waite, a junior public relations major, wrote an article titled, “Beware of Facebook Danger,” on May 10, 2006. In this article, Waite ultimately tries to persuade her readers to avoid Facebook. She describes how predators can use Facebook as an opportunity to find unsuspecting victims. She also tells of the risk that a student might face from questionable photos posted of them. She explains how students can portray themselves as potential victims by exposing their insecurity. Finally, she talks about how employers can use Facebook to check the credibility of potential employees. Waite's claim about Facebook being a danger to students and potential employees are flawed because she uses faulty generalization to point out only the dangers of using Facebook and she has no evidence to support the claims that she makes about Facebook being dangerous to users. Waite uses faulty generalization throughout most of her article. She explains how Facebook is used in a negative way by predators, stalkers, older male colleagues, and student's, but she doesn't tell of the positive ways that Facebook can be used. Lauren Tarshis, a writer for the Scholastic Scope, said, “Facebook can help kids build positive connections, especially for kids who find it hard to make friends at school” (Tarshis). Tarshis' intuition on this shows a positive outcome that Facebook can have on a child's future and on developing social skills that might had been hard for the child to do in school. The Daily Mirror discovered that Facebook was used in the recovery of a stolen car (Singleton). This demonstrates another positive use of Facebook not only for the recovery of missing items but could also be used in finding missing people. Waite makes many claims in this article with no supporting evidence to back it up. In her article, she said, “every employee or student at this university can view the information posted on an individual’s personal page” (Book). Waite also makes a claim that friends