Discussion Board 5- CJUS 740 Reply 2

Reply must be at least 200-300 words and at least 2 citations from sources such as your textbook, peer-reviewed journal articles, and the Bible. The thread and replies must follow current APA format.

Tracey

Maxfield, M. G., & Babbie, E. R. (2018). Research methods for criminal justice and criminology (8th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning. ISBN: 9781337091824.

Social Media is a powerful form of communication between individuals, businesses, and other organizations. Various websites and applications enable people to connect, coordinate, share, and participate in social networking via the internet. Social media is known as a phenomenon that took over the 21st century. However, this technology was being used as early as the 1970s with services like CompuServ, while the World Wide Web was not publicly recognized until the late 1980s. Social media groups such as Friendster and, MySpace were big in 2003, with Facebook being launched in 2004, then YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube are popular, and the most used social media groups today (Ahern, 2017). 
Social media has influenced every aspect of our lives because it has changed and revolutionized how we communicate and socialize with one another. With social media being booming commodity in our lives daily, we as individuals tend to forget that there are rules when are on the internet and these social networking sites. There is not a book of formally written rules, but one should use common sense because what we post or say on these sites will remain in cyberspace forever. No matter what you do to get rid of it. If you have to use social media daily please remember to be respectful to others, be honest about what you are doing, do not get pulled into the gossip circle, do not let your emotion rule your social behavior, respect the privacy of others as well as yourself and, more importantly, remember that it is public.
When it comes to law enforcement agencies, have gotten on board and use social media as an outlet to provide information on crimes in the communities, provide tips on how to be safe, and even to use social media to solve crimes. This form of media plays a vital role in the portrayal of crime, just like the press media. Events of a crime can be manipulated to the perspectives of the individual posting or publishing such information. According to Stratton, Powell, & Cameron (2017), the global web not only brought a way for everyday users the accessibility to share and communicate with one another. Therefore, it is creating new and massively expanded opportunities for crime to occur because the perpetrators who use to attack other machines with the machine are not using those same machines to attack humans. 
With its continuous growth will create more issues for law enforcement as crimes continue to rise. The laws will have to be constitutional and not violate the right users. The House and Senate, in addition to law enforcement agencies, will have to ban together to create, enact, and enforce new laws to protect society from cybercriminals, who are in full force and using social media as their weapon.
References
Ahern, T. (2017). Social Media: Practices, Uses, and Global Impact. New York, NY: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
Stratton, G., Powell, A., & Cameron, R. (2017). Crime and Justice in Digital Society: Towards a ‘Digital Criminology’?. International Journal For Crime, Justice And Social Democracy, 6(2), 17. doi: 10.5204/ijcjsd.v6i2.355*