Let The Users Beware

Today is International Internet Day that marks the day of sending the first message electronically. The first message was transferred from one computer to another on October 29, 1969.

In India, internet services started in 1986, but was available only to educational and research community. It was launched for public on 15th August, 1995, and thereafter there was no looking back. There are now more than 700 million active consumers that comprise more than 55% of the population.

It’s such a fast way of providing, accessing and exchanging information all over the world that it’s difficult now to imagine life without internet. It has entered every sphere of the life.

Internet provides some engines to search for information. The most popular thing about the internet is its social media sites. YouTube is one. Here I would like to discuss it in particular.

YouTube is a US-based, free video sharing and social media platform, originally launched on 14th February 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chan and Jawed Karim, the three former employees of e-commercial company, PayPal. It was bought by Google in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion.

One can watch video clips and also create and upload any damn video to share with friends and the world. It’s the second most visited website after Google Search. You can imagine the scale, as every minute more than 35 hours of videos are uploaded. The uploaded videos are watched around six billion hours every month.

If we need any information about any subject of the universe, we can access the videos concerned on YouTube in a moment. YouTube is a treasure trove of knowledge and entertainment.

But here is a caveat. Whenever you watch a video related to an ideology on YouTube, it throws a lot of related videos, whose contents are not authenticated, and at times inappropriate too, as these are related to the ideology of the video maker. By constantly watching videos of one ideology, impressionable minds can easily get influenced or confused.

Misleading titles of videos are also a big problem. On the basis of alluring heading, you open the video, but its contents will be something else. It’s done intentionally, as the purpose of video uploaders is to increase engagement by attracting more views, likes, comments, shares and subscriptions. Your one click serves their purpose of increasing traffic.

YouTube does not have a control system to check all videos. Yes, if someone reports, then of course YouTube checks it and deletes the video.

So watch a lot of videos on YouTube, but these need to be viewed judiciously at your end. And this applies to all social media platform.

You go to Google search for finding an ambulance or your favourite restaurant, and place order, but later it transpires that the site, from where you had accessed the number, was fake.

Digital payment system has also made our life comfortable, but the cases of defrauding people using the system are also on the rise.

There is a Doctrine of Caveat Emptor (Latin: “let the buyer beware”) in the law of commercial transactions. It means that the responsibility lies on the buyer, who must perform due diligence before purchasing a good, as he does it at his own risk and responsibility in the absence of an express clause in the contract.

So consumers or users of internet and social media, beware! Let’s beware!!

–Kaushal Kishore

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