IELTS Task2: Social media and sharing personal information on different websites does have risks

Social media is becoming increasingly popular amongest all age groups. However, sharing personal information on social media websites does have risks.

Do you think that the advantages of social media outweigh the disadvantages?

It is true that social media has revolutionized the way in which people communicate with each other, and it has affected people at different ages from children to the elderly. While I accept that sharing private information on the social platform might have dangerous effects. I believe that social media is more likely to be beneficial.

On the one hand, social media can be seen as negative for both security and psychological reasons. From a security perspective, social media has made people more likely to be exposed to cyber fraud. Information such as Email address, phone number and home address that the user puts on his profile are visible for everyone; therefore, criminals can use this information to pose as that user in order to commit crimes or to steal user's bank account for example. On a psychological level, social media considered to be addictive and productivity killer. That people today spend most of their time surfing social application, chatting with friends and watching video clips all of which are useless activates that have no beneficial outcome on one's life.

However, I would argue that these drawbacks are outweighed by the benefits. Social media can have made it easier for people to find job opportunities. In social platforms such as Linkedin, people who are seeking new job share their qualification and experience, that way employers who looking for employees can easily find them using the web site system. In addition, social media also has facilitated the way in which people looking for a life partner. Every day, there are thousands of successful relationships created between couples who want to marry who are met on social media that otherwise they would never be met.

In conclusion, it seems to me that the potential benefits of social media are more significant than the possible risks.

Mohammed, please read up on the use of subject sentences in Task 2 presentations. Try to avoid using memorized opening phrases like "on the one/other hand" because those are used as a teaching tool, but the student should have shown a progression from that tutoring tool used in class by the time the exam itself comes around. Using topic sentences will be better for your GRA than the memorized tutorial phrases.

Watch out for your errors in capitalization and punctuation which can lower your GRA score. In the opening paraphrase, you said that you accept the dangerous effect then ended the sentence with a period. The correct punctuation mark would have been a comma to connect the two different topics in one sentence presentation. You also capitalized the word email in the second paragraph when that should have been written in lower case.

Your second paragraph leaves the psychological explanation under developed in terms of discussion and explanation. That is because a majority of the 5 sentence paragraph was used for the security explanation. When you want to use 2 topics for one paragraph, balance it out by using only 2 sentences each for the actual topic, then using a mid-sentence transition to relate the two discussion points before discussing the new topic.

The concluding summary is incomplete. It lacks a proper summation of the discussion topic and discussion points before the presentation of your opinion as the closing statement of the essay.