“With people relying on our services more than ever, we're focused on keeping people safe, informed, and connected,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, and CEO. Many businesses have been suffering struggles while the COVID-19 appeared, but tech has a big advantage because people want to stay connected with their family and friends. Facebook, which is one of the social media giants has reported revenue of $17.7 billion, compared to $17.4, earned last year. Facebook also saw an increase in user engagement because of the coronavirus in its main apps, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
The entire world remains in isolation because of the coronavirus. This leads users to spend endless hours on the networks, but the problem here is that many news related to the pandemic appears on the internet and not everything should be believed on social media. The spread of misinformation is unlikely to stop soon. For its part, YouTube promised to make their biggest effort to detect and stop the spread of misinformation. Many people affirmed that while spending more time reading about COVID-19 on social media, their mental health gets worse. While being isolated physically makes us feel lonely, we turn our screens on to be in contact with our friends or family.
Isolation and mental health are connected. Many people realize that they are feeling lonely or sad while quarantined. We just call, video call, or text people, but digital communication could not be compared at all to in-person contact. Unfortunately, we cannot hug our family and friends. For this reason, Facebook created a way you can virtually hug your Facebook friends.
Tech giants are always looking for something useful according to users’ needs. Facebook added a new reaction called “care” which is represented by a smiley face-hugging a heart. This reaction will make you send support and love to the ones you love the most. We are all conscious that almost everybody prefers to have physical contact than digital, but we cannot go outside as we used to. Soon everything will be okay and we will continue with our normal lives, but now we must be thankful with technology for leading us to be informed and in contact with the ones we love.
