Throughout life, everyone encounters risks. The risks of having a Facebook account are not exempt from this, however, the benefits of Facebook seem to outweigh the risks.

Facebook and its multitude of benefits allows teens to stay in touch with people, coordinate events, and many other things too.

The average teenager is usually busy with school and extracurricular activities that it is hard to carve out time to spend with friends and family, as well as accomplish the endless list of things they need to get done. One major benefit of

Facebook is that it enables students to be able to stay in contact with people while still having time for all of the other activities in their busy lives.

Sophomore Omid Afshar said that Facebook is “a great social experience online” that allows users to “[share] pictures, experiences, and ideas with friends and family.”

There are many helpful tools that make it easier for users to plan events, contact people, and stay in the know with their friends.

The messaging tool is great for contacting friends and family privately. The messages are a private conversation between the people invited into the conversation and are not posted publicly, therefore, protecting members’ privacy.

Carlmont students also like to post status updates to let their “friends” know what they are up to. Sophomore Aaron Karpie said that status updates are his favorite feature because he likes to “keep [his] status’s really funny and get a lot of likes.”

Afshar finds it to be “very exhilarating when friends agree with something you say or like a picture you have posted.”
Creating “groups” on Facebook allows users with similar interests to stay in touch. Groups can be created privately and members to the group can only be invited to join, which helps to keep the privacy of the members in the group.

Many students also find that using the groups can be a helpful way to solve problems.

Carlmont sophomore Gianna Schuster recently encountered a situation involving the popular app Instagram, and was able to use Facebook communication to help solve the problem.

Schuster had an impersonator on Instagram that made a fake account with her name and profile picture from Facebook.
Schuster explained that although the problem stemmed from Facebook and was not solved completely using Facebook, she was able to invite all of her Facebook friends to a group and let them know about the problem she was having in order to help “spread awareness to everybody.”

Other students are members of groups for various classes that allows them to communicate about homework assignments, in addition to asking and answering questions that they might have about the topics being studied in class.

Afshar stated that using Facebook groups “helps out when you don’t know the homework because you can just ask somebody on Facebook.”

While risks are everywhere, Facebook is a place where many Carlmont students can interact socially in a fairly safe environment. Many choose to overlook the potential risks because obviously, the benefits of using Facebook and other social networking sites like it far outweigh the costs.