December 3, 2025 l Business Mirror
On June 29, 2011, the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines’s Media Affairs Committee, which I chaired at that time, organized a webinar on the power of social media. That was 14 years ago and, our speaker, Maria Ressa, that time already had shown us how social media can continue to grow as a powerful channel of communications for good or bad.
Fast forward to today in 2025, we can see how the power of social media did not only grow at such a fast pace but exponentially! There were around only 970 million users globally in 2011 which is a much smaller portion or around 18 percent of the world’s population. By early this year, the number had significantly grown to over 5.2 billion users, which is around 63.9 percent of the global population! (Source: dreamgrow.com statistics dated 10.2.2025).
This could be a positive impact on human life, or a bane for many people. This all depends on how social media is being used. Decades ago, war is waged using weapons; nowadays, a weapon also being used is social media. The power of social media cannot be underestimated.
We all are familiar with the pros of social media. Some can’t deny that it improves our communication with relatives and friends. We are also able to make new friends. Before, we cannot communicate easily with those who are geographically distant; with social media, with one click of the keyboard we can instantly get in touch with them.
Through social media, we can be able to create community of relatives, friends and even acquaintances or new friends sharing the same interests with us, from all over the globe. In fact, in 2025 most people now prefer to share within their community group rather than in news feeds. Further, through the community groups, advocacies such as anti-corruption, social justices, anti-political dynasties can propel transformation.
Certain advantages could also include information dissemination, educational resource and for me, it provides a lot of self-help content, both personally and professionally. Most of my free time are spent in listening to the preaching and talks by David Jeremiah, Gary Hamrick, Ed Lapiz, Dave Bronner and other famous speakers. My resources in my writings and ideas of my contents, which can also help me in my profession, are also from social media. The likes of TEDx Talks and content by audit and accounting and health professionals are among the many resources I have.
On the other hand, the cons may include privacy concerns. Without our knowing it, we may be sharing personal and confidential information that could be used by cyber criminals. To address this concern, our firm organized a webinar on data privacy last December 1 with New York–based Data Privacy Expert Severino “Dino” Landingin as our resource speaker.
Another disadvantage of the increasing power of social media is the increasing fake information proliferating in the cyberspace. Victims’ reputation can easily be tarnished with bashings based on fake information.
Sometimes it is a battle of trolls especially during elections or even during times like we have right now where one political group throws verbal trash on another group and vice versa to influence public opinion.
There is also the problem of cyberbullying as well as addiction in the use of social media, which can affect mental health. It can be source of distractions that keep us from focusing on some important endeavors, channels of frauds and scams among others.
With the rise of artificial intelligence, social media users are estimated to grow to 5.85 billion or to almost 6 billion in 2027 and expected to reach 6.6 billion in 2030 (Source: designrush 2.28.25).
Social media is here to stay. But whether it will have a positive impact in our personal and professional life will depend on how we use it. We should start with ourselves by protecting our mental, physical health and relationships with family and friends from its ill effects. Moreover, we should be a channel for right information and a positive influence in the lives of others by the contents we post and how we use it as a form of communicating with others.
We may not be able to control the way others use this powerful tool and we maybe just a dot in the whole universe but several dots making a positive impact will surely be a strong influence in this world we live in.
***The views expressed herein are her own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of her office as well as FINEX. For comments, email wimiranda@inventormiranda.com. Photo is from Pinterest.