Social Networking Security during COVID-19: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

During the Covid-19 Pandemic, the usage of social media networks increased exponentially. People engage in education, business, shopping, and other social activities (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube). As social networking expands rapidly, its positive and negative impacts affect human health. All this leads to social crimes and illegal activities like phishing, hacking, ransomware, password attacks, spyware, blackmailing, Middle-man-attack. This research extensively discusses the social networking threats, challenges, online surveys, and future effects. We conduct an online survey using the google forms platform to collect the responses of social networking sites (SNS) users within Pakistan to show how SNS affects health positively and negatively. According to the collected response, we analyzed that 50% of the users use SNS for education purposes, 17.5% use it for shopping purposes, 58.2% use it for entertainment, 37.1% use it for communication, and 9.8% use it for other purposes. According to the response, the excessive use of SNS affects the health that 9.8% users face the physical threat, 42.8% user faces mental health issues due to excessive or inappropriate use of SN, and 50.5% users feel moral threat using Social sites. Finally, we conclude our paper by discussing the open challenges, conclusions, and future directions.