# Social Media, Quo Vadis? Prospective Development and Implications
## 2 Theoretical Background and Development of Projections
### Societal Effects  
Social media has effects way beyond the individual and organizations and already changed parts of society. In this section, we address social media's effects in several societal spheres. How will social media affect the economy? According to a report by Deloitte from 2016, Facebook had an economic impact of $227 billion and indirectly created 4.5 million jobs worldwide outside its company in 2014 [110]. Most of the economic impact is generated through marketing effects which drive online and offline sales. In addition, Facebook acts as a tool for app development, so that new and innovative features and third-party products and services are created. Being a popular platform, Facebook encouraged the purchase of devices and internet connections, which results in an increase in connectivity [110]. This notion can be summarized in the following projection. P39. Social media will (directly or indirectly) significantly increase economic growth. Apart from that, the emergence of social networks created numerous new jobs that haven't existed in the past [111]. Jobs like influencers, which are social opinion-leaders, wouldn't exist without social media [5]. As a daring hypothesis, social media could stimulate birth rates. Both ideas can be stated as follows: P40. Social media will (directly or indirectly) significantly increase the creation of jobs. P41. Social media will increase birth rates in various countries. [PERSON] et al. state that social media influence, through peer pressure, encourages other users to vote [87]. Their experiment points out that social media users, who viewed a photo and message of their friends voting, were more likely to vote themselves than users, who only received an informational message without a photo of their friends. Hence, interests in politics increased through social influence on social media. According to this, we can conclude that this trend will continue: P42. Social media will (directly or indirectly) significantly increase political interest. However, according to [PERSON] and [PERSON] manipulation of elections through social media is potentially a threat to democracy and therefore, it should be measured [112]. Despite this argument, [PERSON] et al. claim that social media has the ability to hold governments and corporationsaccountable in terms of corruption, due to the possibility to share information independently, compared to traditional mass media [113]. Consequently, it could result in strengthening democracy [113]: P43. Social media will (directly or indirectly) significantly increase democracy. The free flow of information on social media is not guaranteed though. National governments might try to influence news dissemination on platforms or platform operators could have an interest in specific news not being spread [114; 115]. This is not necessarily limited to fake news. In that sense, we posit: P44. Censorship on social media will increase. The relationship between social media and education is subject to extensive research. On the one hand, established educational institutions such as schools and universities can use social media as an additional educational medium to achieve educational goals in a better or at least different way [3; 116; 117]. On the other hand, it could be argued that social media could be seen as a new educational institution itself. Just as newspapers are not limited to inform the public about news but also can serve educational purposes, the same can be true for social media. Therefore, we formulate the following projection: P45. Social media will (directly or indirectly) significantly increase the public's level of education. As previously stated, social media has an effect on an individual's mental health and well-being [92; 93; 94; 102]. In an aggregated view, public health could also be affected. For example, social media could enable the public health community to study behaviors in order to understand diseases such as depression, type-II diabetes, or cardiovascular illnesses [118].