How do we curb scourge of social media?
A news report in the Insight Newspaper caught my attention a couple of days ago. It concerned the distasteful use of social media and called for steps to be taken to stem the tide and bring those involved in peddling falsehood and spreading mischief to book.
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The call couldn’t have come at a better time considering that period the country is in now, an election year. By all means, social media is a good thing, but then it also has its bad sides.
Many of our national leaders, including political leaders and even state institutions, have had stories that are outright lies written about them and shamelessly circulated, sometimes to score cheap political points.
The thing about social media is that before any corrections are made to a false or distasteful story it would have already done damage to the characters involved.
Sometimes no amount of action or corrections can make its damaging effect go away. The detrimental effect sticks, as Chinua Achebe puts it, ‘like Chameleon faeces, even when you wash it cannot go.’
Security alert
The big worry is the issue to do with scare-mongering. If care is not taken, it may come a time when someone would publish that a bomb has been planted somewhere and this will throw the nation into turmoil. Imagine how exasperating it will be if it turns out to be false.
It is to prevent unscrupulous people from taking the country for a ride that the National Media Commission (NMC), the National Communications Authority (NCA) and the national security agencies must put measures in place to control, if not eliminate, the incidence of mischievous use of social media platforms.
Already, without sending the masses on a wild goose chase, there is tension all around and the country will fare worse if the inglorious use of social media is allowed to continue.
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Monitoring social media platforms
Monitoring the social media platform is going to be a difficult enterprise since users remain virtually anonymous, using temporary email accounts, pseudonyms in chat rooms, instant messaging programmes, cell-phone text messaging, and other Internet venues to mask their identity; this perhaps frees them from standard behaviour and social constraints.
But a lot can be achieved if legislation is introduced that would require social media companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and the like to alert law enforcement agencies when they come across messages that are likely to be untrue, distasteful or likely to disturb national peace.
With effect from now, I am of the view that manuals could also be developed to educate the masses on guidelines regarding the proper use of social media, as we go into elections.
Gitmo revisited
And back to the old topic on the admittance of the Gitmo detainees into the country. We have had many well-intentioned people, including some statesmen, giving their expert views on the subject.
As for me, I still think the bottom line is that it was wrong not to have informed the people in the first place before accepting the offer to receive them.
No matter how the issue is rationalised, I believe that America would do a better job at keeping them than us.
Yes, we live as a comity of nations in the world but it will not do for the strong and powerful under the guise of international cooperation to bulldoze the weaker ones into swallowing pills they are not comfortable with.
We must ask how America would feel and react if the shoe was on the other foot.