Believe it or not

Technology has created a huge divide in the media in which the traditional media is searching for its place while a large chunk of the social media and new media is suffering from the crisis of credibility. You cannot call them the victims, but the end users – the common people – are caught between the dilemma of ‘buy or not to buy’ and ‘believe or not to believe.’

How media had evolved to emerge as one of the oldest professions of humankind might be interesting for people to understand, but the transition that the media face today has never been so challenging. The genuine among both are struggling to survive.

The traditional media in the forms of print, electronic and radio, works under certain guidelines, while some enterprising professionals of these media choose to follow their own individual path by setting up social media forums and the like. Owing to their training in traditional media they are still maintaining the media ethics while highlighting genuine issues based on right evidence.

In between, there are people who are self-styled ‘social media campaigners’ who do not have any liability of guidelines or ethics, but keep on posting on social media whatever they want or get from any unverified sources. Some of them have their own vested interests of propagating an agenda, thus posing a great challenge in front of the genuine media players as they are bound by certain responsibilities of posting substances only after proper scrutiny backed by evidence.

REGULATIONS

Here comes the role of the governments to regulate the irresponsible behaviour of the section of social media which acts in unsocial manner by posting unverified items to the netizens.

Abdullah bin Thani bin Jamaan al Obaidani, who runs a social media channel titled Dhofaria Channel, strongly feels that there should be proper legal code to deal with irresponsible and wrong social media contents. “This is must to create space for genuine social media practitioners due to the fact that individuals or groups that misuse the social media platforms give a bad name to the genuine players.

“Today with every social media post people have doubt, whether that has been morphed, irrelevant or lifted out of context from some old event or situation.”

He suggested having ‘early response teams’ to counter any such posts after doing fact checks and reporting to the competent authorities. He also exhorted competent authorities to give due recognition to people or channels with good conduct so that common people get an idea about genuine social media players.

He feels these steps are essential to maintain correctness of information and encourage partnership and networking among credible media organisations.

It’s time to think out of the box and enter into partnership with national and international media organisations. Looking for solutions should not be left only to the governments, as something ‘fake’ affects everyone. “Cross checking information with credibility and posting them on right platforms would reduce people’s consideration for unreliable sources,” said a blogger with deep interest in environment, nature and culture.