Ethical regulations for new media
During a recent meeting, the Committee for Media and Culture at the Shura Council invited experts from the Ministry of Information and the Omani Journalists Association to discuss the committee’s study regarding professional and ethical regulations for new media in Oman. The Shura Council has for a while now been discussing putting forward a new law to stop the circulation of such rumours across social media.
In February, Ali Al Maashani, Head of the Media and Culture Committee at the Shura Council, spoke about a new law being drafted related to regulating social media. He said: “We are not thinking of limiting a person’s ability to say their opinion ; we are only talking about the ethical implications of attacking either a private person, the country, or a group of individuals.”
Al Mafraji added, “Other recommendations were to appoint official spokespeople for public and private institutions. Finally, the committee’s focus for this year regarding ethical and professional regulations for new media is to study the current situation and identify the role of media agencies in keeping news professional.”
Dr Saqib Ali, Head of the Department of Information Systems at the College of Economics and Political Science at Sultan Qaboos University, said although social media organisations were trying to clamp down on fake news, sourcing it was like finding ‘a needle in a haystack’.
The social media organisations are trying to cut down and stop the spreading of fake news, but it is very difficult,” he told Times of Oman. “Their methods are not a hundred percent effective. Finding the source of the fake news is like finding a needle in a haystack because you don’t know where to look. There is no sourcing system for any of these platforms yet.”
“The problem with finding the source of the fake news is that it can be in any language, the pictures used for every piece of fake news are different, the language of the original piece of fake news may be different from the other pieces, how they spread this may vary from one person to the next, so it is not easy to stop the spread of fake news,” added Ali.