Social Media: Who guarantees its safe and responsible use?

Social media, more sought after than the day’s meals, is far beyond issues in Sri Lanka like in its use as a safe and responsible tool. Social Media is handled by different people in unique ways. There is a set of people who handle Social Media in a safe and responsible way whereas most in number are using it inappropriately.

Etisalat Lanka (PVT) LTD organised the Mashable Social Media Day for the third consecutive year at the Excel World in Colombo last Sunday. Sri Lanka was ranked to be among the top eight global social media day events to attend and this recognition is due after the events credibility and in depth topics addressed at this forum. The theme of this year’s social media day was ‘Safe and Responsible use of Social Media’.

Around 300 youngsters between the age of 20 and 35 were present at the event. There was a panel discussion on ‘Safe and Responsible use of Social Media’ with the inclusion of three panellists from different sectors of social networking. One of the panellists posed a few questions to the audience, which made the Business Times learn some lessons from modern society.

The questions were whether any of them have hacked anyone in social media or have they been hacked by anyone, have’fraped’ anyone (changing someone’s Facebook page without permis- sion) or have been ‘fraped’ by anyone, have blocked anyone or have been blocked, created fake profiles and so on. For all these questions there were at least more than 10 hands which rose up depicting how social media could affect an individual in a good and a bad way.

Also there was a panel of entrepreneurs who shared their experience on ‘Driving Businesses with Social Media’, namely Good Market Organiser Dr. Amanda Kiessel, IAMSRILANKA Founder Shiraz Ismail and CIOCONAT Lounge Head of Operations Rikaz Rumy. These entrepreneurs shared their views on how social media has helped them drive their businesses through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Foursquare.

An award ceremony took place to recognise key influences of different social media platforms in Sri Lanka. Winners were judged by the positive influences of dif- ferent social media platforms in five award categories, namely ‘Most Popular Facebook Community Page’, ‘Most Popular Tweep’, ‘Most Popular Instagrammer’, ‘Most Popular Blogger’ and ‘Social Media for Social Good’. The award nominations were called from the community for each category and an organisational team shortlisted the nominations to five per category. Winners from each category were selected from a community of online voting.

The first ever crowd sourced song was launched at the event which had already received over 500 song lyric contributions from the local Twitter and Facebook community towards the #apesinduwa song.

Latest statistics show that 20 per cent of Sri Lanka’s population has access to the Internet, 2.4 million Sri Lankans are actively engaged on Facebook and approximately 40,000 on Twitter.