Social Media Should Be Censored ? (Blog 3)

1. Can the Malaysian social media be censored? What are the implications of this?

My reply is NO.

Social media plays an important role in our society as most of us including me obtain data or source from internet or other social platform. If social media are censored, how can we survive? There are implications if our social media are censored and we will lose social media to the control of government. If we lose social media, the flow of information will be reversed back to the ages of 1990s. The only source of information is and all that we hear and know will only be from our government and our mind and behaviour will be shaped and controlled by our government. The news that they publish will only be from one side of view and will only report what they want us to know. We will then lose our freedom, living like a heavily sick patient (citizen) that consumes medicine feed by the nurse (the papers) according to the instruction of doctor (government). We will have no choice and no freedom to choose these information and can only accept whatever information that are given to us, be it truth or lies.  Fortunately, we are born in this era, and we are technologically advanced compared to past. If the official social media is being censored, we still have other unconventional platform to obtain news. For example, if official blogs and social media accounts are being censored, we can turn to other private blogs and social media accounts to obtain information first hand from users of social media what actually happened.

Furthermore, to become a modern democracy country, the government should not censored social media, but should instead encourage their citizen to use social media to improve their own knowledge and train their people to have a wise judgment to judge or interpret the information they get or seen social media. The government advocacy of freedom of speech does not coincides with its act of protecting the freedom, and this will not help our country to become strong and prosperous.

2. What, how & why do you consume (use) social networking sites?

The social media that I use are Faceook, Twitter and Youtube. During my free time, I will use social media as my source of entertainment such as watching videos on Youtube or plays online game on Facebook. Besides that, social media is also my contact tool, as I will use it to meet or chat with the friend who are far from me. We are enjoy chatting with each other using Facebook or Hotmail to develop our friendship. Therefore, the reason why I use social media is its convenience as information and communication are just clicks away. Another reason why I enjoy social media is due to its low cost, as we only need a platform to access social media, be it laptop or smart phone and internet access. Social media plays an important role in my entire life. If I lose social media, I really can’t imagine how I can survive for my entire life, as I have to use long and tedious way to get what I want, for example, getting new music, chatting with friend who far or in foreign country or flip through books in the library just to get the information that I want when I am doing assignment… ... Arrrr, how boring is is…!!! Even my mom is also addicted to Facebook to stalk my profile, and enjoy commenting on my post, so it is not crazy to say that the people nowadays cannot live without social media.