While talking to social media influencers at Governor House, Karachi, President Dr Arif Alvi has underlined the need to discern between fake and real news, identify the strengths of social media, and use it as a positive instrument for imparting education and knowledge, providing authentic, verifiable and credible information and discuss and provide solutions to the economic and social issues of importance to build strong progressive and informed society. He said that social media was a useful tool for highlighting the grass-root-level issues and socio-economic problems faced by the people and generating healthy, constructive and useful discussion on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats faced by the country and the people which would help the country to make meaningful headway toward creating an informed and resilient society The President said that social media can be an effective and powerful instrument to defuse political polarization by diverting the attention of the people towards real issues faced by the nation by encouraging the resolution of political, economic and social issues through the process of negotiation, deliberation and democratic means and by adhering with the relevant constitutional provisions, laws and rules and acceptable social and cultural norms and avoiding mudslinging and character assassination, and curbing the propagation of fake and fabricated news and information. President stressed the need to prepare ourselves through education and intellectual training to sift the right, useful and apt knowledge and verified and credible information which is abundantly available on social media in most cases free of cost and build our intellectual capability to ignore the noise and sift unverified information and build our resistance against hearsay, backbiting and mudslinging and avoid social media products which were not compatible with our religious social and cultural values. He added that shutting down social media platform(s) was not an ideal solution as this would hamper our access to modern technology and science and may deprive us of neck-breaking development and innovation taking place around the world in all sectors. Talking about the water woes of Karachi, the President stressed the need for a comprehensive approach for the selection of projects and ensuring transparency and fairness in the award of contracts and setting in place a monitoring and feedback mechanism to eliminate elements of corruption during the implementation stage. He added that in addition to desalination plants, the K-IV project was the biggest solution to Karachi’s water shortage, which could be further improved by improving the water distribution system. The President urged the social media influencers to create awareness in our youth bulge on digital skill development programmes being offered by the Government and other organizations online to increase the number of beneficiaries of the latest IT skill development programs. He also referred to Google’s initiative to award certificates to over 15,000 students in the latest IT skills. He highlighted that 2.5 million people from different academic backgrounds had benefitted from Prime Minister’s Digital Skills Programme and many were earning handsome amounts by marketing their services online. He appreciated that Facebook had initiated a digital skills programme to train and help over 100,000 women market their products and services online. He asked the social media influencers to disseminate this information to their followers for maximizing its reception by the youth.
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