Th
Over the years, Government has implemented several campaign programs such as War against Indiscipline (WAI), MAMSA, and Heart of Africa etc. They were all amongst other objectives geared towards having the citizens change unacceptable attitude and behaviours. Effective engagement of citizen that will integrate public consultation and interaction which can be achieved through effective use of Social Media platforms is essential before policy implementation and indeed formulation. This is instructive and beneficial in giving the citizens a sense of involvement and ownership of national issues.
The current National re-orientation campaign of “Change Begins with Me” requires an aggressive reach out via relevant media like TV, Radio, Information Education and Communication (IEC) materials and the Social Media platforms, amongst others.
Globally, the New/Social Media platforms has proven to be the widest medium through which messages and campaigns such as these are deployed to reach Citizens and overcome the problems of barriers. Information Technology (IT) has provided the technical means/drivers to deliver a wide range of services quickly, conveniently and more efficiently. It has a very wide reach: it is immediate: it is interactive and it is multi-media (Sight, Sound, Photo etc). Deploying Social Media tools like Facebook, Flicker, Youtube, Twitter, Online Discussion Forum, use of external bloggers, Web Portals and Sites will provide integrated, interactive and end- to-end platform that will ensure a common and user friendly interface. However out of the Thirty Six State in Nigeria and Abuja only 27 have online presence and sites that can be said to be functional today.
In a recent survey carried out by Social Media bloggers, it was proven beyond reasonable doubt that youths between (15 – 30 years) are the most active and spends more time using the social media platforms through their smart phones, android, iPAD, Laptops etc than watching regular television stations or listening to the radio. Instructively, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) these age groups constitute well over 50% of the Nigeria population. This same age group happens to be one of the main targets of this Campaign.
Social Media is highly interactive and a very effective means to reach out to the grass-root populace; however, it is very open and very susceptible to being abused. It is therefore imperative to expect followers whose sole aim will be to continue to post irrelevant comments, response and unwarranted insults, just to embarrass Government and officials of Government. Being internet based, it is also susceptible to being hacked onto. (How do we manage this?)
The attendant benefit of using these medium to sustain and drive this campaign therefore brings to fore the problem of security and cyber-attack on these platforms. Cyber-attack are increasing daily and it might not necessarily be fraud related. Some persons might attack your sites or platforms because they do not like the policies you are introducing or the change being advocated might whittle their power or strength. Sites can equally be attacked because perceived enemies want to run people against the government. These portend grave danger. Cases abound where hackers take advantage of loopholes and security breaches to deface entire websites with irrelevant content or deny regular users or followers from accessing such medium.
Website and portal platforms can be reinforced and secured by increasing the levels of security layers on the infrastructure regularly where such sites are hosted. This is however not fool proof against your site being hacked “You are only
0 comments: