July 29, a knife attack in the English town of Southport north of Liverpool resulted in the death of three young children.

Following the tragic incident, misinformation spread by a rightist organisation on social media alleging that the suspect was a “Muslim immigrant”, subsequently triggered a string of riots, anti-immigrant protests and head-on clashes with the police across several towns.

Even Elon Musk, the owner of X social media platform, reposted this piece of information unverified.

And this is by no means the first, nor last, such case of misinformation sparking violence and social unrest, and indeed similar incidents have been taking place repetitively all across our planet!

Fake news deepens conflicts and enmity among individuals, religions, and ethnicities, increasingly weakening our existing social order and depriving humans of empathy and inclusiveness.

MCMC announced recently that all social media platforms with over eight million users would have to apply for permits with the government starting from this month.

This decision has unfortunately evoked dissatisfaction and powerful backlash from certain organisations, arguing that it was another government move to suppress freedom of expression.

That said, even a Western country that has been consistently championing freedom of speech now finds itself grappling with the most severe rioting in 13 years, and now calls for stricter control of social media platforms!

British parliament announced last week that social media bosses should not continue to rake in enormous profits without adhering to the same set of legal requirements applied to newspapers and television stations.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the Online Safety Act enacted last year would have to be further empowered to resolve the issues of misinformation and seditious violence.

Meanwhile, Downing Street says it is working with tech companies to prompt speedy deletion of harmful contents, insisting that they must adopt more proactive measures to restrict misleading and seditious contents.

Peoples and nations overwhelmed with superiority complex tend to impose their own criteria and standards on other sovereign countries. They will only feel the pain when their own societies come under real attack.

This shows that double, or even triple or quadruple standards are not only apparent in our society, their existence is squarely dictated by the needs and interests of the powerful!

For media workers like us, while we maintain that safeguarding press and speech freedom is our uncompromising principle, we also understand that all freedoms must come with responsibilities.

For a conventional media organisation like Sin Chew Daily, even though we have carved a place on social media platforms, we will continue to ensure that all the content we are going to publish is devoid of misinformation or element of fraudulence, before we accept any commercial advertisement.

In the meantime, to preserve existing social order and stability in a multicultural society like ours, it is imperative that all media practitioners avert sensitive 3R issues.

There is no reason for social networks which are making immense profits such as Meta, X, TikTok, Google, Instagram or Telegram, to be completely exempted from their responsibilities having allowed themselves to become a source of social decadence and unrest.

It is time for us to learn to put aside our phones and step out of the virtue world into real human-to-human interactions, active community involvement, and nature.

On September 4, 2023, Sin Chew Daily published on its Sunday Headline News section an article titled “Facebook is No 1 hotbed for scammers”, slamming such networks for unthinkingly making good money yet unwilling to bear any social responsibility.

Despite the fact many social media users have fallen prey to online scams, these networks opt to steer clear of any association.

Scammers aside, syndicates involved in organ trafficking, prostitution, narcotics and gambling have also found fertile grounds on these social networks. Worse, these networks have also evolved into major drivers of community hatred and religious extremism, as well as channels for the propagation of fake news, and are still making good profits without having to face the consequences.

No doubt the Internet and sophisticated communication technologies have brought infinite possibilities and opportunities to mankind, but behind such a phenomenal transformation lurks a slew of lethal threats to human societies and the human race.

If we choose to remain unalert of these threats, and continue to give in to the temptations of the virtual world, we are bound to bear the painful cost in the long run.

Be it Meta, X, TikTok Google, Instagram, Telegram, or AI that now sweeps across the planet—these are all money-spinning machines created by man using networking facilities.

Never once has social obligation or morality become a consideration of the creators of these mega platforms; creating immeasurable wealth is their ultimate objective.

In view of the breakneck development in technology, neither the government nor the people are adequately prepared. As a result, we can only watch helplessly the morally depraved digital storm sweep across our planet, and can do nothing about it!

It is often too late by the time the government or anyone has realised the extent of destruction this digital storm has wreaked, as mobile phones have become an inseparable part of human existence now, and networking an indispensable element just like air and water.

Humans have become overly addicted to networking and invariably enslaved by smartphones and Internet.

Parents no longer read newspapers or books, but have their eyes customarily glued to junk videos on their phones.

To fend off disruptions, parents often push the phones or iPads to their kids, but would do little to control what their minors access. This will not help foster parent-child relationship but will have a detrimental effect on the child’s focus.

Through algorithm, social networks deliver contents tailored to the needs of like-minded communities, which invariably brainwash the recipients into believing every bit of it, in a way robbing their intrinsic ability to think logically and independently.

On the contrary, reading a book or newspaper allows the reader to engage in deep thinking in the absence of external intervention.

Rapid development in communication technology has also rendered the future of humanity growingly unpredictable, putting social order in a precarious position. Community unrest could be detonated anytime by merely a piece of fake news.

At the same time, more and more young people are suffering from eye impairment and spinal problems, while the focus of people, young and old alike, is gradually depleting…

No thanks to deepfake technologies, scams are becoming more and more real and terrifying, prompting many to reject calls from strangers, not to mention the ubiquity of cyberbullying. All this points to the fact that our society is veritably on the brink of grave moral depravity and value crisis.

It is time for us to learn to put aside our phones and step out of the virtue world into real human-to-human interactions, active community involvement, and nature.

As parents, we must encourage our children to read books and newspapers, allowing them to feel the power of words through reading, or else we may not even see the light at the end of the tunnel in our hyper-networked world.