A Deputy Minister nominee for Information, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, has admonished Ministries, Departments and Agencies to embrace the use of Social Media in their work.
According to him, social media unlike the traditional media, allows agencies to interact with individuals and in return receive real time information and feedback.
“My advice to government, ministries, departments and agencies and key government functionaries, is that we cannot run away from the social media phenomenon, we have to embrace it and get ahead of it so that its ills are cured,” he said, when he appeared before the Appointments Committee of Parliament on Thursday.
He used the opportunity to educate some members of the committee who seemed not to know about the operations and benefits of social media.
Some of them complained that, although they are not on Facebook or Twitter, there are instances where they’ve received messages about scrupulous persons creating fake accounts and sending wrong information to the public.
Oppong-Nkrumah used the opportunity to encourage members of the committee to ensure that their accounts are verified saying that was a sure way of countering supposed fake information from cloned accounts.
“One of the best ways to avoid some of these things happening, is to have a social media account that is verified. This is a process by which technical companies that put up these social media platforms give you an opportunity to directly engage with them and submit your details based on which they would put a specific verification feature on your account. It is usually a blue tick and what it does is that, anybody who goes to that account knows that this is an account that Twitter or Facebook has verified as validly belonging to you. You are also able to report when someone puts up a cloned account,” he added.
Social media according to Wikipedia, are computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks.
Notable among them are WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Intagram, Snapchat among others.
Statistics show that, over 2 billion people use social media on a daily basis worldwide.
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