EENHANA – Social networks have become a junction where people from all walks of life interact and be whoever they want to be. By updating one’s profile, a married person can become single overnight. An unemployed man can turn into an executive of a company and have photos behind a desk to back it up.
In fact, through social media, a person can be anyone. It is the cheapest method of living double or even multiple lives as one can have more than one Facebook account depending on the kind of personality they wish to portray. The increase of social networks has lured people into delinquent behaviour such as cybersex, Satanism and propagating fabricated information through these social platforms. Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, MySpace and others allow anyone to use pseudo names like prominent people’s names, non-existent names to create pages and platforms where they can communicate anonymously without being traced.
Mostly people are now living double standards lives, where they claim to be rich, famous and ambitious yet on actual fact they are ordinary people and citizens from somewhere in this beautiful planet called the Earth.
Fake profiles
People have been fooled by these fake social network friends as they upload fake profile pictures, photos pretending to be nice and friendly. This social network has come as an advantage to cyber-criminals also known as online perverts as they are taking advantage of ignorant users, to commit crimes. People are becoming victims, particularly the younger generation, as they are in danger of detaching themselves from a world of real experience to a world of imaginations and fantasies.
Amenenge Paulus Ndaitwa (21) is a self confessed WhatsApp addict who spends hours each day chatting with “friends” around the globe, some of them total strangers.
She is a reflection to many people of different age groups that have made social networking a major part of their lifestyles. Teen relationships are now normal exploring it all on those social networks sites by sexting half naked or nude pictures with unknown people who end up abusing them, raping them and dragging them into danger.
At the same time what amazes is that at the end of the relationship those private pictures, messages and videos are posted publicly to bring humiliation and indignity to the ex-lover. Many cases are being reported of people involved on social networks scandals, even married people indulging in double dates.
New Era Youth Corner has on several editions published the pros and cons of Facebook and other social networks to the youths but this seem not be taken seriously, especially here in the Ohangwena Region.
Bob Ndevashiye Kamati, an entrepreneur and founder of B K Media and Printing Company here says people, especially the youths, are now more interconnected in all corners of the world. “Billions of individuals worldwide have resorted to using social networks despite the security scare. Social networks allow us to communicate, even for business purposes and discussions. However, with the high rate of unemployment in the Namibia, people are affected, especially the young generation who are desperate for jobs and better fortunes,” he says
“People are struggling for self-actualisation, so they end up spending a lot of time doing unproductive business on those social networks, such as online dating, which results in getting raped or being abused for rituals,” Kamati emphasises.
Dominic Sikopo, a Graphic Designer and a Journalist at the Caprivi Vision newspaper in the newly named Zambezi Region, says the major problem is the nature of social networks that anyone can set any identity and is untraceable and perpetrators are mostly male. “Actually it’s a game of games with people pretending to be what they are not, and it’s now all about followership people actually crating pages with targeted market. Discipline and self control on social media should be the main advice for the Namibian youths. In fact as the saying goes ‘use it for your benefit but don’t abuse it,’” he advises
Identify Theft
He went on to say many pages are being opened on social networks through identity theft and cybercrime to damage the reputation of individuals, and account thefts. The intriguing part is that people voluntarily associate themselves with this new technology. They accept friend requests from strangers, liking pages they do not know or understand, digging their own graves. However, people should try and ensure that they do not like pages they do not understand and accepting requests from strangers. The growing use of social networks has created the challenge to build trust, confidence, reliability and privacy on them since anyone can engage in misinformation and, worse still, the accounts can be hacked. The gadget is in your hands at the end of the day. You are its master and whatever you decide to do with it depends entirely on you.
By Clemence Tashaya