Dubai: With youth increasingly using new and social media as news sources, they become their own fact-checkers, a university student speaking during the Arab Media Forum (AMF), said.
"When I'm listening to BBC or CNN, we know there's a teams that are fact-checking and double-checking... but the one issue with social media is that I should be aware now that responsibility has fallen on me - I should be fact-checking," Hind Mustafa, Mohammad Bin Rashid School of Communications student, American University of Dubai, told Gulf News on the sidelines of the AMF on Wednesday.
"You have to double-check your facts by yourself," she said.
Hind made the comments on the last day of the AMF, after a workshop session examining the role of youth in creating new media platforms.
Amina Rehimi, a student of Applied Communications, Dubai Women's College, Higher College of Technology, said during the session that traditional media vehicles will have to adapt their formats if they are to engage the young audience.
Hind specified, terming news agencies "old media".
"First of all it takes too long to get to what you want to know," she said of "old media".
"Second of all because of the way of delivery... Sometimes they beat around the bush so much, to a point where I'd rather read two lines on Twitter and I understand the whole article," she said.
The workshop also looked at the role of youth in driving political uprisings in the Arab world.
According to the Dubai School of Government's first Social Media report released earlier this year, Facebook usage in Tunisia spiked by eight per cent in 15 days in January.
"Social networks present news content generated by the user, and often this is the popular sentiment. These platforms allow for expression and give contributors the chance to stand their ground," said Nasser Al Naidy, Faculty of Communication, University of Sharjah.
"It is an even playing field, unlike traditional media and its online offshoots, where news reportage often comes from a political bias," he said.
The workshop assessed how this new media trend has created a new perception of Arab youth, changing past views that it is a generation enamoured with Western consumerism indifferent to social issues.
