By: Anwar Ibrahim (Blogger-Student Jayabaya)
Social media has been used as a new way for radical groups to spread the seeds of extremist ideology. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs and free messaging service applications such as WhatsApp are now powerful tools for radical groups and even terrorists to do propaganda, gain influence, and capture their membership in social networks (warganet).
In the digital era like now, cyberspace has become a real force that connects solidity and militancy of radical groups to across countries. Its existence offers ease of interaction and organization. Because of this, their appearance on virtual networks helped change the strategy and pattern of terror. Even in the second decade of the 21st century emerged the tendency of radical groups to increase their interaction and propaganda. By utilizing certain pages to spread hate ideas and ideas, radical understanding.
In the current era of information disruption, where things change rapidly, citizens must be equipped with digital literacy skills both in order to fight hoaxes and the spread of radicalism.
Therefore, early on, digital literacy education must be encouraged to build a foundation of character education that is in line with the times. Bearing in mind, their lives will surely always intersect with the all-online digital universe. Digital literacy can be the right tool in an effort to counteract the culture of information consumption instantly which causes many people and citizens to still be caught up in hoax news. Through digital literacy education, the tradition of reading in cyberspace will be built, so that they are able to choose the right information, and build constructive information, rather than ignite anger and hatred that eventually dragged into the flow of radicalism to then act violently.
Then citizens will be accustomed to finding a variety of differences of opinion that he might find from readings read. Thus, an understanding is established that tolerance is beneficial for nurturing knowledge and peace, while intolerance fosters hatred and hostility. This is because warganet is able to construct good and bad things in their minds. This behavior model is of course very much needed to avoid radical ideologies that destroy the peace and tranquility of the NKRI.
For that, let’s use social media for useful interests through the dissemination and posting of positive content content that fosters optimism among the nation’s children.