The Arab public's vision of the ethical and legal challenges on the use of social media, and the mechanisms to confront them:

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Lecturer, Department of Journalism and Electronic Publishing, Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University

Abstract

The current study aims to identify the Arab user's point of view on the ethical and legal challenges resulting from the use of social media, and to shed light on the most important causes of these challenges, and how to address and confront them using a 400 samples of Arabic individuals collected from four Arab countries: Egypt, Saudi Arabia , Tunisia and Syria. In this study, the researcher tried to represent the users of social media in every Arab countries.
The study concluded many results, including the multiplicity of risks arising from the use of social media, whether at the personal, national, or global level, and these include Challenges, information crimes, and crimes of public morals, in addition to the ideological (intellectual) influence on youth, spreading hate speech, threatening national security, and raising the value of the consumption culture. Or solutions to the challenges arising from the use of social media, and that the differences emerged as a result of the different educational and socio-economic levels of the respondents. The results also confirmed that addressing The challenges arising from the use of social media must be achieved through two mechanisms; the first of which is to pay attention to raising the awareness of social media users about the risks that they may face as a result of their use, and the second, by paying attention to the enactment of deterrent and specific laws to regulate publishing in the electronic environment.
 

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