Effectiveness of Social Media in Promoting Human Rights: A Critical Analysis

Promoting human rights is a vital means to ensure their protection and respect. In the 21st century, the word ‘promotion’ by itself is simply associated with the media. With the wide range access to different types of media and with the ever growing interest of the people to keep abreast of the topics of the day, the media has become irreplaceable choice to spread information of any kind. A person’s perception of reality is the result of their beliefs and in the age of information many of the beliefs are the result of the mainstream media. In last few years social media has played important role in the protection of democratic values and human rights. Social media is increasingly helpful to not only monitor emerging human rights emergencies, but also to uncover incorrect information. Crowd sourced expertise from social media can open up new opportunities for human rights organizations. Digital revolution and the emergence of social media that has significant implications for human rights work. Journalists, human rights researchers cannot cover all places at once and may be denied access to a potential human right incidents altogether. The surge in citizen journalism and social media platforms over the last decade has led to the evidence of a torrent of potential human rights violations. The main objective of this paper is to investigate and analyze the role of social media in the promotion of human rights and discuss the importance of a free Internet to the promotion of human rights and freedom of expression.

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