A Professor of International Relations at the Covenant University, Ogun State, Sheriff Folarin, has decried the influence of social media on the youth, saying the tool is breeding people who are uninformed.
He lamented that many young people had no knowledge of history due to their addiction to the Internet and movies, adding that the narrative must change for a better society.
Folarin spoke on Wednesday while presenting a keynote address at the virtual Covenant International Model United Nations Conference.
He titled the presentation, ‘UN at 75: The Future we want, the UN we need: Reaffirming our collective commitment to multilateralism.’
According to the don, there are certain requirements to realising a peaceful, pandemic-free and prosperous world.
He said they included education, good leadership, building bridges and flattening walls/boundaries, actualization of the Sustainable Development Goals, among others.
Folarin said good education was beyond the ability to read and write.
He explained that everyone needed to have historical knowledge from adolescent age, adding that with this, information such as the one million people killed in the Rwandan genocide and the two million who died in the Sudan’s conflict, would not be strange.
“Aside the foregoing, how many youths do critical reading or research today? Addiction to Netflix, Syfy, YouTube, European leagues and social media fake contents over and above good knowledge is a recipe for disaster.
“The platforms are not bad for social bonding, but are bad when we are addicted to them and rely on them as our sources of knowledge. What we are seeing in the world today is a social media that breeds a new gang of mis-educated individuals who can only contribute chaos to an already chaotic world,” he added. (Punch)
