ESL Narsimhan says Social media doing more harm than good

Governor E.S.L. Narasimhan observed that social media was creating panic and rumor-mongering among people and was doing more harm than any good to the society and people should be cautious while using it.

Addressing a team of officers and faculty members of National Defence College, who called on him at Raj Bhavan on Thursday, as part of their visit to Telangana State under “National Security and Strategic Studies” training program at the National Defence College, New Delhi, the Governor said, “These days, one of the most important threat is cyber warfare or cyber threat which is not new and existed even before”. He said threats come in the shape of disruption, sabotage and subversion and in the olden days it was easy to trace as human element was involved.

He said because of the present day digital world, it has become difficult to find origin of such threats as there is no human intervention and the spread is far and wide. He further said now-a-days, only wars of low intensity will be fought as no country would want to fritter away



their precious human resources. The Governor said the objective was to destabilize, spread wrong information, create lack of confidence and so on. Sometimes, social media was acting irresponsibly aided by digital technology, brainwashing on the media with grey scenes creating an impression of may be true or may be wrong, he added.

The Governor said with e-invitations, e-greetings etc. social media has literally taken away the human touch and human element from the society and said the fine line between truth and untruth is missing and negative- ness in society is more dangerous and social values should be brought back in the society.

The team of officers led by Abhay Tripathi, Additional Secretary & Faculty in-charge of National Defence College, met the Governor at Raj Bhavan on Thursday. The team of 15 officers also consisted of one defence officer each from Australia, Malaysia and Bhutan. Abhay Tripathi thanked the Governor and felicitated him with the presentation of a Memento.