“How to be a Responsible Netizen”

First of all what is a netizen? A netizen is a person who actively uses the internet especially in a proper
and responsible way. By the definition if the word netizen itself, it is already associated with the word
“responsible”. Being a responsible user of the internet, specifically social media, is being aware of the
power you hold. What you share may either influence other people regarding what they think over a
certain topic that you specifically shared. Being information literate, as we tackled in our lesson, is
knowing when and why you need information, where to find it, how to use it, and how to evaluate it to
use for the common good. People should be able to learn how to be careful especially in social media
where scams are all over. Knowing how to assess information is one way to be information literate. By
knowing how to interpret information, you can be a responsible netizen.

Being a responsible netizen is a must, especially when you are surrounded by people who easily absorb
everything in the internet. Some people tend to believe everything they see on the internet, which is a
dangerous and foolish thing to do. In this modern world, our computers and any other gadgets and
websites can easily be hacked by those who know advanced programming. They can easily manipulate
the data in order to confuse you and force you into believing something that is not real and relevant.
That is why it is really important to research multiple websites that are reliable. It is important in
knowing where to get your information.

Next is thinking before clicking. To be a responsible netizen, we must first think about certain things
before we are about to click the “share”. Ask yourselves “what would this piece of information do to
other people?”, “is this information relevant?”, “will this help the target people?” and many more. Like
I’ve said earlier, we live in the modern day technology where data is easily manipulated. That is why it is
our responsibility as users of the internet to be careful in what we share and spread. Let’s face it, we
cannot stop all those false rumors, all those fake news, all those irrelevant data in the digital world,
because someone is always behind those, but we can control it. We can control what spreads
throughout the social media and what spreads into the minds of the people. But it is still important to
keep in mind that even after all those precautions we observed on how to be a responsible netizen,
there is always a piece of article or news that is not entirely true, because we are just the second hard
receiver of the information. We don’t know the truth. The real truth. But what we can do is to always be
careful in what we say, what we post, and what we share in social media. And we should always rely on
a reliable source of information to prevent wrong information transferred to one another.

As a conclusion, being a responsible netizen is bestowed upon us the moment we had our social medias
and we were able to access websites across the internet. It is up to us on how to use the information we
have gathered and what we have seen. We have the power to prevent false information