I come from the war torn country of Syria, and specifically Aleppo, which is by far the most torn city of the country. As grateful as I am to be here in Canada away from the danger, I am constantly worried about my family over there. The thing that bothered me the most is lack of publicity by major media channels like BBC about my city Aleppo, which has been suffering from lack of water, electricity, internet, and medical supplies for years, and most devastating, the amount of innocent civilians getting killed by the bomb shells from both sides, the rebels and the Syrian regime.
I am a true believer of the power of people, and when many people are aware and care about a matter; then escalation becomes much easier and faster. At a point of time in the near past, there were major clashes between rebels and government forces in Aleppo, Syria. The amount of civilians killed during that time was averaging 30 per day, and the only reason I knew about this is because of direct communication with my family over there, and few of my friends on Facebook who posted about the issue. So many people, including myself, were bothered by the lack of publicity on what’s happening, and people, yes people! Started a social media campaign with a hashtag; it was most commonly posted as #Save_Aleppo. It was spreading quickly worldwide until it caught the attention of BBC; which escalated to increase the will of world leaders to meet regarding the issue. Here’s a link from BBC talking about the #Save_Aleppo campaign: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-26956082.
To support this topic, from this site http://www.statista.com/topics/1164/social-networks/ I found out that the number of social network users around the world is 2.22bn. So when I find myself incapable of helping others around the world because of many factors, such as, lack of money, distance, physical, etc.; I would simply just share the stories on social media to help the topic get to the next level of awareness. I used criticize the idea of sharing, hashtagging, and posting on social media about major issues thinking that it won’t go anywhere. Did you think the same?
Algonquin College Social Media Certificate Program 