- By: Muskan Taqi
Weapon accessibility refers to how easily individuals can obtain and use weapons. It likes availability and ease of acquiring. But today’s weapons are not physical tools like guns and bombs; they can also be things like misinformation, social media manipulation, data breaches and privacy violations, AI-powered propaganda, cyber attacks, and hacking.
Modern warfare is a high-tech battleground in which social media is an unexpected and powerful weapon .If we look into the game of digital networking, now Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have become spaces of battle. As a result, they are effectively able to spread fear, manipulation, misinformation, hate, or influence to people.
For example, people share their personal lives on social platforms and become victims of bullying because social media has become a weapon. Everyone is using it, but they don’t know the right way. In Pakistan, a recent incident happened with a former actor, Hania Amir, where she was facing negative consequences of AI-generated video she shared in her Instagram story where she talked about AI being scary and there were no policies for such things. Social media has a decisive impact in shaping the Gen Z generation, who are growing up now.
Think about the designers of these platforms who design them as additives. If we look at these platforms, they are also not secure; they faced another weapon in front of them, which is cyber-attacks and hacking. Cyber war was the hacking of networks that affected individuals, society, business, and government. so that leads to crime and causes more crime.
By addressing the problems of weapon accessibility in digital time, we can reduce the harm and promote a safe space. But if we want to solve these problems, then don’t expect and blame any designer or government. So we should address these issues by ourselves.
Through digital literacy, awareness. We should educate individuals about the risks associated with digital weapons and promote responsible online behavior, access control, and authentication. Design strict access control and allow limited access to digital weapons. Content regulation plans help to prevent the inapplicable and violent content.
Community engagement and reporting to prevent and block questionable and destructive online behavior. Implement plans like information sharing with organizations and governments to analyze the global threat of digital weapons. develop security protocols to prevent hacking and unauthorized access, such as cyber-attack tools.
Today’s weapons accessibility is destroying nations, countries, and generations that ease availability, spreading fear manipulation, misinformation, and hate, and influencing people to forget differentiation between right and wrong. Because they don’t know the right way. But we can’t expect and blame the developer and government for these inappropriate actions. Yeah, somewhere they are responsible. They should make strict policies regarding these problems, like AI deep fakes video have no policies. But there are the protocols that we can follow to address these issues: digital literacy, awareness, reporting, promoting responsible online behavior, strict access control, and violation monitoring. These actions may help to prevent inapplicable behavior and these weapons accessibility.(Our world is at the crossroad; we have a choice, right and wrong.