The Role of Social Media in Daawah 1

Prelude
It is worth stating that professionals from different endeavors have in one way or
the other devoted time to discuss, learn and undergo training on how social media
(SM)2 affect their work, but never had I read, seen or participated in such a forum
where Muslims especially Daawah workers (DW) 3 decide to unravel the good, the
bad and the ugly of this ubiquitous platform.
For inviting me to discuss SM and its roles, I feel the invitation can aptly be
described as timely. How timely the invitation is could be seen when we juxtapose
social media and its potency in the realm of Daawah.
To understand its potency one needs to recall how Radio 4 has taken 38 years before
it reaches the market audience of 50 million people. Juxtapose it with Television,
Internet and iPod who had taken 13, 4 and 3 years respectively and compare it with
Facebook who only took 2 years to penetrate such huge audience.
Contrast it with Twitter5 in which in the recently concluded World cup, a total of 35.6
million tweets were sent during the match that saw the Germans thrash Brazil 7-1 in
less than an hour. During the same match 580, 000 tweets were sent in the space of
one minute when Sami Khedira scored the fifth German goals.
Consider also Qualmans analysis6 in which he opines If Facebook were a country, it
would be the FIRST LARGEST country in the world, BIGGER than China, India. and
USA and the fact that more than two-thirds of the world's Internet population visits
social networking sites at least once a month, and nearly 10 percent of all time
spent online is devoted to social networking (Gewirtz, July).
Based on the foregoing, I find it very unfathomable for Muslim to Sidon look in a
world that is habituated by more than 2.2. Billion 7 virtual users which forms roughly
1 This topic was presented at Sokoto Guest House during NACOMYO Human Capital
Development Program and was later Presented at IIIT monthly discussion circle at
BUK
2 SM will be used throughout to stands for Social Media for want of space
3 DW will also be used in place of Daawah Workers
4 UN Cyber school bus vital statistics
5 Brazils World Cup humiliation smashes social media records
6 Qualmans analysis was paraphrased and updated
7 BI Insider http://goo.gl/Smm9i3

one third of the entire population of earth. For me, taking such stance is akin to
undermining the call of the noble Prophet PBUH of Convey my teachings to the
people even if it were a single sentence (Sunnah.Com, n.d.).
Hence, as timely as this call is, Muslims need to start asking questions like: How
does the ubiquity of SM affect Muslims, and how should Muslim respond to it?
Windows for Understanding SM
Considering the fact that people hardly spot the difference between SM and social
network (SN), the presentation will therefore attempt to give a simple overview of
what SM is all about.
SM is defined as a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological
and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange
of user-generated content (Haenlein, 2009)
To better understand SM, its classification is hereby given below:
It classification comprises; Collaborative projects (Wikipedia, Google Docs), Social
Networking Sites (Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn), Blogs and Microblogs (Wordpress,
Blogger and Twitter). Others include; Content Communities (YouTube, Vimeo,
DailyMotion), Virtual Game Worlds (World of WarCraft) and Virtual Social Worlds
(Second Life) (Haenlein, 2009)
SM Criticisms
Even though SM is value - neutral, a lot of people are hesitant of using it based on
criticism ranging from the privacy incursion, addiction, susceptibility to scamming,
cyber stalking and many other noes. However, in the context of its role in Daawah,
it is desirable to highlight some of its downside and contrast it with its positive side
and determine whether in spite of this glaring criticisms its usage might out weight
its snags.
Privacy Invasion
A well-known internet maxim says If it is on the Internet, it isnt private.
Therefore, privacy concern remains one among top most discussed issue on the
internet. Recent revelation made by whistleblower Edward Snowden 8 on US
surveillance program justified peoples concern. Hear him NSAs PRISM program is
targeting nearly 120,000 internet users and is receiving live notifications when
surveillance target use email and chat. Lending credence to Snowdens revelation

8 5 Intriguing New NSA Revelations From Edward Snowden By Mother Jones

is Glenn9 Greenwalds article on how NSA and FBI surveilling Muslim American
leaders.
Ghitis in her seminal essay to CNN Google Knows too Much About You
highlights that:
Google has every e-mail you ever sent or received on Gmail. It has every
search you ever made, the contents of every chat you ever had over Google
Talk. It holds a record of every telephone conversation you had using Google
Voice, it knows every Google Alert you've set up. It has your Google Calendar
with all content going back as far as you've used it, including everything
you've done every day since then it knows your contact list with all the
information you may have included about yourself and the people you know.
It has your Picasa pictures, your news page configuration, indicating what
topics you're most interested in and so on. She concluded that Facebook
has even more interesting stuff: your pictures, your comments, your likes,
your friends, your un-friends". (Ghitis, 2012)
Cyber Stalking
Apart from the privacy invasion, SM also serves a veritable platform for stalkers to
identify would be victims. Two sad stories abound here.
The first was a story of an innocent lady called Cynthia Osokogu 10 who met her
would be killers on Facebook. When she informed them that she usually comes to
buying good in Lagos, they made an arrangement of her visit while promising to
help her get cheaper prices. When she arrived Lagos, they took her to a hotel in
Festac and offered her a drugged drink which didnt work quickly on her. Later on
they tied her, used cello tape to cover her mouth in their bid to extort money from
her. On discovering that she had no money, they strangled her and abandoned her
in hotel room. It was with the help of CCTV footage that police used in apprehending
her killers.
The second episode has to do with a manager in Shell Development Petroleum
Company (SDPC) and a businessman who were allegedly killed by in Rivers State
fraudsters impersonating as a woman in a dating site called Badoo. The gang leader
narrated how they dwell on Badoo that many Nigerian men visit regularly.
According to him I surf the net and select pictures of black models and
impersonate them by using them as my own so that men will think they are
dealing with a woman. As soon as they see the picture, some send the
message to me I will respond, they will ask for my number and I will give
them. I have a Techno that has a special voice prompt that allows a man to
9 Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On by
www.firstlook.org
10 How we raped, killed Cynthia, suspects in murder of Generals daughter confess
By Premium Times (Ezeamalu, 2012)

sound like a woman. Once I establish contact, I will go to the next step which
is to convince them that I will satisfy their sexual urge. Pretending to be a girl,
I will tell them to meet me at a petrol station on Eleme Road while one of my
boys will go there and meet them as my domestic servant and direct them to
my house. To convince them to come, I will claim that I live in one of the
estates alone and it will be safer to meet there so that they will not be caught
by their wives or girlfriends. While in their cars, my domestic servant will tell
them to drive towards a deserted place where we would lay ambush for
them, dressed in police uniforms. We will stop them and demand to know
what they are doing in such a deserted place. We will overpower them and tie
their hands and legs while we take their valuables including their ATM card.
Two of us will go to the bank and withdraw money through their ATM. If there
are no much money in the account, we will loosen the rope and disappear,
this will enable the person to untie himself and go home (ISIGUZO, 2014)
That is the reason (Gewirtz, July) observed that If a criminal can easily find out
where you are, what stores you frequent, what your daily habits are, who your
friends are, and even what your personal food, entertainment, and beverage
preferences are, you can be targeted with a level of ease never before possible.
Addiction and Distraction
Social media is addictive. So addictive to the extent that the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders consider the possibility of including internet
addiction disorder to the list of genuine afflictions in the most recent publication of
the handbook for psychologists (Beckman, 2014)
In a study conducted by IDC for Facebook, 25 percent of smartphone owners ages
18-44 say they can't recall the last time their smartphone wasn't next to them
(Sperry, 2014).
To understand the level of this addiction, some few instances will be helpful here 11.
To start with, here is the story of a woman who used the WhatsApp messaging
service so much so that she ended up in the hospital for spending an estimated six
hours holding a weighty mobile phone while sending vast quantities of messages.
Her
physician
diagnosed
her
as
suffering
from
the bilateral
extensor pollicislongus tendinitis of the thumb or what they have
nicknamed "WhatsAppitis.
A story of Danny Bowman must also come to mind on how he spent up to 10 hours
each day taking up to 200 photos of himself on his iPhone and tried to kill himself
because he didn't like any of the photos he had taken.
In February 2014, a 24-year-old Indian woman who was confronted by her parents
over her obsession with Facebook responded by hanging herself from a ceiling fan.

11 Instances lifted from 9 Craziest Stories of Social Media Addiction (Murano, 2014)

Another female tourist visiting Australia has put a new spin on taking a long walk off
a short pier. She was so intent on checking Facebook that she plunged straight into
chilly waters of Port Phillip Bay.
Larry Carlat used to be a married editor of a famous men's magazine. Later he
became obsessed with Twitter to the extent that he was given to choose choice: to
delete the account or face termination (in his workplace) in which he chose Twitter
and ultimately lost his job, A month later, he lost his wife after tweeting "I would've
taken a bullet for my wife, but now I'd rather be the one pulling the trigger." He
claims to have reached his lowest point when his son threatened to stop following
him on Twitter. After Tweeting as much as 30 times a day, seven days a week for
over 3 years and amassing over 25,000 followers, Larry decided to commit
Twittercide and left the social platform.
As FBI succinctly captured on its website that Predators, hackers, business
competitors, and foreign state actors troll social networking sites looking for
information or people to target for exploitation because Information gleaned from
social networking sites may be used to design a specific attack that does not come
by way of the social networking site. Examples of such attack include among others;
Click-jacking, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Doxing, Elicitation, Pharming, Phishing,
Phreaking and Spoofing just to mention but a few (FBI Counter Intelligence, n.d.).
SM users are susceptible to manipulation and open to accepting news without
having a second thought to ascertain its veracity. This gullibility is itself a problem
capable of fueling crises. Some few examples suffice here.
In November 2013, some angry Palestinians burnt Angola's flag in a protest amid
reports circulated on SM that the country has banned Islam and destroyed
mosques (Smith, 2013) and in July 2014, another picture went viral on SM alleging
Boko Harams massacre of 375 Christians in Nigeria (Rademeyer, 2014).
The other side of Social Media
Social Media for Good
SM provides platforms for users to leverage for both crowd funding and
crowdsourcing in the field of charity, medicine, research and many other
endeavors.
A story of homeless man Billy Ray Harris who returned $4, 000 (NGN 648, 000. 00)
diamond engagement ring to woman who accidentally put it into his cup went viral
after her fianc share the story and called for public to donate S1000 (NGN 162,
000.00) to him. The public responded positively by donating $191,745 (NGN N31,
584, 236.40) from 8351 donors (Krejci, 2013).
Another inspiring story of the positive side of SM is that of Stephen Sutton, a
teenager who was diagnosed with incurable cancer and decides to set up a
fundraising campaign using Just Giving platform with the view to raise 10, 000.00
( NGN 2, 738, 790. 27) for a teenage cancer trust but quickly broke through that
target. As a result he decides to aim for 1, 000, 000. 00 (NGN 273, 875, 775.00)

but soon his efforts had gone viral and become an internet sensation courtesy of
SM. Even though Sutton is now deceased, donation now for his trust amounted to
4, 325, 090. 69 (NGN 1,189,483,414.00) (Sutton, 2012).
SM as a tool for investigation
Journalist, researchers and crime investigators are now leveraging SM to their
advantage. According to Erie County District Attorney Jack Daneri There is a lot of
positives to law enforcement with SM because We can use it to find someones
whereabouts to keep track of someone, learn who their associates are, and even get
into their mental state by their posts that day. Furthermore, with SM Predictive
analytics, it is possible to see a criminal threat develop, view where the threat may
exist, and allow law enforcement to quickly intercede to prevent a crime from
occurring. With analytics, it is also possible to identify the threat before the
incidents unfolds (Flowers, 2013).
As for the journalist, Mahaney argues that I dont know how you can exist as a
reporter today without having access to multiple social media sites. Every news
operation should have an ear and eye on Twitter during important breaking-news
events. (Krajicek, 20112). Larosa of CBS News states that When a big crime story
happens now, every reporter and producer attacks Facebook for information and
sources. He continued that Its the first thing we do, and everybody does it.
Why? Because Facebook worldwide includes more than 1 billion users searchable by
names, occupations, hometowns, schools and interests. He further elucidates that
Each page is a potential lode of the biographical information that journalists crave.
It also provides links to friends who might serve as secondary sources (Krajicek,
20112).
Altman of Tampa Tribune also says I use social media mostly for three purposes,
first, to reach family and friends of victims and suspects, and to get photos and
gather information. Second, I use TweetDeck and other social media to gather
intelligence and keep on top of trends and subjects. Third, I use social media to
build branding, get my name where it needs to be and build sources (Krajicek,
20112).
SM as a tool for Social Movement and Agitation
Another positive aspect of SM is its ability to provide a platform and rallying point
for people to express their feelings. Arab spring will readily come to mind. A
demonstrator in Tahrir square mentioned that We use Facebook to schedule the
protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world (Howard, 2011).
Other glaring potency of SM can be seen in Kony2012 the YouTube most viral video
of all time (Wasserman, 2012) that attracted over 120 million views in 5 days
highlighting the crime of Joseph Kony, the Central African warlord of Lord Resistance
Army (LRA) who is accused of overseeing the systematic kidnapping of countless
African children, brainwashing the boys into fighting for him, turning the girls into
sex slaves and killing those who dont comply.

The campaign elicited response from UN, EU and AU to the extent that US
designated the LRA a terrorist group after September 11, and in 2008 began
actively supporting the Ugandan military.
Want of space delimited this piece to capture the use of SM in business, SM as a
petition platform and its usage in Dynamic Emergency Environment.
Papal Case Study
In order to drive our case on the role of SM in Daawah, there is the need to beam
our search light and interrogate the rationale behind Pope Benedict decision of
joining SM.
When Vatican announced the popes intention of joining Twitter on December, 2012
SM was agog and an hour after his first tweet, the pope had around 700,000
followers on his English language account and had more than 2000 retweets in
under 2 minutes (Smith-Spark, 2012).
The one million dollar question is how on earth, could a religious leader of pope
standing with more than 1 billion followers engaged in SM?
To answer the question, one needs to find out the first top 10 most followers on SM.
To do that, we chose Twitter as the SM with highest followers. Looking at the first top
10 (Twitter Counter, n.d.), we shall be confronted with Katy Perry, Justin Bieber,
Barack Obama, YouTube, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Rihanna,
Instagram and Justin Timberlake with Kate having 54, 802, 034 followers and
Timberlake 33, 310, 456 followers.
From the foregoing, it is clear that 70% of the top 10 followers on SM are celebrities
(Singers, Songwriters, actors or models) whose tweets lack any flavor in impacting
someones life. While the remaining 20% is that of a Social Media platform (YouTube
and Instagram) and the only negligible 1% (Barack Obama) seems to be that of a
politician.
Prominent people that impacts on people life by either their discoveries, inspiration,
motivation, policies, charities, or books are nowhere to be found in this platform.
Hence, the possible answer to our interrogation is Pope decides to join Twitter based
on his perceived understanding that SM platforms is a veritable tool for effective
outreach evangelism to both his followers and would be followers.
The summary of it could be seen when we undertake a simple addition of the top 3
most followed people on Twitter; Kate Perry, Justin Bieber and Barack Obama one
will see that they have more Twitter followers than the entire population in China
and how on earth could religious leaders afford to relegate themselves out of this
world with over a billion population?
As a pointer to the above, imagine that late Sheikh Jaafar, Sheikh Dahiru Bauchi,
Karibullah Nasiru Kabara, Sheikh Adam Idoko or any other prominent scholar with
million followers write a note on ruling regarding the clash of Arfat and Sallah day

and tweet the link to his followers and inform them that this is the consensus
agreed upon by Sultan, NSCIA, JNI and Ulama Assembly of Nigeria.
DW and the use of SM from International Scene
At the international scene, some DW are faring very well in leveraging SM platforms
to the extent that some of these workers are more prominent to Nigerian youth
better than our home based DW in terms of followership and listenership.
Some of these workers include among others; Mufti Ismail Menk, Dr. Zakir Naik,
Shaykh Khalid Yasin, Dr. Yasir Qadhi and Dr. Abu Ameena Bilal Philips
DW in the Nigerian Cyber Space & the Missing Link
In the Nigerian space, DW are also not left behind. Prominent among them include
Dr. Ahmad Mahmud Gumi, Dr. Mansur Ibrahim Sokoto, Dr. Salisu Shehu, Mal.
Abdulkadir Ismail and Mal. Aminu Ibrahim Daurawa to mention just but a few. The
foregoing representative sample was carefully chosen based on their dynamism,
area of interest and professional calling.
However, based on my sustained interest, interaction as well as careful study of the
SM issues, trends and dimension across the globe, I can simply submit that their
dealing is certainly enthralled with some missing links.
Prominent among these missing links include but not limited to: inability to curate
their Daawah in SM platforms, limited use of multiple platforms, limited user
engagement and limited digital sophistication.
Agenda Setting for Daawah Workers
As Andrew Keen the author of Cult of the Amateur stated Under these rules of
digital Darwinism (the survival of the loudest and most opinionated), the only way
to intellectually prevail is by infinite filibustering (Keen, 2007). DW must
understand the fact that SM offers a veritable platform to rich out to millions of their
followers and non-followers regardless of their region and background across the
globe.
It is based on these, DW needs to understand SM users demography in terms of
age, gender, status, education and sharing habit. This will be relevant when
DW understand the psychology, needs and motives behind the use of SM by people.
Understanding SM sharing habits12 where users are categorized as Peacocks,
Dippers, Changelings, Ghosts, Ultras, Virgins, Lurkers, Ranters, Informers
and Approval- seekers will afford DW to understand who, where, when and how to
channel their Daawah to this type of users. Understanding the who, where, when
and how will therefore give the DW the arsenal to sieve from the foregoing who are
the creators, the critics, the collectors, the joiners, the spectators as well as
12 Paraphrased from What type of sharer are you? Understanding your social media
personality (Lee, 2014)

the in actives and which category from them could be to targeted for mentoring,
networking, collaboration, segmented sharing, recruitment or training to serve as
DW brand ambassadors depending on the users category, potentialities,
sophistication, followership and influence within the SM sphere.
Based on my interaction with SM users across platforms and my experience as
Facebook group administrator of about 5 Groups whose combined membership is
amassing to more than 94, 827 where in my six year studies and acquaintances to
users from different socio-economic cum political background, I can unequivocally
state that failure for the DW to partake in cyber Daawah will certainly pave ways
and space for deviants groups and other social outcasts as well as undesirable
elements to hunt for these innocent SM users.
DW can also leverage SM to improve their capacities in terms of training, targeted
Daawah and international linkages with other Daawah minded workers and groups.
Conclusion
In Conclusion, one can understand that even though SM is potentially dangerous
based on issues related to privacy invasion, addiction, stalking and scamming, the
platform can be regarded as value neutral where its benefits can be leverage to
promote Daawah work and project the image of Islam. But to do that, DW need to
undergo intensive training.

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