Social media in your child's life

This is how Nada Al-Ahdal used social media as a weapon to support her cause against the marriage of minors

Social media is lovely.
WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter… what lovely inventions these are!
I'm actually active on Twitter, and I have thousands of followers.
And my Facebook page is full of photos and comments.
They help me a lot in carrying my cause, which of course you know: the cause of child marriage
Well, what role does social media play in your lives?
(Symptoms of addiction)
I have noticed a lot around me, in the behaviour of teenage boys and girls my age, that many of them are really drowning in the world of social media.
They only talk through WhatsApp. They don't sit together; you feel they have lost the ability to talk and communicate.
Their only hobby is scrolling through Instagram.
And their parents call them addicts.
(Where is the problem?)
I'll start with myself.

I'll say quite frankly that I still love sitting with my friends and talking to them face to face.
And it really bothers me when I'm talking to someone and they don't look me in the eye, only at their phone screen.
And when I'm sad or upset, I don't feel better pouring my heart out on WhatsApp. I'm really happy when someone is beside me listening to me, not from behind a screen.
And I discovered that after a long day on my phone, I feel something very strange: that I am alone, and that nothing I lived through that day was real.
And what do you feel?
(Make a cause for yourselves)
I told you that I use social media for a humanitarian cause. This is a golden opportunity, and I thank God for it.
I also use it to talk about issues that matter to us, as I am doing now, and through another programme on MBC called ”A New Fact”.
But sometimes when I scroll through social media pages, something catches my eye that really upsets me.
It's that social media is full of a lot of superficial things.
Full of mockery, criticism and negativity.
Full of pictures of the dishes we eat, the new abaya we bought, and the latest trends in make-up and fashion.
I thought to myself: why don't we use it to share things that really matter in our lives?
We might think, for example, of sharing useful information, of carrying a particular cause as I do, of beautiful pictures from around the world, of stories of goodness and love.

(Why shouldn't I be active?)
In the world today there are two kinds of people: the doer and the receiver.
I could sit all day on my phone, scrolling through social media, watching, reading and listening to everything on it. That way I would just be a receiver of everything good and ugly on it.
Or I could make it a better place to connect.
I could leave my mark on it.
I could fill it with my experience, my knowledge and the cause I carry.
And the important thing is not to forget that there is a real world I must live in and not cut myself off from.
A world in which I must also be active, through my studies, my ambition and my work.
A very beautiful world, if we put the phone aside and live real moments with our families, our friends and those we love.