Examining the Public Awareness on Digital Ethics for Social Media to Foster Responsible Digital Citizenship in Higher Education Institutions

Social Media platform is a main platform for the individual to share ideas, interact and search information in variety format such as text, audio and video through virtual network. Social media has become a part of the individual’s lifestyle. However, the use of social media can be misused. Cyberbullying, misinformation, social media addiction are negative effect that associated with the social media usage nowadays. For this reason, the digital ethics on social media should be highlighted to minimize the problem. Therefore, this paper purposely to examining the public awareness on digital ethic of social media especially among student in higher education institutions. The quantitative approaches have been adopted to assess the level of awareness of digital ethics in using the social media among student in higher education institutions. The number of samples that participate in this study is 145 respondents among student in higher education institutions in Malaysia. The descriptive analysis will be conducted to examine the understanding and awareness on the ethics to use the social media in their daily life. Findings show that majority of the student in higher education institution aware to use the social media ethically. The findings also reveal that the student strongly agree that the lack of public awareness related to ethics in social media will trigger many social problems in the future. Through this research, the government agency or responsible agency could highlight the appropriate guidelines or codes of ethics for the social media user to use the social media in ethical and appropriate ways.