Social Media, Religious Extremism and the Developing Minds of Youth: A Cognitive Psychological Perspective

Extremism in general and particularly religious extremism is a common scenario among the societies around the world. Social media is an open platform provided by the today’s complex societies to disseminate information and individual ideas, whereby sentiments are shared and communicated. This study aims to highlight how the platform of social media is used to express religious extremism with reference to the youth. The study is quantitative in nature which is carried out on the students at different universities of Sindh, Pakistan. Findings revealed that Facebook users encounter more extremist views than the ‘X’ (formerly known as Twitter) users. It is also found that the majority of youth believes that religious extremism is not productive for our society. It is also evident from the study that the majority of the youth believes that religious extremism gives birth to terrorism in the country. Moreover, the results reveal that despite knowing these devastating challenges, youth is somehow psychologically affected from the religious extremism due to the usage of social media platforms like Facebook and ‘X’. Findings also demonstrate that Pakistani students perceive that funding is provided by different groups to propagate content based on religious extremism on social media platforms and their supporters promote it by ‘sharing’ and ‘retweeting’ options. They also hold the view that such activities have a malignant influence to represent a positive image of Islam and other religions. Nevertheless, youth from all age groups affirm that they must utilize social media to disseminate their religious views among masses.   Keywords: Social media, Religious Extremism, Propaganda, Facebook, ‘X’ (twitter), Digital platforms, Agenda Setting, Cognitive Impact, Youth.