Digital Surveillance in Crisis Reporting and Performance of Media Professionals of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Pakistan

Abstract

Ah! My! My! I lost my data on the phone.
Pooh!-Pooh! There's nothing on my computer.
Ugh!-Ugh! With my password, what's wrong?
Hey, oh no! Somebody's hack my account.
These are the issues that media professionals face in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. The objective of the study was to investigate the level of knowledge of the media staff of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa , Pakistan, regarding digital and internet security. In this research, a quantitative approach was applied. The survey was carried out in three districts of KP, including Peshawar, Charsadda, and Swat, because the region's journalists were more vulnerable than others to attacks. Data was obtained via a simple random sampling process from 469 journalists. The findings showed that 67% of them did not know about digital security, while 60% did not have an understanding of cyber security tools.70 percent of media workers were unaware of the tools used to secure their automated communication systems, such as email, mobile phones and telephones. A clear association between digital security .109 * with a significant value of 0.002 with the output of journalists is shown by the Correlation test values.Providing information security training for media professionals in Pakistan is recommended.