Prophetic framework as a guideline for social media use during the pandemic

The spread of COVID-19 throughout communities around the world has now caused drastic shifts in the dynamics of how the whole world operates. These changes undeniably cause major issues in various aspects of our lives including social communication. As face-to-face communications had been minimized and restricted, people largely depend on social media to access the latest news, information and communicate with family, friends, and the community. However, it is apparent that the surge of social media use during the pandemic also witnessed over-sharing and the widespread of inaccurate news and information that leads to community divergence and huge societal arguments in the community. Thus, it is highly imperative for the Muslim community to reflect and revisit the guidelines of ethical social media use based on Islamic perspectives. Amongst the most ideal references in dealing with these issues are the Hadiths as it records various aspects of the Prophet's life as a guidance including those relating to ethics of social communication and the widespread sharing of news and information. There are various works relating to ethics on social media usage. However, research which tackles these specific issues by referring to the Hadiths are still inadequate. Therefore, this study aims to construct a framework on how to use social media ethically by extracting information from related Hadiths. The data and information will mainly be collected through library research revolving around authentic accounts from selected books of Hadiths and accounts from both the Prophetصلى الله عليه وسلم himself as well as his companions. A practical and feasible framework will then be constructed suited to the needs of the current situation after thorough analysis of the collected Hadiths