Addressing social and economic issues using graphic materials (animation) through social networking sites and youth awareness of those issues

Social media has played a major role in light of the growing social and economic issues in various areas of life, as it is a tool that uses elements to attract followers from all segments of the society, so one of its societal responsibilities is to provide information to form public opinion among Egyptian youth, increase their culture knowledge and urge them to adopt many positive values. Therefore, the communicators were interested in engaging the advantages of modern technology to transfer ideas and opinions related to particular issues to a large number of people, which results in a positive change in some people’s opinion trying to solve the social problems.
This study aims to find how communicators deals with social and economic issues by using graphic materials through social media websites, and determining the role that content plays in those graphic materials, and its impact on youth perception of these issues. The study used "New Media Dependency Theory” as a theoretical framework, and the study used the descriptive methodology, as it relies on description, analysis and interpretation.
The study analyzes some of the content of some Facebook pages that use graphic materials to present social and economic issues, including: «Egyptioon - Warka», the content analysis will cover one month (January 2021).
The field study sample composed of youth aged between 18-25 years; the sample was random and consisted of 100 students from public and private universities who follow these pages, in order to find out the reasons of following these pages, and its role in forming their public opinion.
The study reached many results, the most important of which were:

Youth use social networking sites throughout the day, because social media has become an important part of their daily routine, and also due to the easy usage of these networks and their continuous development, and easy access to them.
Pages that use graphic videos on social media discuss all topics that are interesting to the Egyptian society, whether they are economic, political or social.
These pages concentrate on presenting problems only, and portraying it in a new and simple way; in order to attract the attention of youth and others who follow what is happening in society.
The most important reasons and motives for youth to follow the pages that present graphic videos are that they present important societal issues, the availability and credibility of information presented by these videos, and the fulfillment of youth’s curiosity for new issues through graphic videos, which access them to the latest issues in society.
From the most pages that youth like to follow are “Egyptoon” and “Tahaleb” in comparison to the rest of the pages, because youth prefer to follow pages that expose social and economic issues more than the religious and political issues that are presented by other pages.
The interest of youth in social and economic issues compared to other issues, such as: political, religious and scientific issues, because most of them suffer from many problems and issues that are related to their social and economic lives, which affect their daily lives greatly.
The most common forms of participation and interaction that the youth do while using social media sites towards various issues is liking and commenting, which explains the youth’s sense of freedom and safety when expressing their views on the issues raised through their personal accounts, and this result shows the youth’s desire to share the social topics they care about and their opinions on it through their personal pages.
Youth are greatly affected by watching graphic videos on social networking sites, and they reconsider some of the topics presented by these videos. These videos are a way to freely express different trends and opinions, and more explicitly by directing the message directly or indirectly.