False Rumors on Social Media Threaten Northern Morocco’s Tourism Season

"At the beginning of each summer season, rumors related to the tourism sector intensify, ranging from the appearance of sharks attacking vacationers through doctored videos and shared on social media, to the proliferation of pages on Facebook protesting against high prices, through the dissemination of anonymous invoices," condemns the editorialist of Al Akhbar, considering that "the tourist or the customer remains free to accept or leave the premises after consulting the menu and the list of services offered".

The editorialist adds: "We do not encourage intermediaries and speculators, but we ask that control commissions under the prefectures be deployed to fight excessive and unjustified high prices in return for mediocre or ordinary services." According to him, these bad practices harm the image of tourism in the northern cities that welcome many visitors during this period.

"Some pages on social media have even gone so far as to call for a boycott of northern destinations, supporting their maneuver by publishing old images to ’tarnish’ tourism in the region," the editorialist is outraged, stating that these maneuvers would be due to "conflicts between officials and elected officials to the detriment of tourism development in the region," calling on "the competent authorities [...] to intervene" to put an end to these campaigns.

The editorialist recalls that "tourism development and the creation of job opportunities have been at the center of the concerns of King Mohammed VI," stressing that "important royal projects have been realized and [that] infrastructures have been equipped to welcome thousands of visitors and tourists in the northern regions".