The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, has told Google and Meta, the owners of social media platforms – Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram – to address the spread of unauthentic and misleading news on their platforms.
This came as the country’s 2023 general elections are fast approaching.
Mohammed made this revelation in Abuja, the nation’s capital on Friday while meeting with the ambassadors of Meta and Google, owners of the YouTube and other
“It is no longer news that the use of social media is now a critical factor in national elections, and no nation, including Nigeria, is immune. With a predominantly youthful population, Nigeria ranks among the countries with the highest number of users of various social media platforms, especially Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.
”The use or misuse of these platforms is therefore of great concern to all stakeholders in the elections, and that’s why we have invited you here, so we can all jointly work to ensure the responsible use of these platforms so that they don’t become the platforms of choice for purveyors of fake news and disinformation,” he said.
“For example, candidates’ campaign speeches are doctored to portray them in a bad light, video clips and pictures of campaign rallies are tampered with to make them look poorly attended; fake or unscientific opinion polls are concocted, while threats of violence in certain parts of the country are exaggerated – all of which are then circulated via social media to a wide audience, with the aim of making their target candidates look bad, influencing public perception or even suppressing votes in certain areas. In other words, there has been a gross abuse of social media platforms to purvey fake news and disinformation ahead of the elections,” he said.
“These actions, if executed, will go a long way in checking the proliferation of fake news and disinformation on social media ahead, during, and after the elections,” he said.
The ambassador of Google who was at the meeting, Dawn Dimowo, said they’re ready to collaborate with concerned stakeholders to effect the credibility of the forthcoming general elections.
She added that social platform Google had trained about 6,000 journalists to widen their understanding and scope of fact-checking platforms such as Dubawa to identify and flag fake news.