The National Assembly has recently revisited the moribund social media bill to address the fall-out of #ENDSARS promoters accused of peddling fake news which they claimed almost destabilised the serenity of Nigeria.
The saga threw up myriads of accusations and counter-accusations by those who witnessed the shooting in Lekki and those defending the government position of no shooting. The government alleged that social media influencers had used the social media platforms to exaggerate the issue to curry global sentiments that streamed in to condemn the military intervention in civil protest.
Similarly, the opaque and treacherous role of security agencies and government in the protests, especially their incoherent statements, portrayed them as villains in this saga.
The government then decided that social media needed to be regulated in the country. Consequently, the social media control bill emerged at the National Assembly. In fairness to the lawmakers, Nigeria has been saturated with fake news and hate speeches through unregulated social media. Hate speeches are often fired aimlessly like poison darts into the space by those who are hell-bent on destabilising Nigeria by all means. These platforms were readily exploited by elements like KANU of the infamous IPOB during the bloody protest in Lagos.
More than ever before, the master-minders of fake news and hate speeches resorted to using social media platforms (especially Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, What Sapp, Viper, etc.) to spread their nefarious, scandalous, and libelous information across the multitude at a speed of light in a raw, unmitigated language. This is easy because, unlike traditional print media with editors and known journalists who midwife and proofread materials before publishing for public consumption, writers in social media are the editors and publishers of their contents and articles simultaneously.
Notably, social media and underground websites active on the Dark Web, have turned everybody into a journalist of a sort. This uncensored invisible web is also being maliciously used by top politicians to churn out negative propaganda here and there, to their advantage.
According to Wikipedia, the phrase “fake news” is a type of yellow journalism and propaganda that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online media’. Most of the messages that stream to our android phones on daily basis are laced and flavored with choleric infection capable of igniting hatred towards innocent fellow countrymen and women. It become apparent that something needs to be done to confront this nasty situation, but certainly not this blind proposition of criminalization of this forum touted by the people in power to conceal their inherent inadequacies.
The introduction of the bill has thrown up pocket of reactions from the glitterati and literati whose lives depend exclusively on social media. These perceptive political observers have interpreted government’s move (to control social media) as a way of gagging, suppressing, and compromising the entire citizens so that they could have a free hand to loot the people’s patrimony.
According to many, social media is not the problem of Nigeria but rather the ruling elites whose position has been threatened by the spontaneous reaction to the youths during the #ENDSARS protest that shook Nigeria to its foundation. People in all strata of life have agreed that fake news must be effectively monitored and controlled through forthright, proactive well-thought-out actions but not by outrighly undermining the efficacy of social media through deliberate emasculation.
Rather than wasting precious time and resources to make a law that is already dead before its enactment, I think energy should be exerted on addressing factors that made Nigerians resort to aggressive use of fake news which culminated to hate speech. An in-depth examination of how the social media influencers manipulated the #ENDSARS protest to reach the psychological ceiling of pervasive hatred for this government should be understudied with a view to proffering acceptable solutions that would curtail similar occurrences in the future.
The youth are angry because the police, especially operatives of the disbanded SARS are unnecessarily empowered to do dirty job that culminated to the series of fatalities to innocent citizens. They are supposed watchmen who need to be watched, however, nobody watches and monitors their nefarious activities that plunge the youths against them.
Aside from this, many wounded politicians and government contractors who lost out in the power equation have allegedly resorted to asymmetrical use of social media to fight their potential enemies in and outside the government circles. Some of them are kings on Twitter and Facebook. Every second they twit like birds about all sort of things that come to their subconscious mind.
The people in government should know that almost everything in this country is crying for attention, not just social media. Of course social media and hate speech are issues that should be proactively managed within the ambit of the existing common law. Government should, however, know that the proscription or censorship of social media is inimical to democratic values which the current rulers pledge to uphold and have benefitted immensely from more than any other group in recent times.
It is ironic that this government that was breed, and exclusively assisted by social media platforms when the outgone government of PDP almost stifles it out of existence should be working to block freedom of speech and expression through this self-serving censorship of social media.
In this 21st century, when other nations are busy exploring space to forge through technological breakthrough, and creating frontiers in robotics science and artificial intelligence (AI) to make life better for their citizens, our leaders should rather be finding proactive ways of exerting in all spheres to make things easy for the citizenry rather than gratifying and exerting their brawn on censorship of social media that is capable of exposing their leadership ineptitude in governance.
Rotimi S. Bello wrote this piece from Abuja via [email protected]