Social Media

By Isah Nasidi

A report has it that about three hundred and sixty-one million (361,000,000) videos were uploaded on YouTube in just 30 days, and about 19,200 articles have been published on Google Scholar in the year 2020. Similarly, around 550 million tweets, including terms like “coronavirus,” “COVID-19, or “pandemic”, were recorded in March 2020. These are just a few platforms where information is produced, distributed, and consumed. Imagine the gross total of all the information shared on the entire world of conventional media, new media, and media.

New information technologies fueled the overabundance of information known as the “infodemic,” which is now the new feature of the information flow. Due to technological affordances, a fair percentage of people have the technical know-how to produce authentic and unauthentic information and circulate it without any professional gatekeepers. This makes it difficult for people to differentiate between accurate and inaccurate information, which in the end may cause disinformophobia. However, it is not only about the accuracy but also the safety or health of the information.

For journalists, social media influencers, and the entire audience or users to produce, circulate and consume safe information and avoid information disorder syndrome, media literacy on the ecosystem of information disorder is a must.

Basically, fact-checking organisations use truth metres or scales to categorise information. Depending on the in-house style, information can be divided into four categories based on the dimension of true or false: purely true, largely/partly true, false, largely/partly false, unconfirmed.

True information is not always good. Information can be true yet harmful to society. Information that is true and harmful is labelled as “malinformation”. Such information can be hate-speech, leaks about personal privacy without any justification of public interest, stereotypes, prejudice, and embarrassment. For instance, it is a true representation of identity when you call a Hausa man Aboki or Malam, but the intent and the approach may be harmful.

The largely/partly true information is the most common strategy for information contamination and is very dangerous and challenging to deal with. Here, the root of the information is genuine but diluted with false information, misinterpreted or misrepresented. This is what I call diluted information (dil-information). The intent may be good or bad. For instance, the military has been accused of reducing the number of casualties from their side while increasing the number of casualties from the enemy side. Yes, the Nigerian Army indeed killed some scores of bandits, but the number is not correct.

The false information can be classified as “false,” “transformed false,” or “unknown false. False information happens when both the producer and the consumer know the false status of the information. The majority of the content shared for entertainment purposes is false, and it is treated as such. However, known false content may be shared with another community of consumers that do not know the origin of the information, thus considering it true, which is transformed into true. This is very common in this era of globalisation, where content can be shared easily across the globe.

The unknown false information can be from either the source or the consumer. For instance, a journalist may unknowingly receive false information and share it as true, or he may deliberately fabricate information and share it as true. The former is classified as misinformation while the latter is called disinformation. In both cases, the consumers of the information do not know the false status of the information.

We will continue.

Isah Nasidi is a media consultant and research fellow at PTCIJ.

By Muhammad Abdurrahman

By Habib Sani Galadima

I was one of the persons that took social media (SM) as a joke. I used to think that SM was only for chatting with family and friends. I thought that one could not build a career or improve oneself there except if they belong to a small group of people who obtained certificates and special skills abroad.

I was scrolling down my Facebook timeline on a particular Friday night in 2019 when I got a post by Ibrahyim Elcaleel. He was jokingly talking about LinkedIn. I did not know anything about the platform, so I hurriedly went to check it on Google. I read the information about it until I was convinced to create an account with them.

Honestly, I didn’t take the platform seriously, for I didn’t even put a profile picture, let alone my academic details there. Coincidentally, in the first quarter of 2020, I read three articles, in a row, of late Prof. Ali Muhammad Garba, Mal. Muhsin Ibrahim and Dr Adamu Tilde advising youths to learn skills. One of these articles attempted to convince people to add the skills to their SM profiles.

Before then, I thought that only people who go to the highest level in many aspects of life beautify their profiles. So, doing that by an average translator like me is an exaggeration. In my experience, the only things I know that I could beat my chest to reference are two translation projects from Amnesty International and Al-Qalam University, Katsina State, and a few more from some national companies that need not be mentioned.

Still, I know that I have some writing skills, mainly translation, but I do have not many certificates to create a pretty CV to be read like a journal. Nevertheless, the late Prof. Ali Muhammad Garba said something that rehabilitated my conscience to move forward, thus: “There is the difference – between knowledge and skill. The former says you are aware of it, while the latter says you can do it. Which one do employers seek or value? The former is evidenced by a certificate (of attendance. The latter is evidenced by ability (buried in the anecdotal stories and case examples). Both are valuable, but one (skill) even more so. One addresses the question of “What?”, the other addresses the question of “How?”

Reading those articles by the people mentioned above pushed me to go back to my LinkedIn profile to edit it —adding academic details and some skills that I didn’t think were worthy of review.

Surprisingly, in one year, from the time I edited the profile, I did three projects, two from Northern Nigeria and the other from the southern part of the country. And my profile was reviewed by Writers.Gig, which is a part of success as a friend who works with them said. They review few people among many.

The mighty problem is how we consider ourselves “local”. We learn a skill, but we keep it unpublicised, assuming our friends on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms know it since they know us. Many people keep their heads low in terms of humility, while it is a lack of confidence. Understanding the difference between humility and lack of confidence will help a lot. People have the latter, thinking it is the former. You can humbly show your skills to the world.

Dr Marzuq Abubakar Ungogo says, “As demand for skills increases worldwide, one easy way to lose opportunities is to show that you have no skills. But you actually have so many skills than you think of, mainly coming from your education, unpaid labour, charity or voluntary work. What skills need is packaging and honing. You can start by having a deep reflection on possible skills you have, then present them in the most marketable way possible. There are specific terminologies that you should also use. Once you do that, you also start working on getting better at them. This is not meant to stop. Constantly update!”

Habib Sani Galadima writes from Kano. He can be reached via habibmsani46@gmail.com.

By AF Sesay

The internet’s primary role is to connect the world through an interconnection of devices. After many years of building, testing, deploying and repeating the process, we have reached an epoch wherein we have billions of humans living one click away from one another. What a fantastic feat!

Yet, the journey to a better world is far from what we envisioned. With the rise of Fake News and the acerbic toxicity of views and counter views on the internet, we are yet again at this crucial juncture: What do we do next to better the lot of humanity, and how can the internet help?

While I don’t boast of an answer to any of the two, I dare say the crux of the job is shifting the paradigm from the internet of believers to the internet of thinkers! Something like a ‘thinkernet’, you know!

The internet, while very transformational, paid little attention to re-education, which could have been a core mission. And with the realisation that it could be a veritable tool for making money, things took a worse turn. So we are here now: a world where ad sense determines what truth gets told and what gets suppressed, a world where influencers can share the most foolish things and get a million humans taking actions in the next second, a world where the most erudite are kept at the margins of conversations because the nature of their jobs leaves them with little time to establish and maintain massive followership on social media.

We all know something has to be done, but we are unsure what needs to be done.

One way I have always thought of is to leverage and massively scale technologies that make it easy to reward truth and suppress falsehood on the net. This is difficult, considering the thousand or more-year-old dialectics on what is true and what is false, who is right and who is wrong and blah blah blah.

I wouldn’t really want to go that path because it is likely the deepest rabbit hole humanity has ever dug. So what I will rather ask us to do is to venture on the path of classifying contents consumed on the internet from the least harmful to the most harmful. Harm, in this case, is anything that has the propensity to cause loss of human life, not as compensation for another loss or greater evil.

And this could first be applied to the news that gets shared and the ones that get suppressed. Just the way we decentralised news breaking and sharing through social media, it’s high time we decentralised news verification and suppression of harmful content through a combination of simple technologies like the effective use of spreadsheets and emerging technologies like Blockchain. We have to create means to identify and reward truth whilst suppressing fake news.

Closely related to this is seeing this as a behavioural issue and not completely a tech problem. Therefore, massive design of new materials and Curriculum aimed at rewarding truth and fighting fake news are necessary.

We have got to do this work together—all of us and right now.

AF Sesay is a writer based in Lagos. He can be contacted via amarasesay.amir@gmail.com.

By Nazir Muhammad

Have you ever met someone online with a false identity or been in love with a total stranger, believing he’s real and found out otherwise? That’s a catfish!

As social media (SM) globalised the world, catfishing is scrambling like a bushfire. It happens daily on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and other social media platforms.

The word “catfish” refers to a person who set up an account with a false identity (Name, Photos, Address, Occupation) SM for fraudulent, deceptive and other malicious purposes.

Social media experts explain that catfishing varies in nature, depending on the target goals. Some pretend to be businessmen to rip off people’s money. Others are merely playing around, toying with people’s emotions for fun because they are lonely, bored or mentally sick. Then, of course, there are also sexual offenders, kidnappers, and rapists, among others.

The vast majority of catfish victims are youths and teenagers. Perhaps, their facileness to fall in love with online friends is the reason. For decades, there are bunches of girls and boys blindly dating people old enough to be their fathers or mothers. Consequently, millions of people are trapped in job scams – losing their hard-earned funds. Often, girls get kidnapped, raped or heartbroken the same way.

A report gathered by Reuters on March 22, 2021, reveals that Facebook took down 1.3 billion fake accounts. However, notwithstanding the efforts, catfishing remains incessant. According to a recent online survey conducted by an American website, one out of four women (23 per cent) admitted that they had catfished someone. In contrast, one out of three males (38 per cent) also fessed up similarly. In addition to these reports, another statistic said that about 73% of people online use photos of someone else rather than actual pictures of themselves. No less than 10% of all online dating profiles are scammers. 

Shocked? Alas, it is true and daily business for the culprits -the only way to shield yourself is to be circumspect with online friends.

It is not a one-day job, if not impossible, to get rid of all catfishes online, but you can cover up yourself by getting adequate cyber awareness. However, having eagle eyes to spot the doers will also help. 

Often, a catfish could be easily discerned whilst desperately trying to be too friendly and familiar to their target – denying the face-to-face meeting, or refusing a video call could be a significant clue.

Furthermore, to verify a person’s identity, meet in person or make a video call/Skype; monitor people they interact with online and unrelentingly download his photo and verify it via Google image search to confirm whether it appears somewhere else.

FYI: No matter how close you are with your online bae/fiancee, concede to meet only in the daytime and on busy places or streets. Shun hotels and uncrowded areas for your safety. 

Nazir Muhammad writes from Gombe, Gombe State. He can be reached via nazzhubby@gmail.com.