Dr Oby Ezekwesili kicks against proposed Social Media Bill

Dr Oby Ekekwesili (Photo-Credit-Bellanaija)

*Advocates rewards for purveyors of factual information

The former Minister of Education in the country, Dr (Mrs) Obiageli Ezekwesili, has kicked against the proposed Social Media Bill, saying it would only repress the people just as she tasked the relevant government institutions to remain alive to their responsibilities as there is an existing law that addresses issues of defamation, libel and the likes.

She also cautioned against government action that may violate Nigeria’s inalienable right to free speech in the guise of fighting fake news and urged the media to perform its education function, teaching the public in the simplest, plain language.

The former World Bank Vice President also advocated the need to consider motivating purveyors of factual information through incentives to discourage the spread of fake news.

Ezekwesili made the call during a webinar jointly organised by the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR) with the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) Knight Fellowship in Nigeria recently.

In her keynote address at the conference themed, “Public Accountability in Stemming Misinformation,” she said aside from the incentives, such a system would also reduce the credibility of those notorious for sharing misinformation.

The initiative is to be developed through collaborations with the public and media. The group would determine the trust points and indicators on how the trust should be measured.

“For every solution, we must consider reducing or ensuring people are accountable for fake news; we need to think of incentive and disincentive-based approach. That is an approach that rewards a record of consistent dissemination of facts, truth,” Ezekwesisli noted.

“That system that makes a person a purveyor of accurate information, especially those with strong followers and are sufficient to influence what others may think or do.”

The system would also deduct trust points if unverified news is disseminated by the newsmakers or social media influencers, she said.

According to her, “the erosion of trust points overtime will signify a red flag anytime news comes from such individual or individuals.”

The former World Bank vice president also identified the need to overwhelm ‘the market of news’ with accurate, evidence-based reporting. The continuous publication of factual information, she said, would overshadow false information.

Earlier, the executive director of The ICIR, Dayo Aiyetan, emphasised the need to hold accountable people who deliberately post fake news.

Citing the example of Femi Fani-Kayode, a former Aviation Minister, whom he said had discouraged people from taking the COVID-19 vaccine through unverifiable assertions that it was meant to depopulate Africa. Still, the same minister recently took the COVID-19 vaccine.

The FactCheckHub, he said, has been deliberate in creating explainer videos, training to make everyone a fact-checker, just as he called for collective responsibilities from the government, civil society organisations, stakeholders and the general public to check the spread of misinformation.

“We need to increasingly look at the responsibility of the ordinary man who becomes the weapon in the misinformation warfare. At the end of today, we hope we will have sensitised the public to combat misinformation.

“It is not the job of the government, civil society and the media alone. Everyone must be involved.”

The executive director/editor-in-chief of Daily Trust newspapers, Naziru Mikail Abubakar, shared similar positions with Aiyetan and Ezekwesili.

He encouraged both the legacy media and digital media to take active participation in combating misinformation. The digital media organisations, he said, have bigger responsibilities to play.

Abubakar advised on the need for journalists’ training, media collaborations, investigative journalism, fact-checking, and self-examination.

Beyond media training initiated by local and international Non-governmental organisations (NGOs), he tasked local media with best practices, stressing the need to set up a dedicated fund for journalists’ capacity building.

Abubakar who advised journalists to get the right modern tools also called for more investigative reporting and encouraged local fact-checking organisations to increase fact-checking efforts rather than republishing verified claims published by international fact-checking organisations.

“Government officials are making false statements. Some of these are false claims that should be fact-checked. If it is difficult to do individually, media organisations should collaborate to make this possible.”

The Executive Director, Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), Idayat Hassan, expressed worry about how fake news could undermine democracy.

She observed that social media is a positive tool that enables the people to influence government policies, give voices to the marginalised, but it requires more attention.

According to the CDD director, the automation in disinformation in Nigeria is huge, with 19.5 percent, and the tools used include Nairaland, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and  Opera News.

Hassan advised using audio, picture, video to spread factual information and recommended local languages’ deployment.

“There is a need to construct an informal structure that would resonate with the people.”

Another panellist at the Zoom meeting was the founder of BudgIT, Seun Onigbinde. He attributed the spread of fake news, especially in the digital media, to the urge to always break the news.

Speaking on Digital Advocacy and Public Enlightenment on Social Media, he described fake news as an extension of malicious reporting.

Explaining how people react to information on social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, WhatsApp, he characterised the distinctiveness as ‘spirit of the medium’, advising tech giants to shut down trolls on their platforms by designing special algorithms that could discourage fake news, spotlight and delegitimize the purveyors.

Below are excerpts of Dr. Ezekwezili’s lecture

Misinformation is false or inaccurate information, especially that which is deliberately intended to misinform. The intent is to deceive, so it’s not a case of oh, it was a mistake.

Disinformation as false information deliberately and often publicly spread by the planting of rumour in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth and as one who has been on the receiving end of some of this kind of behavior, I certainly know what it’s like. People can just get up and cook up a story, and say it with all confident and people will listen to it and just run with it, for different reasons as the case may be.

So, having laid this contest, I then go on to say what is this about the media that should make understand how important their role is in our society. Our constitution which is the 1999 constitution, which really has passed the same verdict and should be deemed so that citizens can lead the process toward a constitution that works and can give us a sustainable and prosperous as well as inclusive nation but while it remains our constitution, I will quote the section in 39(1) which recognizes and guarantees the freedom of expression as s fundamental right. Also, as a country we are signed onto all kinds of international treaties and conventions that really recognize this right of the press as the fundamental right has for the existence of our democracy.

We also know, that within the 1999 constitution, other than the three arms of our democracy, being Executive, Legislature and Judiciary, the only other profession that gets a mention in the constitution, are not Doctors, not Engineers, not Chartered Accountant, but actually the journalists and their profession gets a mention. I think its Section 22 of the 1999 Constitution that places the burden of ensuring that society has access to information and that it plays the necessary role of ensuring that government is held accountable for the responsibility they are expected to discharge. The right and obligation that the media is accorded means that we must do everything to preserve the ethic of the media.

With the advent of the social media, every individual laid claim to be a journalist and that definition of a journalist now being suffered a nebulous, this means that we who know one thing or the other about the danger of this current circumstance must begin to gather together as we are doing today, to determine pathways that can help reduce the idea that rumours, fake news and all kinds of falsehood and things like that would become definition of news media in our society.

The fact is that untrustworthy information has a way of being such a social menace to the society, that is why the society must in every way counter it otherwise the effect can be too damning, the effect can be too long lasting in damages that it behooves the media as well as citizens to ensure that the original intent of the powerful recognition given the media, is not negated because suddenly accountability that supposed to be what the media stand for is considered scandal and sensationalism.

The definition of accountability is for someone who is assigned a responsibility to be measured against the responsibility that he have in order to ascertain whether they were done what they were supposed to do and in the way that they were supposed to do it.  Accountability is when an individual who has to perform a task or to perform an action is seen to have performed it without any form of breach or reproach.

Accountability is something we talk about in relation to what the public space owes the citizens and so we often characterized accountability in democracy as being public accountability. However, beyond public accountability, we have now seen that to the extent that an individual or an entity has any form of public audience in what it does, there is accountability and responsibility that it owes that public.

Accountability is fundamental, every time that people operate in a relationship so that the extent that anyone who owns a part of a public space whether it be on instagram or on twitter or on facebook or any other platform that public has access to, it behooves that individual to be accountable.

We now realize that with this kind of definition of accountability, your topic, “Public Accountability for Dissemination of Disinformation” is one that is appropriate to deal with because we are not simply today discussing about the accountability that government owes the citizens, but we are discussing the accountability that the public owes to the public, that members of the public owe to other members of the public, to not engage in actions that are detrimental and to the good of society.