FAKE NEWS - THE NEED FOR NIGERIANS TO BE MINDFUL OF THE INFORMATION THEY SPREAD ON SOCIAL MEDIA
July 3, 2021 | News
Before the advent of social media, there was a strong limit to the spread of rumours which were laboriously done mouth to mouth. The market places, schools, business centres, religious grounds and others places of interest were fertile grounds for the dissemination of unfounded claims.
-By Zik Gbemre
FAKE NEWS - THE NEED FOR NIGERIANS TO BE MINDFUL OF THE INFORMATION THEY SPREAD ON SOCIAL MEDIA
There is need for Nigerians to always investigate carefully any news/broadcast they receive online via any social media platforms before they escalate/share same…
Never believe unverified/unascertained news feed… especially in this generation age “where we can no longer tell what is real from what is fake, which is potentially dangerous” for our society…
People should learn the several ways to identify fake and real news received via social media platforms…
Before the advent of social media, there was a strong limit to the spread of rumours which were laboriously done mouth to mouth. The market places, schools, business centres, religious grounds and others places of interest were fertile grounds for the dissemination of unfounded claims. Most malicious news died natural deaths in the course of proliferation as it took maybe too much time to travel. Significant platforms like radios, TVs and newspapers were reserved for consequential issues and most sensational news about public interests that never made it to these platforms were regarded as false to a large extent. News tips that were not verifiable were suppressed by journalists in order not to misinform the society and cause unrest but today, journalism has changed due to advancement in technology, introduction of social media and instant messaging applications. As social media encouraged digital journalism which made information dissemination faster and cheaper, so also did it open grounds for easy manipulation of the media space.
In this 21st century, every individual with a Smartphone connected to the internet is a journalist. Citizen journalism encourages the participation of all citizens in journalistic processes thereby leading to the abuse of ethics as participants are untrained and crude in reporting events of public interests on their page.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo was at it again with his usual bluntness in expressing his thoughts on observed national issues, when he expressed how ridiculous some of these fake news being spread on social media can be. In a short video online, Obasanjo said: “Somebody came to me, very high up in the political space, and asked – This talk about Buhari not being Buhari, do you believe it? He said Well, it is in the social media. And I asked: Buhari will die, and we will not know that Buhari has died? And they‘ll bring somebody from Sudan to be Buhari. It is ridiculous to the extreme. But you have it in the social media. And you have people believing it. Social media is good, but it can be abused and misused…”
It is imperative for every one of us to realize that the growing fake news trend in Nigeria, might not only jeopardize our future electoral processes, undermine individuals’ right to truth, and increase social polarization, but it might also threaten the foundations of the country’s democracy, foster distrust in institutions, exacerbates various social and political religious divides and loss of trust by external parties, hence, the urgent need for people to be very weary and mindful of the kind of news and information they help to spread on social and corporate media. There are countless examples of confusion, half-truths and outright misinformation that abounded and were spread like wildfires via different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, etc. In fact, chaos and misstatement have become the mainstay of public authorities, media organizations, mischief-makers and greedy-bloggers in Nigeria: It is sometimes difficult to separate fact from fiction in the digital, “fake news” age.
There is need for Nigerians to always investigate carefully any news/broadcast they receive online via any social media platforms before they escalate/share same. In cases where one is not sure of such news post, do not even bother to spread/broadcast it until a thorough investigation is carried out to ascertain the authenticity of such news feed on social media.
Most of these malicious WhatsApp messages are believed to be composed by young folks majorly teenagers who follow political events emotionally with no in-depth knowledge of events. I mean the calibre of people who initiate arguments from the knowledge derived from reading headlines of news reports and ignoring the body of the report. Their top consumers are the elderly people from age 50 and above who are not fully accustomed to how the digital media works. Most of the young Nigerians have uncles and aunts constantly and unrepentantly sending unsolicited broadcast messages on WhatsApp which they hardly read. Even some well-educated and well-travelled persons could be swayed by such messages as they usually fell for it. This shows that there are vulnerable users that need protection and guidance to save their minds from pollution by unscrupulous people. A study of those messages has proven that they are not only unhealthy for a fragile country like Nigeria but they are also divisive.
As I advised in my past write-ups on this same issue, there are several ways to identify fake and real news received via social media platforms. Some of these include: Start by first assuming that not all the news on your feed or that you receive are true; Question the ‘source’ – identify where the story emanated from by searching Google, the website of the organization or government body concerned, the website of reputable news media, etc.; Look for confirmation – check to see the said news/story is on mainstream media and if not, it is most likely false; Check the facts about the news/story with third-party sites -the only limitation with this is that, by the time a claim is researched and proven false, it may have already reached millions of accounts; Read More than the headline; Check to see if the website that carries the news/story has an odd/strange domain name; and other measures we can think of.
With these, we hope Nigerians will be guided on how to identify fake/false news so as not to become tools through which such misinformation can be spread to others to create confusion and cause serious problems for Nigerians.
Zik Gbemre.
July 3, 2021
We Mobilize Others To Fight For Individual Causes As If Those Were Our Causes
-By Zik Gbemre
FAKE NEWS - THE NEED FOR NIGERIANS TO BE MINDFUL OF THE INFORMATION THEY SPREAD ON SOCIAL MEDIA
There is need for Nigerians to always investigate carefully any news/broadcast they receive online via any social media platforms before they escalate/share same…
Never believe unverified/unascertained news feed… especially in this generation age “where we can no longer tell what is real from what is fake, which is potentially dangerous” for our society…
People should learn the several ways to identify fake and real news received via social media platforms…
Before the advent of social media, there was a strong limit to the spread of rumours which were laboriously done mouth to mouth. The market places, schools, business centres, religious grounds and others places of interest were fertile grounds for the dissemination of unfounded claims. Most malicious news died natural deaths in the course of proliferation as it took maybe too much time to travel. Significant platforms like radios, TVs and newspapers were reserved for consequential issues and most sensational news about public interests that never made it to these platforms were regarded as false to a large extent. News tips that were not verifiable were suppressed by journalists in order not to misinform the society and cause unrest but today, journalism has changed due to advancement in technology, introduction of social media and instant messaging applications. As social media encouraged digital journalism which made information dissemination faster and cheaper, so also did it open grounds for easy manipulation of the media space.
In this 21st century, every individual with a Smartphone connected to the internet is a journalist. Citizen journalism encourages the participation of all citizens in journalistic processes thereby leading to the abuse of ethics as participants are untrained and crude in reporting events of public interests on their page.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo was at it again with his usual bluntness in expressing his thoughts on observed national issues, when he expressed how ridiculous some of these fake news being spread on social media can be. In a short video online, Obasanjo said: “Somebody came to me, very high up in the political space, and asked – This talk about Buhari not being Buhari, do you believe it? He said Well, it is in the social media. And I asked: Buhari will die, and we will not know that Buhari has died? And they‘ll bring somebody from Sudan to be Buhari. It is ridiculous to the extreme. But you have it in the social media. And you have people believing it. Social media is good, but it can be abused and misused…”
It is imperative for every one of us to realize that the growing fake news trend in Nigeria, might not only jeopardize our future electoral processes, undermine individuals’ right to truth, and increase social polarization, but it might also threaten the foundations of the country’s democracy, foster distrust in institutions, exacerbates various social and political religious divides and loss of trust by external parties, hence, the urgent need for people to be very weary and mindful of the kind of news and information they help to spread on social and corporate media. There are countless examples of confusion, half-truths and outright misinformation that abounded and were spread like wildfires via different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, etc. In fact, chaos and misstatement have become the mainstay of public authorities, media organizations, mischief-makers and greedy-bloggers in Nigeria: It is sometimes difficult to separate fact from fiction in the digital, “fake news” age.
There is need for Nigerians to always investigate carefully any news/broadcast they receive online via any social media platforms before they escalate/share same. In cases where one is not sure of such news post, do not even bother to spread/broadcast it until a thorough investigation is carried out to ascertain the authenticity of such news feed on social media.
Most of these malicious WhatsApp messages are believed to be composed by young folks majorly teenagers who follow political events emotionally with no in-depth knowledge of events. I mean the calibre of people who initiate arguments from the knowledge derived from reading headlines of news reports and ignoring the body of the report. Their top consumers are the elderly people from age 50 and above who are not fully accustomed to how the digital media works. Most of the young Nigerians have uncles and aunts constantly and unrepentantly sending unsolicited broadcast messages on WhatsApp which they hardly read. Even some well-educated and well-travelled persons could be swayed by such messages as they usually fell for it. This shows that there are vulnerable users that need protection and guidance to save their minds from pollution by unscrupulous people. A study of those messages has proven that they are not only unhealthy for a fragile country like Nigeria but they are also divisive.
As I advised in my past write-ups on this same issue, there are several ways to identify fake and real news received via social media platforms. Some of these include: Start by first assuming that not all the news on your feed or that you receive are true; Question the ‘source’ – identify where the story emanated from by searching Google, the website of the organization or government body concerned, the website of reputable news media, etc.; Look for confirmation – check to see the said news/story is on mainstream media and if not, it is most likely false; Check the facts about the news/story with third-party sites -the only limitation with this is that, by the time a claim is researched and proven false, it may have already reached millions of accounts; Read More than the headline; Check to see if the website that carries the news/story has an odd/strange domain name; and other measures we can think of.
With these, we hope Nigerians will be guided on how to identify fake/false news so as not to become tools through which such misinformation can be spread to others to create confusion and cause serious problems for Nigerians.
Zik Gbemre.
July 3, 2021
We Mobilize Others To Fight For Individual Causes As If Those Were Our Causes