Of web gag and abusers

If it was being gingerly explored hitherto, now it is frontal: Nigeria is headed for a tightening of the social media space. Information and Culture Minister Lai Mohammed says the online world is unhinged and poses a grave danger to the survival of this country; hence it will be reined in and policed.  

“What goes on the social media is so ridiculous and we will contain it,” he told journalists last week while reporting on reforms being rolled out in the broadcast industry. “I can assure you we are also working on how to inject sanity into the social media space, which today is totally out of control,” he said.

The minister’s beef is with the generic ills of ‘fake news’ and ‘hate speech,’ which really are global menaces being combated by many countries. He allayed fears that the government was seeking to muzzle the media or stifle free speech, insisting however: “We cannot allow fake news and hate speech to become free speech because these Siamese twins of evil are capable of inflicting untold damage on our democracy and are threatening our national unity. They represent a clear and imminent danger to our survival as a nation.”

No one should be ambushed by the minister’s disclosure of this resolve of government, as President Muhammadu Buhari only last month foretold the policy. In his Independence Day address, he said the administration’s attention was increasingly drawn to cybercrimes and technology abuse by way of hate speech and other divisive stuff trafficked on social media.

“Whilst we uphold the constitutional rights of our people to freedom of expression and association, where the purported exercise of these rights infringes on the rights of other citizens or threatens to undermine our national security, we will take firm and decisive action. In this regard, I reiterate my call for all to exercise restraint, tolerance and mutual respect in airing their grievances and frustrations,” the president had said.

In real effect, all the minister did was amplifying this thinking last week when he said: “No responsible government will sit by and allow fake news and hate speech to dominate its media space, because of the capacity of this menace to exploit our national fault lines to set us against each other and trigger a national conflagration.”

Short of giving details on how the social media would come on the leash, Mohammed hinted that the procedure would take largely from the stiffer rules for the broadcast sector. For instance, he said government had approved proposals for an amendment of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) Act as would enable the regulator to license web television and radio, just like conventional stations. He also made the point that the planned regulation of the social media would align with international best practices.

Objectors to proposed control of the social media space have always waved the red flag on account of the potential for government to thereby curtail free speech. One of the arguments is that the social media offer many citizens the means of airing their minds on national discourses as they are never afforded on conventional media channels, hence the importance of this free-for-all sector to democratic culture and preservation of the fundamental right of free expression.

Others have argued that regulating the social media could be a façade for government angling to crack down on dissent and efforts by citizens to hold it accountable. In this regard, criticisms of government will end up being readily labelled ‘fake news’ and ‘hate speech’ qualifying to be taken down and its authors punished. This is more so as there are laws in the country’s statute books with which to prosecute illicit conducts like libel, defamation and incitement, among others.

‘The real challenge for the Buhari administration (in) policing the social media space…is (that) it cannot be self-adjudicating in determining what is ‘fake news’ and ‘hate speech’

Experience suggests such fear isn’t altogether unfounded. Of conventional and citizen journalists who in recent years have had brushes with the law, most came under the hammer on account of their needling derby online with powers that be. As we speak, Agba Jalingo is the jailman’s guest for his fierce criticisms of Cross River State Governor Ben Ayade. Omoyele Sowore is awaiting his day in court for treasonable felony trial after calling a phantom revolution against the Muhammadu Buhari presidency. Aku Obidinma, a broadcaster and one-time aide of former Imo State Deputy Governor Eze Madumere, was arrested late in 2016 over a Facebook post criticising the state government; he was released in January 2017 after 60 days in detention. Also in 2016, a blogger, Abubakar Sidiq Usman, was arrested by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for a critical post about Acting Chairman Ibrahim Magu. Austin Okai, a blogger from Kogi State, was nabbed in April 2017 for alleging that Governor Yahaya Bello inflated contracts as would enable him to procure vehicles for traditional rulers and his commissioners. We could go on ad infinitum.

Worse is that beyond individual critics, government control of the social media could be too short a stop from circumscribing the civic space. This also isn’t without precedent, although mostly offshore. Besides a number of countries that routinely suspend the web during crunch events like elections to curtail the transparency benchmark, Cameroon shut down the Internet in 2018 for 240 days in its Anglophone areas, just so to emasculate agitators for regional freedom.

Even with those potential downsides, however, hardly anyone would credibly deny there have been dangerous excesses by some (ab)users of the social media space warranting society’s protection from harmful content. In our peculiar instance, “hate debate is adding fuel to some low-intensity fires and, if left unchecked, could consume all of us,” says the Information minister at a recent parley with online media publishers. And he is right. Among many others, there have been graphic social media posts purporting to show inter-ethnic or communal killings, which proved upon fact checking to be a hoax. In the thick of the recent xenophobic killings in South Africa and reprisal attacks against the country’s interests in Nigeria, there was the viral video of a building belching flames that was purported to be the Nigerian mission torched by South Africans. Subsequent reports showed the building was a factory that was much earlier on gutted by fire in Bangladesh or some other Asian country.

Truth really is that there is no country in the world where the social media is not regulated. Most of the giant platforms have their founders hailing from the United States, with its longstanding culture of near-absolute freedom of speech. But even there, there is a strong tack of self-regulation by the platforms. Provisions of the First Amendment are so fundamental to the American life that Twitter once acclaimed itself ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party’ and rebuffed demands by Congress to prevent access to terrorists. It has since buckled to societal pressure and blocked terrorists with their allies from using its platform.

Germany, with its NetzDG law, has the strongest national legislative model in Europe for holding service platforms to strict account in the event of their users purveying harmful materials. And while the European Union is yet working out a collective framework, Australia and New Zealand have rushed in legislations mandating the social platforms to preemptively block or take down graphic contents in real time following the massacre early this year of some 50 persons at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, by a gunman believed to be an Australian white nationalist, who shared a manifesto online before live-streaming part of the mass shootings on Facebook.

The real challenge for the Buhari administration is not the propriety or otherwise of policing the social media space. It is rather that the procedure must extensively consult with the civil society, and it cannot be self-adjudicating in determining what is ‘fake news’ and ‘hate speech.’