Stakeholders have called on the Nigerian government to ensure media education and value reorientation in order to curb fake news and its spread.
This formed part of a panel discussion at the last day of AFRICAST 2023, with the theme: “Examining Tools to Help Identify and Boot-Out Fake Content in the Digital Age”.
One of the panellists, a veteran Broadcaster, Eugenia Abu believes that one of the major problems affecting the broadcast media standards is commercialization and lack of fact-checking information before use.
“All media institutions should have a fact-checking department.
“Fact-checking is really a business now. There are international fact-checking associations that people can join to fight disinformation. Due to this era of AI where images can be falsified, there are things you can use to check if your photograph is fabricated. You know, they can take your head now and put it in another person’s body and then they begin to tell you that you are the one. It’s called photo manipulation”.
Mrs Abu also pointed out the need for capacity building for best results in broadcasting.
“More than anything else, you need the ownership of the media to understand that capacity building is critical. You cannot hire people off the street who don’t have journalistic skills then you throw them on air to analyze issues they have no in depth knowledge of. The so-called experts used by some media houses have little or no experience in the field they discuss on air.
Some experts have become so famous in going from radio to TV stations without any knowledge, that they are now described as West African experts without any knowledge about West Africa. Also, celebrities need good managers in order not to feed wrong information to the public”. She said.
Another panellist, Mrs. Nneka Moses, the managing director of Goge Africa highlighted the need for more collaborations between regulators and media houses.
“I think we need collaborations at all levels, all media platforms must be accountable for what they publish to their audience. And the National Broadcast Commission has a serious role to play in order to achieve this.
“Just like in telecommunication, when they notice some people’s ugly dealings, they mark those numbers as scammers. So too if there is a particular handle in the social media that is known for disseminating fake news, NBC must find a way to red flag them in other to curb the spread of fake news”. She affirmed.
Africast has witnessed three days of various expos, conferences, brainstorming sessions and high-level networking, with thousands of professionals from different parts of Africa attending the event held in Lagos. Southwest Nigeria.
