Nigeria’s minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has said that social media have to be regulated, “for it not to destroy the country.”
Lai Mohammed at House Committee on Information, National Orientation, Ethics and Values, said the government isn’t planning to shut down social media space in the country.
However, he said that there is need to regulate and check fakes news and misinformation because it will destroy the country.
According to PUNCH, he said;
“The biggest challenge facing Nigeria today is fake news and misinformation. Based on that, we dedicated an entire National Council on Information’s meeting to that issue, after which we launched a national campaign against fake news in July 2018.
“We said, then, that the next war will be fought without a shot being fired, but with the use of fake news. We didn’t stop there. We went on a tour of all media houses to solicit their support in the fight against fake news. We launched the campaign to regulate social media, which was bitterly contested by the stakeholders. We kept saying that if we don’t regulate social media, it will destroy us.”
