Social media banditry

Nigeria has always been a tough country to live in, but the past several months have been particularly tough for Nigerians. News of Boko Haram attacks, abductions and murder of students, travellers and even residents in their homes by bandits, secessionist war drums, and similar manifestations of a near complete breakdown of law and order in the country became commonplace news. On top of all these however, a different kind of banditry was maturing in another corner of the Nigerian universe–on social media—every day, and with much the same consequences as the offline banditry we know, if not worse.

For both personal and professional interests, I have tried to become much more of an active observer on social media lately, particularly Twitter, since well before the #EndSARS protests in October last year. Of course I had been on Facebook and WhatsApp for years before then, and used to be quite politically active on Facebook, but the social media politics of the 2011 and 2015 elections got too toxic for me, and somehow, I managed to reduce not only my participation, but also the amount of time I spent on the platforms.

Still, discussions with my students and others convinced me that, as a politics buff, I was missing something for not being on Twitter, and I reactivated my then dormant account. And so far, until the recent ban on the platform, it has been a humbling, but also troubling experience. As it happens, the period of my reengagement with Twitter coincided with rising banditry across the country, and it was not long before I started to think that political behaviour on the Nigerian corner of Twitter was not much significantly different from the banditry that was the stuff of everyday offline news.

First, offline banditry thrives on the use of physical violence, or threats of it, but usually both, by the bandits against citizens. Banditry on social media, on the other hand, at least as it appears to me, thrives on verbal violence and disinformation. Second, the chief objective of offline banditry is to extract money by creating a climate of fear. This is not much different from social media banditry where the primary objective is misinformation and disinformation for sale.

Third, banditry, as we know it, is organised criminal behaviour led by the bandit-kingpins, even if the organisation is itself often disorganised. Banditry on social media is similarly organised through the online activities of so-called political ‘influencers’ who are often just as unscrupulous and ferocious as the bandits offline, even if the ‘criminal’ aspects of their activities are not as straightforward, perhaps because of a lag in our laws, or a deeply entrenched and irresponsible misunderstanding of free speech in Nigerian politics.

For sure there are slight differences between the two forms. Where offline banditry is, at least as we know so far, perpetrated by largely uneducated Fulani men turned bandits located mostly in the northern states, social media banditry is more of an all-comers affair, but the bandits in this case are principally educated, grammar-blowing men and women drawn from across the country, although geopolitical location is clearly prominent as well. And where offline banditry revolves around physical abductions of mostly students, travelers and other citizens for ransom, social media is rather based on cancel culture and the abduction of political reputations of former and current public office holders or politicians for personal gain.

Examples of all these abound everywhere on Nigerian social media—but particularly on Twitter—if only we look carefully and interpret what we find more critically. Verbal violence, of course, consists of using intemperate, insulting, denigrating and dehumanising language by Nigerians from some parts of the country to describe Nigerians from other parts. While this has been taken to a new, even dangerous, level on social media, it is not exactly new.

Verbal violence has deep roots in our mainstream political journalism where the ‘North’ is politically and culturally associated with ‘animal’, or more frankly, ‘cow’. Indeed, as a student of human political behaviour, I have often wondered whether there is some correlation between the frequency and dominance of physical violence in northern Nigeria and the frequency and dominance of verbal violence in southern Nigeria, since both are means of political expression.

But if verbal violence has deep roots in our political journalism, so too are misinformation and disinformation, the stuff of many newspapers in Nigeria for so long. Anyone who regularly reads Nigerian newspapers in the late 1980s and 1990s, as I did voraciously in my teens, cannot forget such purely armchair journalistic constructions as ‘Kaduna Mafia’, ‘Langtang Mafia’, ‘Northern Hegemony’, ‘Phantom Coups’, and so on, that were passed on to readers as factual representations of Nigeria’s political reality.

Today, misinformation and disinformation appear, in the garb of the age, with hashtags. Perhaps the most obvious, and infamous, example of this is the yet to be determined #Lekki Massacre which trended on social media and was remediated across mainstream media across the world. I watched as the social media influencer, Aisha Yesufu, struggled to define what constitutes ‘massacre’ and ‘genocide’, terms she used repeatedly, or to provide evidence of it when probed for these by a CNN daytime news presenter during the peak of the protests.

In the end, she could only say that some ‘eye witnesses’ told her they had ‘shootings’. Of course, the question was not whether there were ‘shootings’, or even of the unfortunate deaths of some protesters, which stand condemned nonetheless, but of whether there was a massacre or genocide. The Lagos state government has an open hearing ongoing on this, but so far, we have yet to see Nigerians thronging there to report missing family members massacred. That’s what makes it a classic case of disinformation: escalating events in a conflict into very dangerous proportions without facts.

However, where disinformation in the newspapers of old were generally part of Nigeria’s age-old regional politics, and therefore, tolerable at least, todays’ disinformation on social media is more akin to banditry precisely because it could be more about money than politics. Shortly before the ban on Twitter, which I stand resolutely against, and about which we will speak another day, one of the trending topics on the platform was the hashtag #BenueUnderAttack.

But while #BenueUnderAttack was gathering storm on Twitter, with tens of thousands of tweets, retweets, and simultaneously by most of the leading Nigerian influencers on the platform, my checks on the websites of several leading newspapers did not find reports of any new attacks in Benue that day. The only report I found was on Premium Times, but it was about how the hashtag #BenueUnderAttack was trending on Twitter, rather than reports of new attacks that day. In other words, the hashtag was drumming up events that had happened several days previously.

Again, this is how disinformation works: to recast past events happening right now, especially, if it is disinformation for sale, as could well be the case, given what we know about such influencers being paid money to promote certain topics, rather than for political or human rights purposes. So how does a government in an emerging democracy deal with this new form of banditry?