Fake news is capable of threatening our existence as a nation and we all have a duty to fight it head-on. I was just setting up my gadgets for the day’s business on Monday, October 22, 2018, when a colleague hit me up on the office Slack channel.“How true is this?” she wrote.“How true is what?”“You guys did not write about this Lai Mohammed/Israel thing?”“What did Lai Mohammed say again?” I wrote back, wondering what I had missed on the drive to work. “That Nigeria is going to invade Israel. He’s trending at Number 2 on Twitter right now!”, she added.She was right. News of Nigeria’s Information Minister Lai Mohammed threatening that Nigeria was going to make Israel pay for taking in fugitive separatist, Nnamdi Kanu, complete with quotes and all, was among the top trending topics on Twitter Nigeria on a busy Monday morning. I would tell my colleague not to touch the story and made sure no one on the news desk touched the story until we got some kind of confirmation from Abuja.Two phone calls later to Mohammed’s office in Abuja and we were proven right. He never made the remarks attributed to him. One mischievous individual with an internet connection and a weather beaten smartphone, who sat in a dingy apartment probably in suburban Lagos, had cooked up a story, unleashed it on the internet and watched as faux activists analyzed and pontificated a figment of his own imagination. It was pure madness. Welcome to the sad era of fake news!“I was in London when I heard the story about Nnamdi Kanu surfacing in Israel. I was not in a position to make any statement. But before I knew it, within a few hours, I saw my picture with a story saying that I had actually given Israel ultimatum to return Nnamdi Kanu otherwise, we will send them missiles.“I just laughed. It speaks to what we are talking about fake news because it is probably the biggest threat in the run-up to the elections”, Mohammed said.For once, you just have to agree with Mohammed. The rate at which fake news is being churned out by Nigerians with some online following these days, is alarming. Two days after Mohammed was said to have said something he never said, the fake news industry in Nigeria declared former President Ernest Shonekan dead. It was a lie as well. Go through your social media feeds daily and fake news stares you in the face. It’s almost as though peddling and passing on lies as facts has become the new normal. The cold truth is that it will get even worse as Nigeria prepares to hold a general election in February 2019, with propagandists and partisans handed miserable amounts of money to churn out lies just to diminish an opponent. Fake news is a global phenomenon these days. The United States is still reeling from the effect of fake news and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was grilled by US lawmakers earlier in the year for allowing his platform to be seized by fake news merchants during the 2016 US elections that threw up Donald Trump as President.We all have a duty to fight fake news by calling the merchants out online and shaming them for all it’s worth. Fake news can burn down an entire nation, result in a diplomatic row and lead to sectarian violence. Those who use the internet have a duty to behave responsibly. We can’t afford to have it any other way.
