The New Normal?

Driving against the traffic on the 10lane Airport Road in Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja is now the new normal. The Road Safety Corps has accepted it. So has the police. If you are new in the city, you could be killed or end up killing one of the daredevil road abusers who drive with their full lights on in a brazen display of impunity.

In days gone by, rules of human engagement (including traffic rules) were sacrosanct. There were things we just couldn’t do. Now, it’s “to your tents, O Citizen”. We have become a law unto ourselves. What is worse, we have accepted aberrant behaviour as the new normal.

It was the great educator, Tai Solarin, who warned us not to shrug in the face of aberrant behaviour lest we get used to negative things and shrug our way out of civilisation. I wonder what the famous headmaster would have said now that a new social media scourge, worse than driving against one-way traffic, has taken Nigeria by storm. Its name: Fake News — the art of passing off total fabrication as gospel truth, complete with convincing graphics.

Last week, some of our worst elements sent round fake invitation cards to a purported presidential wedding which existed only in their minds. They gave the date, time and even accompanied some of their posts with photographs and video clips. For quite a while, the social media has been used to fight dirty wars but this latest one takes the cake.

We can disagree about many things. It is our right so to do. But to intentionally fabricate something which impinges on the privacy, life and integrity of other people is simply wrong and cannot be rationalised whichever way one looks at it. As a people, we have to understand that fake news or ‘alternative facts’ as one US ‘politrician’ famously put it, is not funny. Indeed, it often leads to tragedy. I don’t want to be a victim before speaking out.

I concede that there are many positive things to be said for the social media. They are indispensable in today’s world in virtually every area of human endeavour. They enhance the capacity of the traditional media to educate, inform, entertain and carry out surveillance to warn society about harmful developments. Social media has helped make life easier for a lot of people. A smart phone is now at once post office, a fax machine, a calendar, a camera, an alarm clock, a meeting venue, a chat room, a bank, a photo album, a library, a music player, a video player, a television set, a calculator, a personal assistant and more.

It can be a great force for good or for evil. However, the new media boasts millions of apps that enable anyone interested to virtually turn night into day, bending reality to suit his whims and caprices. Sometimes it is hilarious, at other times it is anything but funny. There are so many apps and platforms that enable anyone to say whatever he/she wants without any gatekeeper. We are in the era of the citizen journalist. The problem, however, is that there are usually no checks and balances. Facts are mangled, fables are presented as real events and opinion passed off as gospel truth all in a bid to influence a predetermined reaction from the target audience.

Within the last two years, many prominent Nigerians have been the target of social media abuse. At a point in time the favourite victim of the faceless criminals who invent statements and attribute such fake statements to famous personages, was Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. Because the cowards propagating the crime were faceless and nameless and of no social worth themselves, they borrow the names and integrity of their victims to do damage. The Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, the respected Cardinal Onaiyekan had to issue a press release last year when they stole his name and high office for fake attribution.

One can no longer take news items at their face value. Photographs and videos have to be subjected to forensic scrutiny to ensure that they have not been photoshopped, grafted or There.

If we were still in an era where news travelled relatively slowly — where we waited till the next day to get the full gist of what happened yesterday, where every news item had gone through the crucible of vetting and subediting, where Op-Ed articles were subjected to the added scrutiny of the legal department to ensure that there was no risk of libel or defamation — the danger we are currently faced with would have been minimal.

There are no borders in this newfound media toy. Gory pictures that would never have made the pages of traditional newspapers or television are now happily shared round to deaden our capacity to be horrified. The result is that many of us are now unshockable. That’s the new normal.

To fully grasp the danger posed by the new media, we must take full cognisance of their awesome reach. The world has never seen anything like this before:

If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world. (Source: Socialnomics)

YouTube has more than a billion unique users per month which equates to nearly half of all internet users. (Source: IACP)

With over 1.5 billion monthly active users, WhatsApp is the most popular mobile messenger app worldwide.

Each minute, 150,000 messages are sent on Facebook. (Source: IACP)

Users send out 58 million tweets per day, with 9,100 happening every second. (Source: Search Engine Journal)

We must tame this modern monster before it swallows us.

One can no longer take news items at their face value. Photographs and videos have to be subjected to forensic scrutiny to ensure that they have not been photoshopped, grafted or There