Nigeria EndSARS Protest: False Information Mitigation Hybrid Model

Abstract

False Information can lead to chaos and destruction of lives and properties, as was the case during the EndSARS protests in October 2020. Young people took to social media to campaign for the scrapping of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) and for better governance in the country. Social media, especially Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram were used to garner the support of people to join the protests across the country. The use of social media platforms gave rise to a proliferation of unverified information in the social space. As events unfolded, some reports were confirmed as fake and some were quoted out of context. Different scholars have proffered solutions to mitigating the spread of false information but less attention has been paid to the combined role of the mainstream and social media. This study content analysed available reports of the EndSARS protests that were tagged fake and found out that rumour accounted for the most reported false information type. This implies that the mainstream media scale up their reporting to enable people get more authentic information. This study proposed a hybrid model factoring in the reporting role of the mainstream media as a potential strategy to mitigate false information in the media.