₦airaland Forum

Enemyofpeace:
Mtcheeeeeeeeeeeeew!

I slept at my girlfriend's place and in the morning she didn't give me money for transport I don't understand🤔..

A reverse image search revealed that the men were nomadic Fulani whose children Mr Shettima had enrolled in western schools in 2017 and not Boko Haram members.

A month later, influencers promoted a claim without evidence that Labour Party presidential candidate Peter Obi was linked to, and following orders from, the Indigenous People of Biafra (Ipob) - a separatist movement designated in Nigeria as a terror group. His party denies this.

Those who shared this information included Reno Omokri - special assistant to former opposition President Goodluck Jonathan - who has more than two million followers on Twitter.

When approached for a comment, Reno Omokri said he stands by his accusations, but insists he has not been paid by the main opposition People's Democratic Party (PDP) to campaign on their behalf.

Meanwhile, false claims that the PDP presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, fell ill and was rushed out of the country have been shared several times on Twitter.

Godiya, the politician we interviewed, says political parties tell influencers to elicit as much emotion as they can with their paid posts.

"We use images that may not even be relevant to the story we are trying to spin. We can take pictures from East Africa in the 1990s in warzones and attach them to a tweet about how my ethnic group is being killed. When people get emotional they retweet, they like, and it gets traction," she says.

According to the whistle-blowers, the hired influencers are sometimes given an idea that they should frame in their own words. At other times, they are given the actual tweets that need to be published at specific times.

They say influencers are paid based on the number of followers they have. They also say payment happens mostly in cash to avoid a paper trail.

Moral compass
It is not illegal for political parties to hire social media influencers in Nigeria, but spreading disinformation on social media is a breach of the country's laws and Twitter's policy.

The BBC has asked Nigeria's main political parties, APC, PDP, and the Labour Party, about the whistle-blowers' allegations. They did not reply to our request for comment.

False messages tend to spill offline - travelling from Twitter to news programmes, becoming real conversations on the streets of Nigeria
In response to our findings, Twitter has taken down some of the accounts we reported to them and said it had a responsibility to protect electoral conversations from interference, manipulation, and false information.

However, there are concerns about the platform's capacity to tackle misinformation in Africa after Elon Musk's takeover of the company, when its continental headquarters in Ghana was closed and nearly all its staff fired.

The BBC has reached out to Twitter again after these changes, but received no response.

Idayat Hassan, director at the Centre for Democracy and Development, says the activities of these influencers amounted to "political interference".

"It is undermining trust in democracy, undermining trust in the electoral system, and it is instigating conflict," she says.

But politician Godiya sees it a different way, and defends the tactic: "It is a game. Somebody had to win, and God help me, I will not be on the losing side."