Nigeria to sanitize social media, says Minister

The Minister of Information and Culture, Alh. Lai Mohammed has said that the Federal Government is going to sanitize the social media.

He said the regulation will, however, be in line with global best practices as obtainable in the United Kingdom, Singapore and other jurisdictions.

He said the government has no plans to gag the press or stifle the media as being insinuated.

Mohammed made the clarifications at a briefing a few minutes ago.

He said the government will never allow anarchists to take over the nation’s airwaves and media space.

He said: “Gentlemen, since we launched our reform of the broadcast industry, many Nigerians have reached out to us, demanding that we also look into how to sanitize the Social Media space. “I can assure you that we are also working on how to inject sanity into the Social Media space which, today, is totally out of control

” No responsible government will sit by and allow fake news and hate speech to dominate its media space, because of the capacity of this menace to exploit our national fault lines to set us against each other and trigger a national conflagration.

“That is why we will continue to evolve ways to tackle fake news and hate speech until we banish both.

“Therefore, Gentlemen, we once again seek your support for our efforts to banish fake news and hate speech from our media space.”

The Nation