Among trending social media images claimed as perpetrators of the August 10 violence is a Nigerian rapper, Oladapo Olaitan Olaonipekun, nicknamed Dagrin. He died twelve years ago. Yet he was recently declared wanted by the Sierra Leone police. How a man who died over a decade ago became a wanted person in Sierra Leone speaks volume of what social media can do and the level of our growing dependency on it as a source of information.
Not only that the August 10 protest was entirely incited through the spread of hate speech and disinformation shared on social media, but that some of the photos and footages shared on social media claimed to be images from the insurrection were fake and misleading.
Despite its positive role in enhancing democracy, it cannot be doubted that the unfiltered use of social media has also made governing societies complex and challenging.
The messaging platform has become a tool for the conception of alternative facts, fake news, hate speech, incitement and a tool for political propaganda. In the words of Richard Gray (2017), it is a world of "bewildering maze of claim and counterclaim, where hoaxes spread with frightening speed on social media and spark angry backlashes from people who take what they read at face value.
Apart from disrupting the traditional trade of the mainstream media, social media is now even use to discredit the mainstream media and to verbally attack professional journalists. Yet, social media, itself is far from being perfect.
US president Donald Trump was notorious in using Twitter to attack reputable mainstream media institutions that put out content critical of him. Often, he would brand such contents as 'fake news.'
The difficulty Sierra Leone now faces is a popular WhatsApp blogger in the name of Adebayor who sits in Europe but continues to spew out hate speech, and verbal attacks on reputable Journalists in the country through his widely listened audio messages scattered on WhatsApp.
During the execution of his self-declared three days strike action, the social media blogger could be heard in one of his audios telling his followers not listen to any radio station as they tell nothing else but lies. And his message went through successfully. Despite counter broadcasting from radios, TVs and newspaper publications, August 10th insurrection went as planned by its actors.
The freedom the platform has given people to share information and interact is now subjected to abuse. This because anyone is at absolute liberty to share his or her unfiltered voice, concoct and share any unverified information that speedily goes viral with a desired effect. In a politically divided society like Sierra Leone, this is actually very challenging.
Below this piece, is an analysis of social media challenges by Dr. Hindolo Tonya Musa, social media specialist and lecturer at the Department of Mass Communication, Fourah Bay College on SLBC, and others who spoke BBC in a feature published in 2017.
Social media is part of the new technology that has come to stay. It has its good sides. It has its bad side, says Dr. Hindolo Tonya Musa.
"The Good side, he said: to accept the outcome of the 2018 election, social media played a significant role in the sense that everybody was following the trend but how the results were coming in to the point that there was only one District remaining, Kailahun. So even before the returning officer announced the result, no sooner the breakdown for Kailahun became available; people had already known the outcome of the election. So throughout the day towards that process as the trend was showing, we engaged mainstream media base on what was coming from the social media to engage the people about the results and the need to accept the outcome of the results so there will be peace.
"The other part of it in times of political conversation, it helps to understand what exactly is happening which also brings about transparency and accountability, but recently there is now what we also call fake news, hate speech, inciteful statements or malicious propaganda that has also flawed social media, especially during the time COVID19 came. Even when we were fighting the pandemic, there were people who were still pushing us backward through the social media disinformation they shared," he says.
Coming to mobilization of strike action, he says, generally, on social media research, there is a case study called the Arab spring. The Arab spring made it more sensitive now for people to see what social media can do in insurgency or what can lead to regime change. It is not Social media that was more or less responsible for the uprising but because the leaders in those countries wanted to stay in those offices forever, the situation was already set. But social media accelerated the process. So from there people had seen the power social media has. In media study, we call it the effect.
"What everybody looks at in Sierra Leone is the content. With content, power lies to the users. The users generate the content but the society suffers or benefit from the effect, and effect engagement is slow or low in the country from what we have been observing," Dr. Musa.
"Content looks at what we call connective action. Where several people connect, do syndicate or dubious acts and it go out. In the area of the faceless protest in Sierra Leone, that is one of the things connective action pins on, unidentified identity. And it is very serious when it comes social media effect. It is the collective action responding to the connective action," he said.
"Before now, Mainstream media was the traditional agenda setter for society but social media has become the new agenda setter. That simply means, instead of social media taking from the mainstream media, mainstream media now take from the social media. Social media don't have a gatekeeper as such it effect is so powerful," Dr. Tonya Musa.
"The major new challenge in reporting news is the new shape of truth," says Kevin Kelly, a technology author and co-founder of Wired magazine. "Truth is no longer dictated by authorities, but is networked by peers. For every fact there is a counterfact. All those counterfacts and facts look identical online, which is confusing to most people."
But the difference today is how we get our information. "The internet has made it possible for many voices to be heard that could not make it through the bottleneck that controlled what would be distributed before," says Paul Resnick, professor of information at the University of Michigan. "Initially, when they saw the prospect of this, many people were excited about this opening up to multiple voices. Now we are seeing some of those voices are saying things we don't like and there is great concern about how we control the dissemination of things that seem to be untrue."
There is great concern about how we control the dissemination of things that seem to be untrue - Paul Resnick, University of Michigan.
We need a new way to decide what is trustworthy. "I think it is going to be not figuring out what to believe but who to believe," says Resnick. "It is going to come down to the reputations of the sources of the information. They don't have to be the ones we had in the past."
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Having a large number of people in a society who are misinformed is absolutely devastating and extremely difficult to cope with - Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol.
Some warn that "fake news" threatens the democratic process itself. "On page one of any political science textbook it will say that democracy relies on people being informed about the issues so they can have a debate and make a decision," says Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol in the UK, who studies the persistence and spread of misinformation. "Having a large number of people in a society who are misinformed and have their own set of facts is absolutely devastating and extremely difficult to cope with."
Working out who to trust and who not to believe has been a facet of human life since our ancestors began living in complex societies. Politics has always bred those who will mislead to get ahead.
For every fact there is a counterfact and all those counterfacts and facts look identical online - Kevin Kelly, co-founder Wired magazine
But such debates are happening less and less. Information spreads around the world in seconds, with the potential to reach billions of people. But it can also be dismissed with a flick of the finger. What we choose to engage with is self-reinforcing and we get shown more of the same. It results in an exaggerated "echo chamber" effect.
People are quicker to assume they are being lied to but less quick to assume people they agree with are lying, which is a dangerous tendency - Will Moy, director of Full Fact.
