The Federal Government has approved the creation of ‘Naija Falsehood Buster’, a national hub to fight fake news and misinformation through a Tertiary Education Trust fund (TETfund)-approved research project led by Dr Toyin Segun Onayinka of the Federal University, Oye-Ekiti.
With this approval, Onayinka, a new media specialist and principal investigator, alongside his team, Dr. Jacob Kehinde Opele (FUOYE), Information Management), Dr. Lawrence Bunmi Adewole (FUOYE, Artificial Intelligence), Dr. Chioma Ifeoma Agbasimelo (UNIZIK, Strategic Communication), Dr. Blessing Vou Dakat (UNIJOS, Pragmatics/Discourse), Mrs. Grace Oluwakemi Onipede (junior researcher) will, after rigorous research, develop an AI-driven system and a national database of influential on-air personalities and social media influencers to detect, monitor, and reduce falsehoods that threaten national cohesion.
The TETFund project is part of the 158 research projects proposals approved for the 2024 National Research Fund (NRF).
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The project, which will develop an AI-driven platform, the “Naija Falsehoods Buster” and establish a national hub for tracking and evaluating falsehoods across Nigeria’s digital and broadcast media will be hosted at the Federal University, Oye-Ekiti (FUOYE).
According to Onayinka, who lectures at the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies and currently, the Head of Broadcasting Department, the interdisciplinary project, titled “Modelling AI to Identify Falsehoods: Impact of On-Air Personalities and Social Media Influencers on National Integration,” combines natural language processing, machine-learning and mixed-methods fieldwork to: map how On-Air Personalities (OAPs) and social media influencers contribute to the spread of misinformation and disinformation; create a large annotated dataset for Nigeria; and deploy an accessible Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tool that flags, classifies and visualises falsehoods in real time.