BEFORE he became a poster child for a mishap caused by heckling on the social media, Paul Akinnuoye, an A-grade student, was set to join the workforce as a construction apprentice. The 20-year-old British citizen of Nigerian descent, who hailed from an academic family, had thrown away the opportunity to study Pharmacy at Brighton University after he stabbed Jordan Wright, an autistic teenager, in a row caused by homophobic insult.
In a WhatsApp group called Ice City boyz, Akinnuoye called Wright, 19, a “batty boy” and the deceased retorted: “On your mum’s life I’m straighter than you.” Subsequently, the pair agreed to a fight at a location in southeast London, in April last year.
Akinnuoye, who had a past conviction for carrying a knuckleduster, armed himself with a small knife and stabbed Wright repeatedly. His case was concluded recently at a London court and he was jailed for life with a minimum term of 21 years.
In a related incident, another Nigerian teen, Michael Idehen, made the news two months ago, when he stabbed Kyron Webb, a 15-year-old, to death in a ruckus incited by comments on social media.
Idehen, a rapper, who was jailed on his 18th birthday, had earlier rapped on Youtube about stabbing people. He was captured on CCTV plunging a knife into the victim’s chest in Manchester last year.
During his trial, Idehen claimed Kyron had left derogatory comments on a video he posted on Snapchat and even threatened to stab him. He was sentenced to a minimum of 15 years behind bars for killing Webb.
There is no gainsaying the advent of social media has revolutionalised communication among people. Social media has helped in bridging geographical space and enhancing human relationships. But it’s benefits come with great risk. It has led to gruesome deaths of users otherwise known as digital natives, overseas and in Nigeria.
One of such which Nigerians will not be quick to forget is the death of Cynthia Osokogu, who was murdered six years ago by friends she met on Facebook.
Osokogu, the daughter of an army general, was 24-year-old when she died. She had travelled from Abuja to Lagos to meet the Facebook friends, who invited her on the terms of a business proposal. On arrival in Lagos, she was picked up at the Murtala Muhammad International Airport (MMIA), Ikeja, and lodged at a hotel in Festac.
Cynthia was reportedly drugged and strangled while her assailants made away with her phones, money and other personal belongings. The murder which happened in 2012 was a high-profile case that jolted Nigerians to the dangers inherent in social media.
A necessary evil?
While the internet made the world a small place by its connectivity, the invention of social media, a microcosm of the internet, has made it even smaller. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, to mention a few, have had profound impacts on the society.
Families, friends and entire communities keep in touch with great ease through the platforms and business partnerships are also formed online.
Some have also met the partner of their dreams on social media, as narratives of love stories and meet-ups often flood Facebook and Twitter timelines. However, it’s not always a predetermined case of all that goes well.
In Nigeria and other parts of the globe, social media has also exposed the ugliness in people’s behaviour. Reports has it that teenagers are so emotionally invested in social media that many would log in intermittently, just to ensure that they don’t miss anything.
Paedophiles have also profited by the phenomenon as they set up fake accounts to lure their underage victims. Social media has become a prime tool for human trafficking. The U.S Department of State estimates that between 14,500 and 17,500 people are trafficked annually in the U.S. and 75 per cent of the trafficked victims were at one point sold online and in their teens.
It is now commonplace to see what should be considered private pictures and conversations exposed in public space, to the amusement or chagrin of many. The recent upload of the lesbianism sex video of former Miss Anambra, Chindinma Okeke, for instance, incited the outrage of several social media users in the country.
Many will also remember the controversial Canadian Matharoo sisters, Jyoti and Kiran, who published a popular blog and Instagram page. Both sisters have been known to engage in cyber-bullying of highly placed Nigerians, many of whom have reportedly been blackmailed and extorted.
Nigerian Celebrities, many of whom have maximised the social media space to build their fan bases, have also been caught in one goof or another. Earlier this year, talented singer, Bankole Wellington a.k.a. Banky W, kept social media agog after he mistakenly shared a nude video of his wife, Adesua, during a broadcast to his fans while on honeymoon in South Africa.
Wellington claimed ignorance as the video caught the back view of his wife, who was undressing. Before the singer could press the delete button, the video had gone viral and the deed could not be undone.
Era of fake news and online frauds
Misinformation shared on social media has resulted in violent occurrences, heating up the polity and threatening the country’s stability. When fake news is spread online, it is usually difficult to contain due to the viral nature of social media threads.
Biodun Ladepo, a political analyst and public affairs commentator, is a very active user of Facebook, where he engages with his followers on personal and political issues. Reliving his experience as an active social media user, he said he has had to deal with cases of people lifting his posts without attribution. Sometimes, they quote him sparingly, often out of context, in order to suit their purpose, which is at times political.
“The most catastrophic experience I had was taking news item from someone I trusted, who was a practising journalist, as true, only to find out it was fake news. And I had helped disseminate it. The advantage of faster and wider dissemination that social media has is a disadvantage, when what you are disseminating is false and can lead to death or serious injuries. You lose the filter (gatekeeper) that the traditional media provides, hence all sorts of inappropriate information get out to the public,” he stated.
“The danger now is that even when you are watching a video, you really can’t say for sure if it is representing what it purports to represent! These are just some of the ills. But you will agree with me that they are not peculiar to Nigeria. We just tend to perfect bad things in Nigeria,” said Ladepo.
Rotimi Taiwo, a professor who teaches English and New Media Studies at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State, argued that he is one of the few Nigerians who has managed to escape the fraudulent acts that have become the lot of many social media users.
Taiwo said he has learnt to delay response to social media messages while he waits to confirm their veracity. Reliving a negative social media experience, he said; “I have received a number of emails and text messages meant to manipulate me to do things that might harm me. Some are cases of identity theft, in which someone hacked a friend’s email or stole the phone of a well-known person and tried to use these to extort some money from me. I receive regularly, scam and hoax messages, purportedly sent from banks and other institutions. I have also been called by people I suspect to be fraudsters, trying to sell fraudulent business ideas or impersonate people close to me.
“On one of such occasions, someone called me with the phone number of one of my graduate students, claiming to be that student. He said he had an accident and he needed some money at the scene of the accident. He wanted me to transfer money to him to bail him out. I almost fell for it, but I had a check in my spirit and asked the caller to exercise some patience.
“I, however, decided to wait for another call from the caller. He eventually called and spoke to me in a way the particular student being impersonated would never speak and that confirmed my suspicion. I had to tell him that the game plan did not work. I saw my student a few days later and he told me his phone was stolen and it had been used to extort money from his elder brother and some other people close to him,” he recalled.
For Prof Taiwo, gullibility and greed are factors which make people fall easy prey to online fraudsters. He recalled how his close friend lost more than N200,000 to an online fraudster.
The academic has also been a victim of online trolls. “When people are impolite to me online, I know they could be trolls whose goal is to deceive and provoke emotional response. Such people gain energy when people get angry and insult them, so I simply ignore them rather than fall for their bait,” he said.
According to him, “There are adult trolls who disobey house rules by deliberately making posts that would start off arguments and controversies or ones unrelated to the original post on WhatsApp and other online discussion groups. Such trolls advance in their posts certain religious, social or political ideological positions that have the tendency to polarise the group.
“If I am the administrator of such group, I will issue a warning at the first instance and on any subsequent attempt, such person’s contact is deleted. If I am just a member of the group, I will simply leave when I can no longer bear it.”
There is no gainsaying that both old and young people in Nigeria are growing to become impulsive users of social media, especially WhatsApp and Facebook. Since there is a tendency for all kinds of messages to spread fast,
including the wrong ones, that could trigger social instability. For a country like Nigeria whose unity has become fragile in terms of political, religious and social structures, the influence of social media, if not checked, could spell doom for the county.
Ayodele Olabisi, a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the Department of Sociology, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, explained that social media has widened the scope of human interactions in contemporary times, hence, existing barriers to social intercourse have been obliterated.
“Social media has redefined the idea of friendship in that age, class, educational and religious criteria have become deemphasized. In a way, it is a leveller. With the increasing acceptance and usage of SM, new norms have been created, new idea of privacy has been accepted, and new opportunities for deviant behaviour have emerged.”
Olabisi said that for deviant behaviour, which tends to be rampant on the platform, social media users now have access to wider network where anger can be freely expressed through words or emoji symbols since the actors are often denied opportunity of physical encounters.
“More than ever before, anger, hatred or bullying could now be expressed in advanced or arrears via social media. Users are free to drop or upload appropriate emoji depicting their feelings (love, hatred, approval, anger, etc). The emoji convey real psychological feelings that facial expressions convey in offline interactions because users of SM understand the norms of online interaction,” stated Ayodele.
He, however, added that it cannot be said that social media has done more harm than good because harms have always been inevitable outcome of human interactions.
“We can only say that new opportunities for harms have been created while reducing old sources for users. For instance, users do freely express their annoyance in online interactions but are prevented from such because of physical barrier,” he said.
As society explores its fourth industrial revolution, where technology is expected to make lives better; it’s left to be seen how far the society can go in preserving its values, as trust erodes and people live in dread that the most private details of their lives can end up online.