Tinubu’s govt gives fresh update on plan to regulate social media

MaTaZ ArIsInG
Texas

An official of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) has given fresh update on President Bola Tinubu-led government’s plan to regulate social media use in Nigeria.

Francisca Aiyetan, Director, Broadcast Monitoring of the NBC, said without regulation, young people could be misguided.

“Every country is making efforts to regulate social media, and Nigeria also is making efforts because we know that there are a lot of things to harness from it. But if not regulated, it can also be a platform that will misguide our young people,” she told Trust Radio on Friday.

“The level we are now is discussing with stakeholders so to agree that, yes, we need to regulate social media and at that level, there should be legislation; there should be strengthening of the law to factor in all the things that are new on the broadcasting and content sharing space.

“And then, when you have the power and the enablement by law to do such things, then we can now look at, do we have the way to do it technology wise? Nevertheless, presently what we do is that we engage the platform owners as a regulator, we engage Google or YouTube, TikTok, so we know the faces behind these platforms.

“What we do is that, we escalate whatever we think is threatening, is injurious to our people, we escalate to them that we don’t think it’s right, take it down, and so far so good we’ve been working well. Other countries are doing the same, other countries are doing more,” she said.

The issue of regulating social media has generated interests across platforms since Director-General of the NBC, Balarabe Ilelah, announced that the regulation bill had been sent to the National Assembly.

Ilelah disclosed this when he hosted Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris, at the commission’s headquarters in Abuja earlier in the week.

Describing the ills of social media as a “monster”, Ilelah said the bill is seeking to repeal and reenact the NBC Act, CAP L11 laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004.

The NBC boss lamented that the current law does not give NBC the right to control social media.

MaTaZ ArIsInG

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