The 7th Kano social influencers conference

This week, I was in Kano attending the 7th social influencers summit. As I have said before, I am a fan of the annual event and I have attended all of them since it started in 2019. It is a great rendezvous to catch up with the latest in the trilateral intersections between technology, media and social change. The digital revolution has fundamentally transformed how individuals across the globe interact, communicate, and conduct various aspects of their daily lives.

Among the most impactful development in this revolution is the rise of social media, which has redefined social norms, behaviour, and interactions, especially, but not only, among the youth.

Social media platforms have transformed the ways in which ideas, trends, and behaviour are propagated. At the heart of these shifts are individuals often termed “social influencers” – people who, through content creation and networked presence, affect what others see, think, or do. While earlier theories of influence focused on mass media and celebrity endorsement, the rise of peer-to-peer networks and algorithmic recommendation systems has made influencer roles more diffuse, accessible, and powerful. 

The theme this year is preparing citizens and deploying artificial intelligence (AI) and innovation for accountable governance. Concerns discussed include the nature, risks and possible outcomes of the AI revolution, what Nigeria should do to engage AI, deploying AI for accountable governance, the development of digital rights and transformation of the global order. Our reality has been radically transformed explained Shina Badru of Technology Times. The ancient Nigeria of 2001 when one organisation called NITEL, had a monopoly of all the 750,000 fixed telephone lines and the joke of 30,000 wireless lines to the revolution today of 197 million GSM lines and generalised internet access that continues to expand, becoming faster and more intrusive on our daily lives. It has changed the nature of mass communications as well as inter-personal communications but it has also transformed modes of production. Remaining part of this dynamics and ensuring it is mobilised for our advantage has become an existential imperative. The ancient world of 2001 Nigeria is not going to return. But what does Nigeria, and indeed most of the world controls.

The leading technology and AI companies in the world are American and their leaders run the digital revolution and emerging AI industry. They are Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Meta (Facebook) and Amazon. Working with a few AI developers like OpenAI and Anthropic, they control big data at the world level and know almost everything about all of us including our political views, lifestyle, family and location at all times. They have accelerated inequality at the world level creating massive wealth in a few hands on one hand and misery, hunger, declining incomes on the other.

Even Europe today finds itself in turmoil  as protests rock the streets as citizens suffer consequences of marginalisation of vast populations by a few individuals like Elon Musk who is armed with the ideology that empathy has been the strategic blunder of Western civilization which must be eliminated to enable them control the world for their benefits. As they accumulate trillions, these individuals have become mad and do not even realise their families cannot spend the money they are accumulating in the next one million years. The tech trillionaires have become the new definition of insanity.

The genocide in Gaza has enabled us to see how they work with the American war machine using AI to wipe out entire families and neighbourhoods who have a different political opinion. The world might be saved by the fact that China is also rapidly developing its capabilities in industry and in digital technology and AI and medium powers are beginning to organise their self-defence through  BRICS and other regional organisations.

Nigeria is missing the boat and as the rest of the world works on protecting its data, Nigeria is signing treaties handing out our own data to the United States. That is a key challenge for us today.

Our approach to this terrifying world must be clear says Surrayya Al-Amin, the spoken word artist. Let’s start with stopping our tendency of tearing our country Nigeria at the seams and let’s sew and heal the divides.

The second poet to perform, Halima Abubakar called on Nigerians to learn to speak for the voiceless and build a narrative that could galvanise us to use AI to build a new world in which all citizens benefit from the output of development. It begins by ensuring all women and children have access to education. Building on this advice, Dr Usman Bugaje recalled our rich trajectory as African we should build up. The first three universities in the world – University of al-Qurawuyyin in Fez Morocco (859, AD), Al-Azhar in Ciro Egypt, (970, AD) and the University of Sankore in Timbuktu (970, AD). All three were engaged in teaching a broad curriculum that included theology, mathematics, medicine and the sciences and all of them were founded by women or in honour of a woman.

These were the principles on which the host university for the event, Khairun University in Kano was established. The VC of the University, informed participants that inclusiveness is one of the most important principles they stand for and 55 per cent of their students are offered scholarships by the proprietor so that no one is left behind.

The allure of social media lies in its ability to connect users across vast distances, offering a virtual space where they can share experiences, ideas, and content in real-time.

For Nigerian youth, this connectivity provides a vital link to both local and global communities, enabling them to participate in a shared cultural dialogue that transcends geographical boundaries. Unfortunately, however, the social media has created a world that is increasingly shaped by the influence of fake news and hate speech.

Indeed, fake news and hate speech are becoming the markers of our time determining electoral outcomes in addition to social and political dynamics in the contemporary world. They matter because they are narratives that are designed to confuse and disinform, to cause pain, to hurt people and to push communities to incite one another to kill and maim.

The main effect of fake news and hate speech is that they make objective facts less influential in shaping public opinion. They trend and determine “news flows” because they have been designed to focus on appeals to personal belief, prejudice and emotion.

Hate speech and fake news have existed for a long time but over the past decade their scale and banalisation have increased significantly and become insidious in our society. This is because of the complete transformation that has occurred in the technology and use of the social media. Mass communications have historically been structured and controlled through regulatory controls of the organisations that operate them. Strong penal, political and financial sanctions, including the threat and practice of the closure of organs provide for a strong control regime that could impose order and minimum quality in the mass media.

In some instances, authoritarian regimes used their power to impose propaganda narratives and hateful speech on media organs and in such cases the structure of control was even stronger. The contemporary situation has been transformed considerably. 

We live in a post truth world that is fuelled significantly by algorithms run by tech companies and social influencers help them create agency. It is a multi-trillion-dollar industry of mass surveillance, misinformation and the spread of false and targeted propaganda that was producing vast profits for the tech companies. In this new world, the main interlocutor in communication becomes a small screen on a hand-held electronic device and the target of communications are social media friends most of whom are not known to the communicator.

Gradually, people became deeply engaged with people they do not know and specific forms of narratives emerge on the basis of aggregation around specific ideas and values. In the process, the values of truthfulness and respect were replaced by the numbers you can reach and the impact you can have on people and in the process producing “the triumph of the visceral over the rational, the deceptively simple over the honestly complex”. Understanding complex processes was no longer important, positions are taken on the basis of belief and opinion and interactions with social media “friends” are used to validate the position. 

The agency for social influencing is governed by algorithms which are complex systems designed by platforms to personalise the user experience and maximise engagement. They determine which content users see in their feeds, in what order, and what recommendations they receive.

These algorithms are sets of rules and calculations used by platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok to determine what content shows up in your feed. This system can create “echo chambers,” limiting exposure to different perspectives. As AI develops, and the social media grows, the great challenge of our age is seeking to benefit from its advantages and avoiding its risks and dangers.