Nigeria protests: disinformation circulating online

The protests began earlier this month in Nigeria calling on the authorities to abolish a controversial police unit called the Special Anti-Theft Squad (Sars).

The story has started to be a trend worldwide, with thousands of posts on social networks, but not all of them are factual.

We have analyzed some of the misinformation that has spread online.

A striking image of a woman named Ugwu Blessing Ugochukwu crying while holding a folded Nigerian flag and sitting on top of a statue has been widely shared on Twitter.

The image is real and had joined the protests in southeastern Nigeria. But as the image was shared, people started adding misleading information.

“Not a brother … 3 … on the same day … murdered and thrown into a well,” read a widely circulated response to one of the publications with the image, alleging that he had lost family members at the hands of the policeman.

When we contacted a spokesperson for Ms. Ugochukwu named Gideon Obianime, he told us that this was not true.

She said that Ms. Ugochukwu herself was briefly detained by Sars forces in 2018, but although she has siblings, none of them had been killed by Sars forces.

“I think people started adding assumptions to the photo. She has received a lot of criticism [over this]”Obianime told the BBC.

Carrying the national flag will not protect you from the army.

This unproven claim has gone viral: A soldier cannot shoot someone holding the Nigerian flag.

It has been widely shared on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, with some suggesting that there is an unwritten military code to that effect.

The claim appears to have originated from a screenshot of a conversation, in which someone says that his father, a retired army officer, told him this.

Someone responds by saying: “I think this is a military code … You should republish it for the protesters to see.”

However, there is no evidence of this, and some accounts have deleted their posts after other online users pointed out that it was misleading.

Onyekachi Umah, a lawyer in Nigeria, told the BBC that there are laws on respecting the national flag, but added: “Just because someone is holding the flag does not mean that [the army] cannot act. “

We have asked the military to find out if the practice is not to target any protesters holding the flag, but they have yet to respond.

However, a Nigerian journalist told us that they had asked a former senior official about this, and had been told that there was no such practice.

A few days after the protests, a video was posted online showing one of President Muhammadu Buhari’s advisers, Femi Adesina, apparently referring to them as simply “child’s play”.

Many interpreted this to mean that the president’s adviser was dismissing the protests.

Along with the video was a message: “If you are not angry enough, I hope this video helps you.”

But the video is old and has been edited out of context.

It relates to a different set of protests held two months ago and has nothing to do with the Sars issue.

At the time, Adesina had been on a local television station talking about those protests. But the video posted on Twitter has been edited to remove the introduction, which would have given proper context.

The television channel in question, Channels TV, has now issued a clarification on the video.

And Adesina himself has issued a statement, thanking the station for the clarification and saying that the misleading video led to his phone being “bombarded … with curses, expletives and messages from the abyss of hell.”

And now, an example of something that was branded false has happened, although it is not clear exactly who was involved.

A video showing looting and violence at a shopping center in southwestern Nigeria’s Osun state over the weekend became the subject of accusations and counter-charges over links to protests against police brutality.

The short video was posted by a Twitter account belonging to the All Progressives Congress UK, a group allied with Nigeria’s ruling party, alleging that protesters linked to the anti-Sars movement were looting.

But some online users supporting the protests against Sars were quick to dismiss the video.

They said it was not related to the Sars protests, but to retaliatory attacks last year against companies associated with South Africa after Nigerians were targeted in South Africa.

Others claimed the video was staged.

From the video, some stores can be clearly identified at the location and we found that they match the photos posted on the Osun Mall website.

The BBC spoke to one of the store’s owners and someone who witnessed the attack, who confirmed that it took place.

In addition, this shopping center only opened in December of last year, a few months after the xenophobic attacks, which rules out that the video is from then.

We have contacted the state police to try to find out who was involved in the incident, but have not yet received a response.

A tweet that has been retweeted thousands of times falsely claimed that Catholic bishops had marched in support of the protests.

The tweet included a photo that showed the bishops among a procession of people, most dressed in black and some with banners.

A reverse image search shows that it is March, when the Nigerian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CBCN) led a protest in Abuja against the murders and kidnappings in the country.

The body that groups together Catholic bishops in Nigeria has issued a statement supporting the Sars protests, but they have not physically joined any protests.

Additional reporting by Linnete Bahati of BBC Monitoring and Yemisi Adegoke of BBC Africa

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