My name is Rafael, and welcome to my first blog post.
The past few CAS 272 classes have opened my eyes on how information can be spread based on who is targeted and how often the information comes up in their feed. Fake news is becoming more and more prominent now that social media is a popular source of entertainment and news. Today I came across a news story on BBC news regarding Fake news in Nigeria. Apparently a man in the UK was spreading images of young children, men and women being killed in the Gashish district of Plateau State, Nigeria. The source said that Fulani Muslims were killing Christians in their beds and murdering infants as well as saying that “God needs to wipe out the entire generation of killers of this innocent child” in response to an image of a mutilated Nigerian child. These images that were supposedly of the massacre, were actually months old and just recycled to make up this story, but to the locals, it seemed as if they were recent images. This caused an uproar in the neighboring towns and many Nigerians began to take justice into their own hands.
A husband and father by the name of Ali Alhaji Muhammed was pulled from his taxi by dozens of Nigerians and he was murdered and burned. He happened to be a Fulani Muslim and was in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is just one incident of the spreading of fake news.
There is definitely some agenda setting and framing going on here. The man in UK knows that many Nigerians use Facebook as a trustworthy news source and by framing the story to make it seem like every Fulani Muslim were murdering innocent citizens. This news story was shared and spread all throughout Facebook and unfortunately caused many innocent people to be burned and macheted by angry Nigerians. This is only one of many fake news stories circulating within Facebook.
A link to the story is below:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/nigeria_fake_news