The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has claimed that Twitter was responsible for the loss of Hillary Clinton in the United States presidential election.
During an appearance on Tuesday before the House of Representatives Committees on Communication, Justice, Information and Culture, and National Security and Intelligence, Mohammed said fake news shared on Twitter influenced the outcome of the election.
He said: “It is only recently that governments all over the world started realising that ‘wait a minute, these people are doing business. They are not licenced either here or anywhere in the world?’ And they said ‘no, this must stop. And you are causing a lot of trouble.’
“It was said that Hillary Clinton lost the last election because of social media. It was fake news. The first fake news was that she was suffering from very bad health. The second was that she had ties with the terrorists, I think the third fake news was that the Pope did not support her or that the Pope supported Trump. These were all fake news.
“So the issue of fake news is not today and the struggle to regulate social media is not today.”
Speaking further, Mohammed said most countries are formulating policies to regulate the operations of social media, adding that social media platforms are profit-making ventures that must be duly registered.
Mohammed said the NBC and NCC will continue to monitor the operations of social media platforms in the country, adding that they must all register to do business in Nigeria.
“I know that both the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) and Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) monitor, on a daily basis, not just these platforms but the entire broadcasting environment. But the thing about social media is that it caught the entire world by storm,” he said.
“As we speak today, UK, EU are all struggling to come by with laws to regulate social media; Australia, Singapore, same.
“The thing about social media is that when they came, they were neither communication nor information. They were operating under the radar.”
This article was originally published on Nigeria News