The Director-General of the National Orientation Agency (NOA), Dr Garba Abari has lamented the spate of disinformation and fake news carried especially by political elites ahead of the 2023 general election.

Dr Abari however, said that the Agency had embarked on training of 37,000 Nigerians on Fact-Checking as a way to tackle fake news and disinformation.

Abari said this at a Course-5 training for participants drawn from government establishments, civil society and the private sector.

This course is designed to build the fact checking techniques of key institutions using web-based applications and research.

“The Fact-Checking training is actually to bring a very large number of Nigerians who are in information management and information dissemination to capacitate them, enhance their competence level in countering the then menace of fake news and disinformation which has actually come to stay with us.

“Most importantly, we are concerned that as we are moving towards the 2023 general election, we will be faced with lots of fake news and disinformation especially coming from the political elites.

“It is very important that we try to avert our minds, and we must find a way of countering this fake news and the only way to do this is to have a very large number of fact-checkers trained across the country.

“In our strategic document 2021 to 2026, we have committed to training about 37,000 fact-checkers and this I think is a very large number”, Abari said.

“As we receive this training, we must be mindful that disinformation, misinformation and fake News, as the name implies, is very often intended to instigate, cause hate, anger and acrimony with the main aim of causing disaffection, division, violence and even war.

“Fake news is outright falsehood; distorted or alternative facts purveyed as authentic news intended to mislead people, cause disaffection, confusion and chaos. Although fake news has been with us over time, the advent of the internet, especially social media, has encouraged its spread like wildfire.

“This is further exacerbated by the use of religious, ethnic and political platforms to promote these negative values.

“Susceptibility to disinformation is usually a product of insufficient analytical thinking, rather than motivated reasoning. In other words, we’re too stuck in automatic System thinking and not enough in analytic System thinking.

“Prevention, not cure, may be a more effective way to combat misinformation and one of the most effective means of prevention is to build people’s capacity to Fact Check”, Dr Abari noted.