Somewhere between a forwarded WhatsApp message and a viral TikTok video, the truth often becomes the first casualty. In Nigeria, where data is relatively cheap and rumors move with the speed of lightning, young people wake up every day to a flood of content that does not come with a warning label. Some of it is harmless gossip; some of it is dangerous nonsense. A health claim that could cause panic, a manipulated video that could trigger violence, a screenshot of a fabricated tweet that could influence an election—these are not rare events anymore. They are the new normal of a hyperconnected society. It was in this atmosphere that Naija Collective, a Nigerian organization committed to social change and civic empowerment, gathered young people at the University of Lagos for a media literacy training session that felt less like a workshop and more like a survival class for the digital age. The room was filled with students from various disciplines, media-savvy content creators, journalists, and curious minds who knew they were being manipulated online but did not always know how to fight back. There was laughter, argument, recognition, and more than a few moments of uncomfortable realization. The goal was not simply to warn young people that misinformation exists; it was to teach them how to think like investigators in their own news feeds, how to pause before they share, and how to refuse to be used as tools of digital deception. The event centered on Digital, Media and Information Literacy, a framework designed to give people the mental reflexes to question, verify, and understand the media environment instead of being swallowed by it.
Abdulkerimu Oare, a media communications trainer and one of the facilitators, captured the challenge perfectly when he told the participants that the world now moves faster than it ever did, and in that speed, people consume more information than they can process. He warned that not everyone who shares information does so with good intentions. Some people share to manipulate, some to profit, some to destabilize, and some simply to watch the chaos unfold. “We now live in a world where information moves faster than it ever moved and we continue to consume so much information and content on a daily basis,” Oare said. “The problem, however, is that information shared by anyone could come with different motives or intentions.” This was not an abstract warning. In everyday practice, it means that a deliberately false breaking news story can go viral before the real story even gets a chance to load. It means that a video filmed in one country, in one year, can be recaptioned to make it look like it happened in Lagos last week. It means that an old quote can be put into the mouth of a politician, and thousands of people will accept it because it appeared with a convincing picture. Oare explained that the training was designed to help young people recognize that not all information is clean and clear, and that every piece of content performs some kind of function. He asked the participants to think about what role a particular message was playing: Was it meant to inform? To anger? To entertain? To make a person distrust a certain group? To make an election seem rigged before it happened? The session was highly interactive, and the participants responded with real energy. They shared stories of being fooled, of seeing fake news spread through family group chats, of nearly sharing false information before a last-minute check saved them. Oare described the response as very interesting and praised the participants for being so active, adding that Naija Collective would be looking at other frameworks and continuing the conversation beyond that single session.
The training went deep into the mechanics of how misinformation and disinformation spread through the modern media ecosystem. Participants were shown that false information does not always arrive as an obvious lie. More often, it arrives as a half truth, a fully fabricated quote, an image stolen from an old event, or a sensational headline that provokes an emotional response before a single fact is checked. The session explored how algorithms reward outrage, how social media platforms amplify content that triggers anger and division, and how people who intend to destabilize a community can use fake accounts and coordinated campaigns to make a rumor trend nationwide. It also exposed the uncomfortable truth that ordinary people are not just victims of misinformation; they are sometimes its willing or unwitting distributors. Many people share things because they trust the friend who sent them, or because the story confirms what they already wanted to believe, or because they feel an emotional need to warn others. But the training stressed that good intentions do not stop a lie from spreading. A message that says “please share with your loved ones” might be delivering panic, not protection. A post that says “the government is hiding this from you” might be using suspicion as a weapon. Oare told the young audience that the whole point of the training was to help them look beneath the surface, identify the true purpose of the content they were consuming, and become less easy to manipulate. By encouraging them to ask who created the information, who was paying for it, and what could be gained by making people believe it, the workshop turned media consumption from a passive activity into an active inquiry.
One of the coordinators of the training, Nosike Nwigene, a strategic communications expert, made sure the lessons were tied to something very concrete: the coming electoral season in Nigeria. He reminded participants that elections are not won only with ballots and rallies; they are also won with narratives, hashtags, and carefully placed rumors. In the months before an election, the online space often becomes a battlefield where political actors deploy misinformation to confuse voters, smear opponents, and inflame tensions. Nwigene warned that young people, who are the most active users of social media, are also the most targeted. They are the ones seeing the videos, retweeting the accusations, and sharing the animated graphics that attack one candidate or favour another. But they are not the only ones sharing; behind many viral trends are coordinated networks of bots, anonymous accounts, and political influencers whose job is to shape the way people vote. “Young people are very energetic and enthusiastic,” Nwigene said. “I love the audience and it shows they are really learning.” He stressed that the programme was about what young people should look out for during elections, particularly the issues of misinformation and disinformation. He said that many people simply do not know how to respond to online manipulation strategies that are used to heat up the polity during elections, and that building resilience toward those tactics must become a national priority. For Nwigene, resilience did not mean becoming cynical or isolating oneself from the internet. It meant developing the habits of mind that make a person harder to deceive, harder to be used as a pawn, and more capable of telling the difference between real journalism and political propaganda.
Perhaps the most powerful part of the conversation came when Nwigene gave the participants practical questions to carry with them whenever they encounter information that makes their pulse quicken. He urged them to take time and think before believing or sharing information, even when it seems urgent. He told them to ask questions like: “Why don’t I see a source? Why does this affect me? Who stands to benefit if I believe this? What is missing from this story? Why was this image chosen? Why does this post want me to feel angry?” These questions, he explained, are the first line of defense against manipulation. He told the young people to take a step back, listen, double-check, and fact-check. In an age when algorithms are designed to keep people scrolling and sharing without thinking, the simple act of pausing is revolutionary. Nwigene’s guidance was practical rather than theoretical. If a story has no clear source, it has no source—be suspicious. If a claim is designed to make you feel hate or fear, it is probably using your emotion as fuel. If an image seems too dramatic, search for it; it might be old, altered, or taken from a different context. If a message urges you to share immediately before you “miss out” or before it gets “deleted,” recognize that as a manipulation tactic. The goal of disinformation is never to inform. It is to provoke, to polarize, and to make people act against their own best interests. The training encouraged young Nigerians to build a personal routine of verification—wait an hour, check another outlet, search the claim, find the original context—before hitting the share button. That small pause, practiced over and over, could be enough to slow the spread of harmful lies and protect not only the individual but the entire society.
By the time the session came to an end, something had shifted in the room. The participants had learned that media literacy is not just about protecting themselves from false information; it is about protecting their communities, their democracy, and their future. They left with a new awareness that they are not powerless victims of hidden manipulators. They are, in fact, powerful gatekeepers, because every time they refuse to share a lie, they stop it from reaching hundreds of other people. The Naija Collective training at the University of Lagos was a small but essential step toward a more informed Nigerian public, and the organization made it clear that this was only the beginning. More frameworks, more sessions, and more conversations are coming. In a country where young people have often been used as tools of political violence, voter suppression, and online chaos, this kind of education is genuinely transformative. It gives young Nigerians permission to think before they act, to question authority and influence, and to hold the information ecosystem to a higher standard. The fight against misinformation is not an easy one, and it will not be won with a single workshop. But every young person who walks away asking “why don’t I see a source?” is one more obstacle for the propagandists. Every young person who fact-checks before sharing is one less amplifier for lies. Every young person who chooses truth over outrage is a small victory for democracy. In a country where the next election will be fought on the internet as much as at the polls, teaching young people to read, think, and verify is not just a form of education—it is a form of protection. The energy in that room at UNILAG proved that Nigerian youth are ready to be not just consumers of information but defenders of the truth. And if enough of them take that role seriously, the story of misinformation in Nigeria will be rewitten, not as a tragedy, but as a triumph of critical thinking and collective responsibility.