Days after Information Minister, Lai Mohammed, dropped hint of a possible clampdown on hate speech and regulation of social media, the Vice-President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, Thursday, warned Nigerians against the abuse of social media.
Osinbajo categorically warned against using the social media to fan the embers of hatred and religious disharmony, insisting that doing so could throw Nigeria into a cataclysm which end no one could tell.
The Vice President gave the warning at the Yar’Adua Centre, Abuja, during an inter-faith tolerance dialogue organised by the United Arab Emirates.
But he said he did not support government regulation of the social media.
He urged the country’s religious leaders to not only stop talking about religious harmony but also walk the talk by making sacrifices necessary to ensure same.
Osinbajo said, “As religious leaders and media personalities, also as people of faith in general,” Osinbajo said “we share a common calling to apprehend the truth. We absolutely need to be careful in our use of social media and if we do not want to promote the kind of conflict that can go completely out of hand, we must be sure that we are policing and regulating ourselves, especially, with social media.
“I don’t think that government regulation is necessarily the way to go, but I believe that we as persons of faith and we, as leaders, and those of us who use the social media actively owe a responsibility to our society and to everyone else, to ensure that we don’t allow it to become an instrument of conflict and instrument of war.”
Dr Fahad Al Taffaq, the UAE Ambassador to Nigeria, whose office hosted the talk shop, said his country was the world’s headquarters of religious tolerance.
Noting that his home government had declared 2019 as the year of tolerance, he observed that some Nigerian churches were coming up in UAE, fingering, specifically, the Commonwealth of Zion Assembly, COZA, which he said opened a branch in Dubai in 2017.
