Hate speakers use religion, ethnicity to inflame passion – CITAD

Assistant Programme Officer, Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD) Malam Sanusi Shazali Suleiman, has said hate speakers were using religion and ethnicity to inflame passion at the time when the indices of entrenching peace and stability must be safeguarded.

Addressing journalists on Monitoring and Countering Hate and Dangerous Speech for the month of March, 2018, held in Kano yesterday, Suleiman said 99.5% of the speakers used plain language without coding while 98.6% used English Language.

Suleiman said the percentage was a confirmation of earlier trend that CITAD observed which indicated that hate speech speakers were relatively educated and that the medium of dissemination is Facebook with the largest percentage of 55.9%, followed by on-line newspapers with 42.8%, while YouTube was the least with 0.9%.

He said gender-based violence online was high at 35.1% among the call to action, followed by 22.1% calling the audience to join violent movement and that 16.7%  to unleash terror, 15.8% to join particular religion.

He said CITAD had at the end of last year, suffered a major online attack resulting in the loss of data, especially at the beginning of the year, adding that CITAD could not conduct the usual monthly comparison.

While appealing to editors of both print and electronic media to be circumspect “in what they are releasing to the public,” Suleiman also called on the general public to keep reporting hate speech, gender harassment online and other abusive uses of the social media.

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