Blood-thirsty jackasses are on the prowl in the digital forest of the world wide web. They prey on the gullibility of their captive audience. Nothing sells like bad news, and that is what they have aplenty. Through the instrumentality of various apps otherwise designed for positively creative ends, they bend reality or create something attuned to their depravity to spread fear, horror, hate, and, ultimately set the stage for massacre or ethnic cleansing.

Flashback

It is a trend that started about one decade ago but gained primacy around 2018 when the Nigerian police highlighted a case in which incendiary images on Facebook fuelled more than a dozen killings in Plateau State. That part of the country had been on the boil for several months with horrendous killings of farmers and rural folk by marauding bands of militias, some of whom were suspected to be foreigners. Ethnic profiling of the Fulani tribe was rife.

In the midst of the grisly sacking of villages and the attendant loss of lives, some e-jackasses saw an opportunity to escalate things by posting fake photographs of imaginary victims butchered by imaginary Fulani warriors. One picture showed a baby with open machete wounds across his head and jaw. Another showed a man’s skull hacked open. There were pictures of huts burnt to the ground. Other graphic posts showed bloodied corpses dumped in mass graves, and children murdered in their beds.

The e-jackasses who posted the images claimed that there was a massacre underway in the Gashish district of Plateau State in which Fulani Muslims were killing thousands of Christians from the state’s Berom ethnic group. The truth is that there was actually an attack which claimed many Berom lives in that area but the photographs posted on Facebook had nothing to do with that particular incident.

According to the BBC Africa Eye, “Some of the most incendiary images circulating at the time had nothing to do with the violence in Gashish. The image of the baby, which was shared with a call for God to “wipe out the entire generation of the killers of this innocent child”, had first appeared on Facebook months earlier. The video in which the man’s head was cut open did not even come from Nigeria, it was recorded in Congo-Brazzaville nearly a thousand miles away, in 2012.

So, what the e-jackasses preyed on was the power of outrage. The aim was to shock the consumers of their fib to such an extent as to become part of an unthinking mob. It was bad enough that some children were killed in the Plateau crisis, but the sense of abominable savagery was heightened when a fake photograph of babies divided into halves with the use of a meat cleaver was shared to millions of Facebook users.

If you didn’t bother to trace the source of the photos, you’d think that they were of the plateau killings. And whereas the extra-legal killing of any human being is condemnable, the deliberate inflammation of passion with the use of fake graphics to activate a mob is totally reprehensible.

Since then, there has been a discernible pattern of revving up tension by internet jackals who dispense journalistic carrion in the name of “Breaking News”. The more horrific the photos, the greater the mileage made by the posts— and the wider the net of victims both of the garbage posts and the ensuing inter-tribal and inter-religious mayhem.

Imaginary Victim

Only recently, a tendentious piece of fake news trended massively on social media alleging that one 22-year-old Zainab Muhammadu who had recently converted to Christianity had been arrested by the Muslim establishment and was due to be tried under the Islamic Sharia law. The combustible story generated nationwide indignation, particularly in the southern parts. Against the background of historic contestations between the two major religious groups, public commentators warned against the opening of another war front that could compound the country’s security situation.

An online news medium had quoted ‘family sources’ as saying that Zainab’s crime was converting to Christianity. According to the report, Zainab’s journey of faith started when she met one Pastor Samuel, a National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) member posted to her area. However, when the authorities discovered her change to Christianity, they ordered her arrest.

According to the story, the trial was to be held the following Friday. Many legal experts and human rights advocates decried the development as a gross violation of a Nigerian citizen’s constitutional right to religious freedom.

One of the religious groups that lapped up the story is the Christian Rights Agenda (CRA) which promptly issued a statement fin which it called on President Bola Tinubu to immediately intervene to save the supposed victim. The body noted that, “In most states of the Northwest and Northeast, government officials, including emirs, engage in massive forceful conversion of Christians, especially women, young and underaged girls, but here they are now trying to murder Miss Mohammed who willingly converted to Christianity.”

The organisation also drew attention to the incidence of terrorism and banditry and how the twin evils had led to the forceful conversion of Christian girls to Islam by the terrorists. They reminded the nation of the well known case of Leah Sharibu who is still being held by the terrorists for refusing to renounce her faith.

Some other Christians also rose in defence of their faith, reminding the nation of the case of Deborah Samuel who was alleged by some of her schoolmates to have committed blasphemy against Islam and was stoned to death and then incinerated in plain sight. Her suspected killers were arrested and charged with bailable offences following which they were eventually acquitted for lack of diligent prosecution.

Bomb Defused

The Zamfara State government was mindful of the time bomb in its hands and moved fast to douse the tension by declaring that the Zainab story was false. The government said it had checked with all relevant authorities and security agencies to verify the authenticity of the story and also confirmed with the Grand Khadi of the Zamfara Sharia Court of Appeal regarding any similar cases. There was no such case before any Shari’a court in Zamfara State.

Sulaiman Idris, the spokesman for Governor Dauda Lawal, said the wide dissemination of the fabricated story exemplified yellow journalism. He urged the relevant security agencies to investigate the source of the “misguided story” which, in his view, was designed “to create significant religious tension” in Zamfara State.

It turned out that the photograph used to illustrate the imaginary victim of religious intolerance was that of an American citizen who lives in Texas, Ms Aliaa Reeves, who has probably never heard of Zamfara State all her life and is certainly not on trial in the state. Her photograph was simply pinched from a social media site and used to illustrate the imaginary victim.

So, if the situation ballooned into an inter-faith conflagration with the usual killings, arson, displacement and human misery, it would all have been in pursuit of a lie!

Why do we do these terrible things to ourselves?

It is time that e-jackasses in news outlets and the social media who enjoy their grisly chortle at the expense of our collective rest of mind, stepped back to rethink their pastime. It’s easy to start a bushfire but when the wind takes over, it may consume the pyromaniac too.