Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Affairs and APC-PCC Assistant Principal Spokesperson, Chief Ajuri Ngelale, has said at a time autocratic rule is resurgent and de-democratisation is spreading, democracies must rise against fake news and attacks on shared systems of government by false empathetic demagogues which disguise as populism.
Addressing the press at Voice of America in Washington D.C., United States, the spokesman noted the unprecedented disintermediation of news dissemination via western-based social media companies has sacrificed truth and informed voter decision-making on the altar of profit for western technology companies in a manner that cyclically fuels erosion of liberal democracy with resurgence of totalitarian appeal and hostile takeovers by power-hungry militaries in less developed nations.
Ngelale explained with three military coups supplanting democracies in West Africa in the last three years, advanced democracies must be mindful not to play into the hands of global faux-populists by advancing evidence-bereft claims of electoral malfeasance and abstract suggestions of human rights abuses against democracies, such as Nigeria, operating in democratically-challenged regions.
The spokesman concluded that in democracies as Nigeria’s, big tech-backed movements around personality cults grow as strongman rule becomes more appealing in times of perceived danger and chaos which, he avers, is why the time is now for big tech accountability to check fake news-for-clicks business model fuelling confrontational divisions in nations and a pervasive breakdown of public trust in systems-based democracy. Ngelale is senior presidential assistant to the president.