Techpreneur faults FG, NASS on social media bill - ITREALMS

ITREALMS:

A Lagos-based techpreneur, Mr. Ebenezer Dare, has faulted both the Federal Government and the National Assembly (NASS) and called on them to define what they really want to regulate in the name of proposed Social Media Bill, reports ITREALMS.

Speaking on the vexed issue of the plans by the Federal Government and National Assembly to gag the system, Mr. Dare, who is the Chief Executive Officer at Hostlag, a domain names and web hosting company, wondered if the Nigerian government truly wanted to regulate foreign applications developed by foreign companies or the people.

He said that regulating the people for instance, will FG sit down with those social media companies in the process of making their regulations and if not, “how do they want to achieve the said bill?”

For him, both the FG and National Assembly must understand what they want to regulate and then come up in alliance with the application companies, insisting that no law is developed in a vacuum, especially in a democratic setting like Nigeria.
And if it is the applications they want to regulate, he urged them to rename the said bill and not call it social media bill.

“If software and websites will be included, that's no longer social media,” he objected, stressing that is relevant now is more education rather than regulation of any sort.

“What I think we need is more of education rather than regulation,” he said.

FG, Dare said, needs to appeal to the emotions of social media activists, youths and other social media users.

“We need to do something that will affect their psychology about the danger of sharing fake news or hate speech because an average social media user will only share news that affects his or her emotion without confirming the source or the genuinety,” Dare submitted.

Insisting that what Nigeria needs on this social media usage is education.

Nenye Dom/Editor

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Pix: Dare