Nigeria's broadcasting regulator, the National Broadcasting Commission, has joined media watchdogs in sounding an alarm over deepfakes and AI-driven falsehoods threatening the country's democracy. The NBC, alongside the Centre for Media and Society and the International Press Centre, is pushing journalists to beef up fact-checking before the next elections.
Media experts gathered in Abuja for a technical summit organized by CEMESO last week. They warned that Nigeria's election information ecosystem faces serious risk from artificial intelligence-generated content and coordinated digital propaganda.
Stella Erhunmwunsee, the NBC's Director of Broadcast Policy and Research, addressed the conference on behalf of the commission's leadership. She described misinformation and disinformation as direct threats to national stability and democratic trust.
"We are operating in an information environment that is increasingly complex, fast-moving and, at times, volatile. The proliferation of misinformation and disinformation, particularly in the context of elections, poses a direct challenge not only to media credibility but also to national stability, public trust and democratic legitimacy," she told attendees.
Erhunmwunsee emphasized that accurate information dissemination matters as much as election integrity itself. Distorted information warps public perception and endangers democratic outcomes, she cautioned.
Fact-checking can't remain optional anymore. Instead, it must become a core professional duty requiring continuous, tech-enabled verification systems, the NBC official stressed.
"Accuracy is no longer sufficient on its own; verification must be proactive, continuous and technologically enabled. The media must evolve at the same pace as the threats it seeks to counter," she stated.
An AI Fact-Checking Tool Guide was unveiled at the summit as a major breakthrough. Erhunmwunsee hailed the move as critical for proactive verification and newsroom accountability.
She warned media organisations to embed fact-checking into their daily editorial workflows. Technology alone won't solve information disorder without ethical professional standards among journalists, she noted.
Akin Akingbulu, executive director of the Centre for Media and Society, painted a darker picture at the gathering. According to him, Nigeria is entering a perilous period where artificial intelligence has "industrialised the production of disinformation."
AI tools now enable false narratives to spread "at scale, at speed, and with a sophistication that makes detection exponentially harder," Akingbulu explained. Between 2019 and 2023, global deepfake content surged by more than 500 percent.
Nigeria has already felt the sting of this technology firsthand. During the 2023 presidential elections, AI-generated videos falsely showed international celebrities endorsing candidates.
Cloned audio recordings were used to fabricate conversations between political leaders during that same period. In June 2025, a synthetic video was deliberately crafted to ignite farming and herding tensions in Benue State.
Such conflicts have historically sparked severe violence in the region. Akingbulu's warnings underscore how urgent the problem has become for Nigeria.
