Mustapha (Olalekan) Lawal

Automated moderation reads Nigerian Pidgin as English. So a Pidgin post with a false claim about polling units goes through a filter that thinks it understood the thing, finds nothing wrong, and passes it on. Nobody checks it after that. Yoruba has a version of the same problem, because the diacritics carrying its tone usually get stripped before anything reads the text. Closing the Indigenous-Language Detection Gap, our new policy brief, goes to the people who can fix this: Meta, Google, TikTok and X, plus NCC, NITDA and NDPC. Four asks of the platforms. Surge review capacity in Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Pidgin and Kanuri through the election window, sized against real Nigerian user numbers rather than a global multilingual capability nobody has tested on Nigerian content. Content Credentials on political advertising, in whatever language it runs. A fast review route for accredited Nigerian fact-checkers, working from a standard evidence template. Weekly reporting on what is being enforced here. Two for the regulators. NCC and NITDA to issue an election-period code of practice using mandates they already hold. NDPC to check whether people posting in Nigerian languages get the same privacy notices, appeal routes and redress as people posting in English. None of this asks a platform to disclose anything proprietary. There is a business argument as well. DataReportal put Facebook at roughly 38 million Nigerian users in late 2025, with TikTok ad reach up 43.4% year on year. Nigerian users aged 16 and over are on an average of seven platforms a month, up from five in 2024. When something goes visibly wrong on one platform, people move. This brief was produced by Brain Builders Youth Development Initiative and FactCheck Africa, supported by the Digital Democracy Initiative and CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation. #ContentModeration #InformationIntegrityr