The newly introduced Guidelines and Principles for Use of Digital and Social Media in Elections in Africa is not a clamp down on free speech.
Delegates to the three day launch in Sandton, Johannesburg said the initiative is meant to help Election Management Bodies across the continent use the newer and more influential platforms to publish information about elections while blocking out misinformation, disinformation, fake news and other negative content considered to be inflammatory.
Sixteen countries including South Africa have already adapted guidelines which were developed over several years under the auspices of continental multilateral body African Union.
Among the Sixteen signatories is Kenya and Nigeria which have both experienced election related violence including as recent as 2023.
The Director of INEC Electoral Institute, the research arm of Nigeria’s elections body Dr Sa’ad Umar Idris said his entity had already been using digital and social media to update voters and believe the platforms have helped elections related violence.
He said the guidelines have been designed to prevent possible abuse by incumbents.
“I think it will not be because every EMB present here has confirmed that social media is something that has come to stay. If it has come to stay you cannot run away from it, you cannot pretend it doesn’t exist, you cannot shut out social media, of course you have to deal with it. Just like I said earlier there are advantages of course it puts out information out there, it sensetises, it makes information available to people but the challenge is what kind of information goes out there it means you’ve let our people, social media utlets out there to put out whatever they wish to put out so you have to do something hence the importance of this document.
“It tries to guide, it provides guidelines,it provides some principles which you can actually use which you can actually adopt to develop some measures so that you can actually engage meaningful, robustly with the social media platforms in times of putting out information but if you don’t do that then that means all the information put out there can just be swallowed by people.
“Of course you’d agree with me that social media,you know all those online platforms and media platforms as well in some cases put out information that is completely incorrect so you have to have a mechanism of correcting that impression, correcting that information out there by putting out the right information so that people could can appreciate what electoral commission otherwise you leave a lot of things to speculation”, said Umar Idris.
Delegates called on political parties to play a leading role in rebutting misinformation and disinformation.