By Maymunah Zubair
The director of Advocacy for Policy and Innovation (API) intelligence and policy platform, Mr. Kassim Sodangi, has called for a multi-stakeholder and systemic collaborative approach to address the challenges of content moderation and safeguard users in Nigeria’s online space.
He mad made the remark at Nigeria’s First Content Moderation and Online Safety Summit organized by API to appraise the regulatory landscape for content moderation and the limitations of relevant extant laws within the Nigerian Constitution, while seeking potentials for deeper collaboration to improve safety in Nigeria’s digital space.
The hybrid conference was well attended to include special guest of honor, the Honorable
At the hybrid conference were the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Ibrahim Pantami, who was represented by the Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Mallam Kashifu Inuwa, Google’s Government Affairs and Public Policy Manager, Dawn Dimowo, Meta’s Public Policy manager, Meg Chang, Executive Director of Internet Sans Frontières (Internet Without Borders; IWB), Julie Owono, as well as policy makers, civil societies, local and international lawyers and policy observers on content moderation.
According to Sodangi, Nigeria is at the forefront of creating deeper and positive regulation in sub saharan Africa, adding that a multi-stakeholder and systemic collaborative approach is key to finding solutions that address the harms of content moderation, without infringing on freedom of expression rights
The API Director also stated that Nigeria is in the lead in creating deeper and positive regulation in sub saharan Africa. He insisted that a multi-stakeholder and systemic collaborative approach is key to finding solutions that address the harms of content moderation, without infringing on freedom of expression rights.
The Summit with the theme “The challenge for content moderation and the opportunity to improve online safety in Nigeria,” opened up an intersectional conversation among big tech companies including Meta Nigeria and Google Nigeria, as well as policy makers, civil societies, and citizen-users of the Internet and other social media platforms.
The Advocacy for Policy and Innovation (API) is a not-for-profit Africa Focused policy intelligence platform that helps understand how policy development and legislative bills affects businesses and gives the tools to influence policy development or to restructure operations to adapt to realities.
API also provides a platform to curate and aggregate feedback from stakeholders and to strategically relay these aggregated ideas to regulators