IPOB Are Using Fake Videos To Deceive International Community – FG
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The Nigerian government warned that the Indigenous people of Biafra (IPOB) were using fake videos to deceive the International community.
Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed said that the group was using fake videos of mass killings, harvested from other parts of Africa and doctored to look recent to mislead the international community and gain their support. Mohammed made these statements while adressing Online Publishers in Lagos on Monday.
He said;
“We must warn the nation against IPOB’s next line of action, which is to externalise their lies and propaganda. Now they are writing to the governments and national parliaments of some Western nations, to give the impression that they are victims of an ethno-sectarian violence orchestrated by the government, hence they need protection.
Some of the tools that have been employed by IPOB include blatant lies and cheap propaganda, and the medium of choice for the organisation is social media.
IPOB has harvested gory videos and pictures from other lands and the distant past, which they are now circulating via social media, to deceive the international community into believing that the people of the South East are being subjected to state-sponsored, ethnoreligious violence.
Such videos, which have very high emotive quotient, are circulating on social media as we speak. These videos are doctored to make them look current. They are fake!” he said.
Alhaji Mohammed said some ill-informed foreigners are already alleging genocide adding: “It is either they do not understand the meaning of genocide or are being mischievous.
“Either way, there is nothing like genocide anywhere in our country today. What we have in the South East is a clampdown on a band of lawless people who have no regard for the laws of the land.”
He appealed to Online Publishers to help change the narrative on social media. He said;
“In the interest of the nation and your own interest, you must counter this fake narrative, report the issues responsibly and without sensationalism and present the truth to the public.
If the social media, your platform, is discredited because of the activities of quacks and internet trollers, you, too, will be discredited and your publications will simply go down.
That is why you must distinguish yourselves, as trained and tested professionals, from the charlatans who have seized the social media by the jugular, those who have no regard for the truth and who do not care whether their fake posts set the nation ablaze,”.
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