COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories on Twitter in Nigeria and South Africa

The final speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Matti Pohjonen and Stephanie Diepeveen, whose focus is on the COVID-19 infodemic that emerged alongside the actual pandemic itself. The global nature of the pandemic meant that the infodemic, too, was global, but such disinformation disseminated in radically different ways in different parts of the world, due to local specificities. So, this research is interested in the categorical markers for information deemed to be (un)trustworthy in local contexts, the reflection of local milieux by global conspiracy theories, and the localised analysis of this research.

The project gathered data from Twitter in Nigeria and South Africa by following country-specific hashtags like #COVID19SA and #COVID19NG; it focussed especially on the presence of the 5G and Bill Gates conspiracy theories in these datasets. It identified a number of overall clusters within the South African and Nigerian Twitter networks, and then positioned the 5G and Bill Gates conspiracy theories within these overall networks.

In Nigeria, a more opportunistic frame was used to extend criticisms of the ruling party: narratives blaming outsiders like Bill Gates and the west, or the Nigerian government, intersected. In South Africa there was a more existential frame that critiqued western disinterest and malevolence towards Africa (with Bill Gates identified as a key actor).

But this approach also tells us more about information online: we must treat examples from the Global South from an equal epistemological footing. This can be linked to a more recent conspiracy theory that the Nigerian president Bihari has been replaced by a clone, ‘Jubril from Sudan’, after a recent overseas trip – a conspiracy theory that even the president himself has now been forced to respond to.

The conspiracy theory and its spread show that such claims are not isolated examples, but a common practice in the Nigerian public sphere, and need to be understood as such. This might be understood as the zombification of Nigerian public debate, robbing it of its vitality and rendering it impotent.