Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo has lamented the negative effect of fake news, adding that it even put him in some trouble with his wife recently.
Osinbajo, while speaking at a BBC symposium on fake
news tagged, ‘Nigeria 2019: Countering Fake News’, in Abuja on
Wednesday, said a blog put up a picture depicting him posing with
strippers.
The Vice-President said upon closer inspection of the
photo, he discovered that he had indeed taken a picture with the women
at an entertainment event but they were fully clothed.
He said the blogger picked a photo of where the women were not fully clothed and presented it to the public wrongly.
Osinbajo
said, “I have been one of the targets of fake news. It can also
sometimes cause you marital peace. I got a call from my wife about three
or four weeks ago and she said Yemi what are you doing with strippers
and I said what do you mean by strippers? So, I read a story in a famous
blog that said, ‘Osinbajo caught with strippers’.
“And there was
a photograph of me sitting between two perfectly clothed ladies but
underneath this picture, the same ladies were not wearing much.
“In
fact-checking (I noticed that) the photographs with these two ladies at
an entertainment event were taken when they were perfectly clothed but
by the time the story was put out, it was as though I had taken a photo
with them at the time they were not clothed at all.
“As it turns
out, I wasn’t in the picture of where they were not wearing clothes but
just the caption, the stories and all that gave the impression that here
I was in the company of these ladies at a point when they were doing
their business. I think the capacity of fake news to cause great harm is
not in doubt at all.”
The Vice-President said fake news is as
old as communication but added that there was a need to effectively
tackle it as it could cause violence and destroy lives.
Source:- Punchng
Share your thoughts