In Lagos, TikTok and the Centre for Analytics & Behavioural Change (CABC) recently convened a roundtable to confront the rising issue of tech-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) in Nigeria. The meeting brought together media professionals, civil society, content creators, and platform policy heads to design strategies particularly aimed at curbing gendered hate speech and online harassment targeting women and girls.
At the event, Jesse Cann (Head of Research, CABC) emphasized centering Nigeria’s lived experience—highlighting that TFGBV is not just an online problem but one deeply rooted in societal attitudes. TikTok executives, including Tokunbo Ibrahim-Okuribido (West Africa Public Policy), detailed how the platform has increased content moderation efforts: removing videos violating community standards, shutting down live rooms, and refining detection tools to better catch language and behaviour that disproportionately harms female users.
Among the critical updates, TikTok reported that in past quarters it has removed millions of violating pieces of content in Nigeria alone, including hate speech, harassment, and violent or hateful imagery. The platform also reaffirmed its #SaferTogether campaign, working with partners like NITDA (Nigeria’s digital regulation authority) and DSN (Data Science Nigeria) to deliver digital literacy workshops, awareness programs for parents/teachers, and tools to help users report abuse more easily.
However, the roundtable also surfaced major challenges. Critics warned that overreliance on automated moderation may lead to false positives, where legitimate content gets wrongly censored, and potential stifling of free expression. Concerns also emerged about the limited infrastructure for support services, weak legal enforcement for digital abuse, and the lack of public awareness among many internet users, especially in rural areas.
The stakeholders laid out a roadmap: strengthen moderation by combining AI with human reviewers, increase transparency of enforcement decisions, expand digital safety education, and push for legal reforms that specifically address gendered hate speech and tech-based violations. If sustained, these measures could improve trust in digital platforms among women and vulnerable populations, helping reduce online violence and its offshoots like reputational damage, mental health harm, and silencing of women’s voices.
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