Verdict: Exaggerated and Misleading Full Story The European Union Election Observation Mission (EUEOM) on Tuesday 27th 2023, presented its final report on the last Nigerian general elections highlighting six priority areas. The Chief Observer of the mission, Barry Andrews, presented the report which has 25 recommendations, at a press conference in Abuja.
Verdict: Exaggerated and Misleading
Full Story
The European Union Election Observation Mission (EUEOM) on Tuesday 27th 2023, presented its final report on the last Nigerian general elections highlighting six priority areas.
The Chief Observer of the mission, Barry Andrews, presented the report which has 25 recommendations, at a press conference in Abuja.
Nigeria’s electoral body, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), conducted the presidential and National Assembly elections on 25 February while the governorship and state houses of assembly polls were held on 18 March.
One of the most significant parts of the report was the identification of certain powerful individuals who engaged in disinformation and misinformation during the election. Some of them were listed as Festus Keyamo, former minister of state for labour and employment, and Femi Fani-Kayode, former minister of Aviation, both of whom were strong APC stalwarts.
The EUEOM report accused Keyamo of sharing fake news on February 12 by promoting information “published by a suspicious website, accusing Labour Party (LP) candidate Peter Obi of bribery”.
It also accused Fani-Kayode of alleging, on Feb 11, 2023, the presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Part (PDP), Atiku Abubakar of “having a secret meeting with serving military chiefs in Abuja”.
However, Peoplegazette, an online news platform as of 4th July 2023, published and reported that ‘EU lists Keyamo, Fani-Kayode among top fake news peddlers’ as its news headline.
Is this really true? We verified.
Verification
NDR fact check desk moved to probe the claim of the headline by critically examining the EU EOM final report to verify if there was any ranking of most fake news peddlers.
On page 91 of the final report, captioned: ‘Misleading information targeting parties/ candidates,’ the EU only frowns at the increased incidence of misleading information in the days leading up to and during the election. And citing that, in many cases, false reports were spread by well-known personalities associated with political parties.
As regards the question of whether EU-EOM report engaged in the “ranking” using the word ‘TOP’, observation shows the EU-EMO only cited ‘Examples’ to back its report, which could be found on page 92 of the report.
Hence, we searched further to look at other credible news platforms for similar ranking; the only news platforms that published EU report such as Vanguard and The Guardian here and here, never used ranking.
Conclusion :
Our investigation shows that the EU-EOM report never ranked fake news peddlers in the last general election. The headline in the Peoplegazette is exaggerated and misleading.
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