Fake News and Its Effect on Public Perception in Nigeria

Background to the Study

The Global Trajectory of Misinformation

The convergence of digital technology and mass communication has produced one of the most disruptive forces of twenty-first-century public life: fabricated news content moving through digital networks at a speed no editorial process was designed to match. Manipulated information is nothing new — propaganda and rumour have shaped politics since antiquity — but what has changed is scale. A single fabricated post can now reach millions of people before a fact-check is even drafted.

The problem gained global prominence around the 2016 United States presidential election, when researchers documented coordinated disinformation campaigns spreading through social platforms with measurable effects on public opinion and voter behaviour. Scholars tracking that election cycle estimated that false stories favouring one candidate were shared roughly 30 million times on Facebook, dwarfing the reach of fabricated stories supporting the opposing candidate. That imbalance made clear that fake news was no longer a fringe irritant — it had become an active participant in democratic outcomes.

Fake News in Nigeria’s Media Landscape

Nigeria’s media environment presents its own, arguably more combustible, conditions for misinformation to thrive. A large, ethnically diverse population, recurring political tension, and one of the fastest-growing mobile internet bases on the continent combine to create ideal circulation channels for fabricated content. Nigerian oversight bodies have repeatedly flagged the volume of political, health, and security-related misinformation moving through WhatsApp groups, Facebook timelines, and Twitter threads. During both the 2019 and 2023 general elections, the electoral commission issued repeated public corrections addressing viral falsehoods about postponed voting, tampered results, and fabricated reports of violence.

The health sector has not been spared either. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization described a parallel “infodemic” — an overwhelming mix of accurate and inaccurate information that complicated public health responses worldwide. In Nigeria, circulating falsehoods claiming that garlic could cure the virus, that it was a manufactured biological weapon, or that telecommunications infrastructure was spreading the disease contributed to documented cases of vaccine refusal, self-harm through unproven remedies, and vandalism of telecom equipment. These outcomes underline that fake news is rarely just a perception problem — it produces tangible, sometimes dangerous, real-world consequences.

Regulatory bodies overseeing Nigeria’s digital and telecommunications infrastructure continue to grapple with how to respond to this volume of harmful content without overreaching into legitimate expression, a balancing act reflected in the ongoing work of agencies such as the Nigerian Communications Commission.

Undergraduate Students and the Information Ecosystem

Social media platforms are the primary distribution channel for this information disorder. Nigeria counts tens of millions of active social media users, and platforms like WhatsApp dominate usage among internet-connected citizens, with young adults between 18 and 35 relying on these platforms as a leading source of news. Algorithmic systems on these platforms are tuned to maximise engagement rather than verify accuracy, and emotionally charged content — true or false — tends to travel further and faster than sober reporting.

University students sit at the centre of this dynamic. As some of the heaviest consumers of digital media and the demographic that will shape Nigeria’s civic and political future, their capacity to resist or fall for fabricated content carries consequences well beyond campus life. Formal education does not automatically confer immunity to misinformation; students remain susceptible, particularly when a false claim confirms something they already believe or arrives via a trusted friend or family group. Recognising how misinformation reshapes perception among this specific group is both a scholarly gap worth closing and a practical concern for universities and policymakers alike. Readers interested in the wider research context behind this study, including related communication and media topics, can find additional explainers on our research blog.

The study is anchored at the University of Lagos, chosen for its size, its cosmopolitan student body drawn from across Nigeria’s states, and its location in Lagos — the country’s media and internet capital. These features make the university a reasonable vantage point from which to examine a phenomenon that, until now, has been studied far more extensively in Western contexts than in Nigeria’s own information environment.

Statement of the Problem

Journalism’s credibility rests on decades of institution-building: editorial standards, source verification, fact-checking routines, and codes of ethics that separate professional reporting from rumour. That credibility is under sustained pressure. Anyone with a smartphone and a data connection can now produce content that mimics the visual form of news while discarding its substance, and distribute it to an audience of thousands within minutes.

The consequences are far from theoretical. Health misinformation has fed public health crises. Fabricated atrocity reports have inflamed ethnic and religious tension. Partisan disinformation campaigns have deepened political polarisation. And the accumulated weight of all three has steadily eroded the institutional trust that democratic governance depends on.

Despite how serious these consequences are, the specific mechanisms through which fake news reshapes public perception in Nigeria remain thinly studied. Existing literature is heavily weighted toward Western democracies — the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union — leaving the African context comparatively under-examined. Where Nigerian research does exist, it tends to be journalistic rather than systematically empirical, or it treats fake news as a secondary variable inside broader studies of media and politics rather than as the central object of investigation.

A further gap concerns cumulative exposure. Existing Nigerian studies tend to anchor themselves to single events — an election cycle, a disease outbreak — rather than tracking how repeated exposure over time compounds its effect on attitudes, beliefs, and institutional trust, a dynamic reinforced by algorithmic recommendation systems and peer-to-peer sharing. Media literacy, too, is underexplored as a mediating factor: if individuals with stronger media literacy skills are genuinely better equipped to spot and resist fabricated content, then the relationship between literacy, exposure, and perception becomes essential to understand for anyone designing educational interventions. This study was conceived to address these specific gaps.

Aim and Objectives of the Study

The broad aim of this research is to examine fake news and its effect on public perception among undergraduate students at the University of Lagos. Specifically, the study set out to:

●       Establish how frequently undergraduates encounter fake news on social media platforms.

●       Identify the dominant categories of fake news respondents encounter, and the platforms most associated with their circulation.

●       Examine how exposure to fake news affects respondents’ trust in mainstream media organisations.

●       Determine the extent to which fake news shapes respondents’ perceptions of government institutions and political actors.

●       Assess how fake news influences respondents’ health-related attitudes and decisions.

●       Evaluate the role media literacy plays in moderating the relationship between fake news exposure and shifts in public perception.

Research Questions

●       How frequently do undergraduate students encounter fake news on social media platforms?

●       What are the dominant categories of fake news respondents encounter, and which platforms are most associated with their circulation?

●       To what extent does exposure to fake news affect respondents’ trust in mainstream media organisations?

●       How does fake news exposure shape undergraduate students’ perceptions of government institutions and political actors?

●       What influence does fake news have on respondents’ health-related attitudes and information-seeking behaviour?

●       Does the level of media literacy moderate the relationship between fake news exposure and shifts in public perception?

Significance of the Study

This research carries value across several audiences. Academically, it adds contextual depth to the growing body of scholarship on information disorder in sub-Saharan Africa, an area that has so far been dominated by research from Western media systems. Its combined use of Agenda-Setting Theory, the Uses and Gratifications framework, and the Third-Person Effect provides a richer explanatory lens than studies relying on a single theoretical model.

For media professionals — journalists, editors, and fact-checking organisations — the findings offer practical insight into which content categories and platforms are driving misinformation consumption among young adults, information that can sharpen targeted counter-narrative strategies and cross-organisation collaboration.

For policymakers, the study supplies evidence that can inform digital media regulation, national media literacy curricula, and stronger institutional fact-checking mechanisms. Regulatory and broadcasting bodies can draw directly on findings like these when shaping responsive guidelines for platforms operating in Nigeria.

More broadly, the research supports the defence of an informed citizenry — arguably the single most important precondition for a functioning democracy. By mapping how fake news erodes public trust and distorts collective perception, the study equips stakeholders, including students working on comparable communication research, with the evidence base needed to build more resilient information environments. Students developing a similar project on media trust, political communication, or public health messaging may find it useful to work with a vetted academic writer for guidance on structuring methodology, questionnaire design, and data analysis.

Scope of the Study

This study is bounded thematically, geographically, and temporally. Thematically, it centres on the relationship between fake news exposure and public perception, with specific attention to media credibility, perceptions of government, and health-related attitudes. While the researcher acknowledges the wider landscape of misinformation — satire, propaganda, and misleading advertising among them — the analytical focus stays fixed on deliberately fabricated news content spread through social media.

Geographically, the research is confined to the University of Lagos’ Akoka campus. Although the student body is drawn from across Nigeria’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, the findings should be extended to the wider Nigerian public with appropriate caution rather than treated as a national baseline.

Temporally, the study draws on respondents’ experiences between 2022 and 2026 — a window that captures the intensely contested 2023 general elections alongside the lingering aftermath of the COVID-19 infodemic.

Operational Definition of Terms

Fake News: Deliberately fabricated or misleading content formatted to resemble legitimate news reporting and disseminated through media channels — particularly digital and social media — with intent to deceive audiences for political, financial, or ideological purposes.

Misinformation: False or inaccurate information shared without necessarily deliberate deceptive intent, including errors, misunderstandings, and outdated claims passed along in good faith.

Disinformation: Deliberately false information created and spread with the conscious intent to mislead, manipulate, or cause harm.

Public Perception: The collective attitudes, beliefs, and opinions held by members of a community regarding specific institutions, events, persons, or phenomena, shaped substantially by their media consumption experiences.

Social Media: Digital platforms and applications that let users create, share, and interact with content and one another; this study focuses primarily on WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

Media Literacy: The ability to access, analyse, evaluate, and create messages across a range of media forms. In this study, it refers specifically to a person’s capacity to critically judge the credibility and accuracy of news content encountered online, a competency also central to UNESCO’s work on media and information literacy.

Infodemic: A term describing an overabundance of information — including both accurate and inaccurate content — that makes it difficult for people to find credible guidance, particularly during public health emergencies.

Algorithm: The computational rules a social media platform uses to decide which content is shown to which users, typically optimised for engagement rather than accuracy.

Viral: The rapid, exponential spread of content across digital networks through repeated user-to-user sharing.

Conclusion

Fake news in Nigeria is not a passing nuisance confined to the fringes of social media — it is a structural pressure bearing down on how citizens, and particularly young, digitally fluent citizens, understand their government, their health choices, and the news itself. This study’s findings among University of Lagos undergraduates confirm that frequent exposure to fabricated content measurably erodes trust in mainstream media and reshapes political and social attitudes, a pattern with implications that extend well past a single campus. Addressing it will require sustained collaboration between newsrooms, regulators, educators, and platform operators, anchored by stronger media literacy education and more robust fact-checking infrastructure. Readers who want to understand more about the platform behind this kind of research support, including how project topics like this one are sourced and organised, can learn more on our about page.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is fake news, and how is it different from misinformation?

Fake news is content deliberately fabricated to look like legitimate journalism, created with intent to deceive. Misinformation is broader — it includes false content shared without deliberate intent to mislead, such as an outdated statistic passed along in good faith.

2. Why do Nigerian undergraduates encounter fake news so often?

Heavy reliance on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter/X for news, combined with algorithmic systems that reward engagement over accuracy, means fabricated content reaches students frequently and often through channels they already trust, such as family or class group chats.

3. Which platforms circulate the most fake news in Nigeria?

WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter/X were the platforms most frequently named by respondents in this study, consistent with their dominant usage among Nigeria’s internet population.

4. How does fake news affect trust in mainstream media?

This study found a statistically significant positive relationship between how often respondents encountered fake news and how distrustful they became of mainstream media organisations, suggesting repeated exposure gradually erodes confidence in professional journalism.

5. Can media literacy really reduce the impact of fake news?

Stronger media literacy is widely understood to improve a person’s ability to identify and resist fabricated content, which is why this study treats media literacy as a key moderating factor worth measuring rather than assuming.

6. What theories explain how fake news shapes public perception?

The study draws on Agenda-Setting Theory, the Uses and Gratifications framework, and the Third-Person Effect to explain, respectively, how media shapes what audiences think about, why people consume the content they do, and why individuals often believe misinformation affects others more than it affects themselves.

7. How was this research conducted?

The researcher used a descriptive survey design, administering a structured questionnaire to 320 undergraduate respondents selected through stratified random sampling across five faculties at the University of Lagos, supplemented by a content analysis of 150 sampled news items.

8. What role did the 2023 Nigerian general elections play in this research?

The 2023 election cycle falls within the study’s 2022–2026 temporal scope and is referenced as a period of particularly intense fake news activity, alongside the continuing aftermath of the COVID-19 infodemic.

9. How does fake news affect health-related decisions in Nigeria?

The study found that fabricated health claims influenced respondents’ attitudes and information-seeking behaviour, echoing documented real-world cases where health misinformation contributed to vaccine hesitancy and reliance on unproven remedies.

10. Where can I find more research topics related to fake news and media studies?

You can explore related mass communication, political science, and media research topics on our project topics page, or check our FAQ page for general guidance on sourcing and requesting project materials.