A new survey has surfaced a contradiction that should worry anyone thinking seriously about Nigeria’s 2027 elections: most Nigerians are afraid AI-generated misinformation will corrupt the vote, yet the platform where they get most of their political news, WhatsApp, is precisely the one place where nobody can check what’s true before it spreads.
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Major Highlights
- The report, “The Algorithm and the Ballot Box” by SB Morgen Intelligence, surveyed 829 respondents across eight states and all six geopolitical zones between April and May 2026.
- 52.1% of respondents named social platforms (WhatsApp, Facebook, X, TikTok) as their primary source of political news; 95.1% of Nigerian internet users use WhatsApp specifically.
- WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption means AI-generated content shared privately can’t be detected or moderated before it spreads.
- 12% of respondents admit they don’t verify political information before sharing it, a number that could represent millions of voters
- The Southeast Paradox: the Southeast has a 42.7% non-verification rate but the lowest concern (38.9%) about AI misinformation of any region.
- INEC set up an internal AI unit in May 2025 but, with the election six months away, has yet to launch any major programme.
- Fact-checking groups like Dubawa operate mostly in English, while researchers warn misinformation may increasingly come in Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, and Pidgin, languages current monitoring barely covers.
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KINI BIG DEAL
The real headline in this data isn’t “Nigerians are worried about AI and elections”, everyone already assumed that. It’s that fear and behaviour have completely decoupled. People can be anxious about deepfakes in the abstract while still forwarding an unverified voice note in the family WhatsApp group two minutes later, because the platform where the anxiety lives isn’t the platform where the habit changes.
The language gap is the part that should keep INEC up at night. Fact-checking infrastructure in Nigeria is built almost entirely around English-language content, but the report is blunt that AI tools generating convincing Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba and Pidgin content are now cheap and widely accessible to non-experts. That’s not a gap, the report calls it correctly, a vacuum. Political misinformation in Nigeria has never really been conducted in English at the grassroots level; it happens in the languages people actually argue in. If detection capacity doesn’t follow the content into those languages, the fact-checkers will always be one election cycle behind.
Six months out from 2027 with an INEC AI unit that exists on paper but hasn’t launched a programme is not a comfortable place to be. The window for regulators and platforms to agree on how to label or flag synthetic political content is closing in real time, and unlike a data protection fine, you cannot retroactively fix an election that misinformation has already shaped.
