National Broadcasting Commission

• The programme, The Bandit Warlords of Zamfara, examined the raids on villages, abductions and murders that have plagued swaths of the country.
• Notably, it included interviews with so-called bandits, who described their violent actions and laid out their grievances.
• In 2021, I joined a team of researchers from Afrobarometer on a project to understand how citizens think about media freedom.
• But this group swung behind the need for censorship when it came to hate speech and false information.

Thorny questions

• Thorny questions about media freedoms and democracy face other African countries too.
• On the one hand, empowering governments to limit media might undermine fragile democracies by allowing incumbents to squelch investigative reporting and opposition voices.
• These questions are important in light of recent declines in support for media freedom across Africa, even as attacks on those freedoms by governments increase.

Limiting freedoms to protect democracy?

• We also analysed data from nationally representative surveys Afrobarometer conducted in the four counties in 2019 and 2020.
• We delved deeper by providing different types of potentially problematic media content and measuring support for government censorship of each one.
• In other words, supporting democracy again meant supporting media’s rights to share content that might upset those in power.

Justifying censorship for democratic ends

• What then explains why people who were most supportive of democracy were also most supportive of certain kinds of censorship?
• We posit that Africans in the countries we studied actually found limiting certain content as necessary for defending democracy.
• Sixty per cent of our phone survey respondents told us that media spread too much hate speech.
• It is easy to see how many committed democrats might see censorship as a necessary step.

Complicated paths forward

• Most who supported democracy erred on the side of supporting media’s right to produce content without serious limits.
• If we are not careful about this, the steady erosion of media freedoms will continue and will end up in a bad place.

• Munich, April 26th, 2022 - Today, Your Family Entertainment AG announced its new cooperation with Moreplex TV, the Direct To Home TV platform owned by Moreplex Television Limited.
• YFE's family channel Fix&Foxi Channel will be available in English to all customers of the Pay TV platform Moreplex TV in Sub Saharan Africa.
• Moreplex TV is a Direct To Home Pay TV platform in Africa offering a large variety of channels in various countries.
• John Okorocha, Chief Executive Officer at Moreplex TV: "Moreplex TV is excited to have Fix&Foxi Channel on our platform.

• CINCINNATI, April 25, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Relevate Health solidifies its position as the market leader in Healthcare Professional (HCP) omnichannel engagement with the acquisition of Dallas-based ConneXion360.
• "Bringing ConneXion360's 1:1 engagement, Key Account Messaging, immersive video, and national broadcast capabilities into the Relevate Health suite of products and technology offer new brand-building opportunities for our clients," said Relevate Health CEO Jeff Spanbauer.
• "Relevate Health is known for its use of data and machine learning to create locally relevant messages that are scalable," said George Griffith, Co-Founder & CEO of ConneXion360.
• The acquisition of ConneXion360 marks the third transaction by Relevate Health since taking on funding from Denver-based private equity firm Mountaingate Capital in late 2020.