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Chibok Parents, Leaders Fight Over FG’s N100m Cash Gift

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Parents of the abducted Chibok schoolgirls and the community’s leader are at loggerheads over the sharing of the N100m cash gift allegedly given to the parents of the students by President Goodluck Jonathan.

The money was allegedly given by the President after a meeting in Abuja on July 22.

But Dr. Reuben Abati , special adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, denied the report that money was given to the Chibok delegation.

But the BBC Hausa Service said that  the sharing formula for the N100m cash gift sparked a serious disagreement between some of the parents and leaders of the Chibok community in Abuja as the parents complained of being shortchanged in the sharing of the money.

There were reports that the Presidency allegedly released the fund to the leaders of the Chibok community in Abuja, as a palliative measure, for onward distribution to parents of the kidnapped girls after the meeting.

However, trouble started when some of the parents who felt cheated with the sharing of the largesse accused the leadership of the community in Abuja of shortchanging them.

One of the parents told BBC Hausa Service: “I got only N200,000 out of the said N100m allegedly received by our leaders in Abuja. Some of us got N300, 000 and some less than that,” he said.

The aggrieved parent said that he was not happy with the way the money was shared as he felt shortchanged.

“Our leaders in Abuja are using the girls to enrich themselves. In fact, some of the parents were screened out of the entourage by the Chibok leaders in Abuja. Many of them are residents of Abuja, not parents of the kidnapped girls,” he said.

Another parent, who was screened out of the delegation that visited the President, said he got only N7,000 out of the money that was shared.

“I was at the farm when they brought the N7,000 to my house and I collected it. Some of us got even less, N300 and below,” he said.  aggrieved parents stressed that they were not selling their daughters and that the money from the President just came to them without their asking or expecting it.

One of the community leaders, Pobu Bitrus, who is also a member of the House of Representatives, was at the meeting with the President.

Bitrus told the BBC that after the meeting with the President, money was distributed to the parents in envelopes.

“After we met with the Presidency, the parents were given money in envelopes and that’s all. All other things they are saying about N100m, I don’t know about that,” he said.

Tsambido Abana, chairman of the community, described as false allegations that the money was shared among the parents and that some were short changed by the leadership of the association.

Abana, in a telephone interview yesterday, said there was no truth in the report that Presidential officials doled out N100m to the parents and the escaped girls that held a parley with the President.

He said: “There is no iota of truth in that report. I don’t even want to talk about it because I don’t know how such a story came about. The money that was shared to the parents was handled by presidency officials who gave out envelopes to the parents, so I was not involved in the sharing and I can’t say anything about it.”

In his reaction, Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Dr. Reuben Abati denied the report that money was given to the Chibok delegation.

“Nobody distributed any envelope after the meeting. The meeting was held in the Villa, a public place. After the meeting, the President left and the parents as well as the children went into their buses in the presence of the media,” he said.

According to him there was no time for money to be given after the meeting.

“The President is not part of will never do anything to bribe anybody. This issue is not about money. We are talking about human lives here.

“The allegation is completely wild. What they are claiming is unknown to the President. Whoever is claiming it should prove it because no such thing happened.

“The commitment of the President is to get the girls back safely. It is not about bribing anybody. This is a very serious matter and we will like to appeal to those who want to play politics with it, using all kinds of tricks to ridicule the efforts of the administration, to always appeal to their individual conscience and realise that what we are dealing with here is a very serious matter and not a matter of mischief,” he added.

Meanwhile, not fewer than eight persons were said to have been killed and a major bridge in Yobe State destroyed when gunmen suspected to be members of the Boko Haram sect attacked Katarko village on Monday, residents and a security official said.

According to reports, the gunmen, who came in large numbers, could not be matched by the soldiers at a check point about 300 metres away from the village.

“They came at 7:30pm,” said Lawan Ali, a resident of Katarko who spoke from Buniyadi, the headquarters of Gujba Local Government Area of the Yobe State, where he sought refuge after the attack.

“They stormed our village with some vehicles and many motorcycles, shooting and chanting Allahu Akbar (God is great).

“Some of them could be mistaken for solders because of their dressing which resembled that of the Nigerian soldiers. “The soldiers in Katarko had to flee after seeing the large number of the attackers.

“After attacking the village and killing about eight persons and injuring others who were not so lucky to escape, we later heard a thunderous explosion at the location of the bridge; we all fled into the bush. But in the morning, we found out that the bridge had been destroyed with bombs,” Lawan added.

Residents of the village lamented that with the destruction of the bridge, the village would be cut off from other part of Yobe State as the rain intensified.

The attack on Katarko village was the first on the community despite its proximity to Sambisa forest.

Abbas Gava, a member of the Nigerian vigilante group in Borno State, who also confirmed the incident, said he was communicating with his colleagues in the state on the incident.

The meeting took place after a meeting with the visiting Pakistani teenager, Malala Yusoufai, who champions the cause of girl-child education.


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


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NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

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Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


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