General News
(Opinion) How educators can help stem the tide of cyberbullying
By Akin Banuso, Country Manager, Microsoft Nigeria,
It’s perhaps one of the great paradoxes of our time – the opportunities that technology presents come with complexities that can be difficult to navigate. Nowhere is this more evident than in today’s classrooms. Whiletechnology is helping transform the learning experience in profound ways, it can also leave students exposed to significant online risk if the right measures aren’t in place.
A recent survey on online bullying in the Middle East and North Africa revealed the depth of the challenge educators and parents face, highlighting that at least 85 percent of UAE children have been bullied online.
In Nigeria, the government has addressed this plight through the provision for an Act that protects people from cyberbullying. However, there is much that still needs to be done in curbing cyberbullying by providing effective means of prosecuting cases in this regard and by raising awareness of the Cybercrimes Act in order to encourage victims of to report the offenders.
As a means of dealing with a wide variety of technology-based threats, the National Assembly enacted an Act called The Cybercrimes (Prohibition, Prevention, Etc.) Act 2015 Cybercrimes (” Cybercrimes Act”) with the purpose of providing an effective and unified legal, regulatory and institutional framework for the prohibition, prevention, detection, prosecution and punishment of cybercrimes in Nigeria. It’s worth noting there two specific forms of cyberbullying have been criminalised – cyberstalking and racial and homophobic offenses.
Vast research has showed that children lack the necessary supervision required to effectively safeguard them from becoming victims of any form of cyberbullying. While parents have a role to play in limiting and supervising access to the internet, educators can also make a key difference. The more teachers are equipped themselves to deal with cyberbullying, the better the chance we have of combatting the online threat. In fact, there are several powerful ways we as adults can intervene in the cycle of online bullying.
Helping to prevent cyberbullying begins with listening to children. Ask them to talk about their lives. Sit with younger children while they play and explore online. It’s a good idea to regularly ask tweens and teens to show you around the websites they visit, where they hang out, who with, and how they talk to each other. This is particularly important in a school setting, where online activities should be closely monitored so that appropriate online behaviour can be encouraged.
There are also ways of watching out for signs of online cruelty. This typically involves taking note when children get upset while online or texting, or when they have a reluctance to be at school. At the same time, teachers can keep an eye out for children being mean to others online.
Greater awareness around the consequences of bullying can assist in discouraging a culture of cyberbullying. Help children understand that cyberbullying can get them into serious trouble. In some cases, this might even involve legal ramifications. At the same time, encourage them to think about the psychological effects cyberbullying might have on others.
Its important children feel they can report cyberbullying to you. Microsoft’s recent Digital Civility Index reveals that while cyberbullying is frequently listed as one of the most painful online risks, just 56 percent of teens in Turkey and 46 percent in South Africa ask for help when dealing with an online threat.
To counteract this, adults need to promise unconditional support. Part of this involves reassuring children that you won’t curtail phone, gaming, or computer privileges because of others’ behaviour. In the context of a classroom specifically, this would also involve providing students with an anonymous platform from which they can report cyberbullying.
One of the most effective ways to prevent online bullying is social and emotional learning—the process through which we learn to build strong relationships and develop healthy boundaries and self-perceptions.
Key to this is promoting empathy and kindness. Actively teach thoughtfulness. This can help students understand how small, thoughtful actions can make a huge difference in others’ lives.
Educators can even advocate for empathy training at school or start a kindness campaign within their classrooms. This could be as simple as each student agreeing to do one kind thing a day, or it could have a much broader scope, such as developing a programme to challenge a culture of criticism with the school. Similar campaigns can be replicated at home or even in a broader neighbourhood.
As a teacher, you can collaborate with other educators to create programmes that explicitly address social-emotional skills. In fact, collaborative learning platforms can enable students to work together respectfully and to negotiate as they co-create. For example, by having students learn how to accommodate the needs of others when creating worlds in Minecraft, teachers can find opportunities to develop deeper emotional literacy and introduce strategies to resolve challenges or understand perspectives.
Like teachers, parents have a critical role in identifying and stopping cyberbullying. As a parent, you might be surprised how difficult it can be for a child to admit, even to you, that they are being bullied. To help them get past this, create an environment that allows them to feel safe to tell you the full story. From there, together, you can come up with a plan of action. Encourage your child not to retaliate and to rather ignore or block the bully. Save the online discussions as evidence just in case it escalates to threats of violence and the police need to be involved. Approach their teacher or school counsellor and find out what steps can be taken to prevent it from happening in the future.
Reassure your child that they always have your support and shouldn’t feel ashamed. Get them involved in activities that make them feel good so that they can move on and heal from the incident.
At the end of the day, combatting online risks like cyberbullying begins with promoting digital civility and helping one another to be responsible digital citizens.
PalmPay, Nigeria’s leading digital banking platform, has renewed its commitment to deepening financial inclusion across the country. At the CeBIH Annual Conference 2025, themed “Reimagining Financial Inclusion through Cultural Shifts in Consumer Credit,” PalmPay’s Managing Director, Chika Nwosu, urged industry players to deepen financial inclusion by embracing community-aligned solutions and customer-centric innovations that can better serve Nigeria’s underserved and unbanked populations.
Speaking during a panel session titled “Social Inclusion, A Veritable Tool for Financial Inclusion,” Chika Nwosu joined other industry leaders to share insights on strengthening participation among women, rural dwellers, low-income earners, and other financially excluded groups.
Chika Nwosu highlighted PalmPay’s commitment to inclusive finance through its 500,000-strong agent network, which enables seamless cash-in/cash-out services for unbanked users across Nigeria. He also emphasised the importance of PalmPay’s USSD platform, 861#, which allows users with basic phones or limited internet access to perform essential financial transactions.
“Financial inclusion goes beyond access; it must be equitable and tailored to real-life needs,” Chika Nwosu said. He shared how PalmPay leverages behavioural insights to design impactful services, including affordable health insurance, reliable bill payments, merchant solutions, and automated savings features that support financial discipline among users.
The session further examined the role of grassroots agents and community touchpoints in driving last-mile adoption. Chika Nwosu noted that PalmPay’s widespread community presence continues to build trust and encourage excluded populations to embrace digital financial tools.
The session was moderated by Ronke Kuye of the CeBIH Advisory Council and featured representatives from E-Doc Online, SmartCash Payment Service Bank, SANEF, and EFINA.
PalmPay reaffirmed its commitment to driving accessible, secure, and inclusive financial services for all Nigerians. PalmPay is a leading digital banking platform driving financial inclusion and economic empowerment in underserved emerging markets. Through its secure, user-friendly, and inclusive suite of financial services, PalmPay empowers individuals and businesses with tools to manage and grow their money.
PalmPay offers a comprehensive range of products, including mobile payments, savings, and micro-insurance via its app and mobile money agent network.
Since launching in Nigeria in 2019 under a Mobile Money Operator license, the platform has grown to over 35 million app users. PalmPay has operations in Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, and Bangladesh.
Reality Defender and 1Kosmos have announced a strategic partnership that will see the deepfake detection firm integrate its real-time deepfake defenses into 1Kosmos’ blockchain-based biometric authentication platform.
Deepfake
A release says the integration enhances the platform’s existing PAD capabilities with new signals on both live and pre-recorded AI-generated image and video impersonations: “multimodal deepfake detection” that “enhances ISO/IEC 30107-3 PAD Level 2 performance to counter the growing share of synthetic-media attacks.”
“Deepfake attacks are evolving faster than most organizations can adapt, and detecting them requires specialized, continuously updated models,” says Ben Colman, CEO of Reality Defender. Reality Defender’s models keep pace with regulatory changes like the EU AI Act and upcoming ISO 25456 standards, to ensure seamless compliance.
“Advances in AI-generated impersonations are rewriting the rules of identity assurance and ratcheting up fraud losses,” says Mike Engle, chief strategy officer for 1Kosmos. “By adding Reality Defender as an embedded detection layer, we’re enabling enterprises to verify identity with greater certainty and stop AI-driven impersonation attacks before they result in financial loss, brand damage, or regulatory consequences.”
The product deploys without friction, integrating natively into existing 1Kosmos workflows, identity stacks, and user experiences with no new licenses, retraining or rearchitecture.
Resemble AI heads straight to market with new funding
Resemble AI has raised 13 million dollars in strategic funding to accelerate development on its voice generation and deepfake detection products. An announcement says the investment round includes Google’s AI Future Fund, Okta Ventures, Taiwania Capital, Gentree Fund, IAG Capital Partners, Berkeley Frontier Fund and KDDI – partnerships, the firm says, that “create immediate paths to market distribution and embed our technology within key identity and security ecosystems.”
The company says its deepfake detection model achieves 98 percent accuracy across more than 40 languages with multimodal threat detection across audio, video, images and text, and enhanced explainability for content analysis. It intends to use the investment to “fuel our global expansion and accelerate the development of our AI detection platform.”
FARx releases new multimodal deepfake detection tool
FARx, which bills itself as “the world’s only fused-biometrics company,” has announced the launch of FARx 2.0, its new generation of biometric software which fuses speaker, speech and face recognition for added capabilities in synthetic and cloned voice detection. The software can be integrated into browsers, apps and communication systems, and operates in the background to provide continuous multi-factor authentication without disruption.
A post on the firm’s LinkedIn page says FARx 2.0 “identifies not just what is being said but who is speaking, enabling it to detect and block attempts to spoof someone’s identity using synthetic voices, deepfakes, or cloned audio and video.” Trained on some 55,000 synthetic voices from real telephony environments, it can “reliably distinguish between real and AI-generated voices.”
The Malvern Gazette quotes Clive Summerfield, CEO of the Worcestershire, UK-based firm, who says the new product aims to deliver “an even more sophisticated, flexible biometric multi-factor authentication technology to users across a broad range of industries and applications.”
“Legacy voice biometrics and traditional MFA systems are simply no longer enough to outsmart the new era of AI-powered threats.”
The launch follows a recent investment of 250,000 pounds (about US$337,00) through the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS).
Grant funds deepfake tool tailored to South Korea, Singapore
A team from Singapore Management University (SMU) has won a grant to develop a deepfake detection tool. A release says the project will be “the first multilingual deepfake data set that includes dialectal variants such as Singlish and Korean dialects.”
“Many existing tools don’t perform well on Asian languages, accents, or content,” says Professor He Shengfeng, who leads the team. “We’re focused on building something that fits the specific needs of our region.”
Understanding different linguistic, socio-cultural and environmental characteristics was a key requirement for the grant, which comes from AI Singapore (AISG) and South Korea’s Institute for Information & Communication Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP).
The team has dubbed its tool DeepShield, which its proposal paper calls “the first unified interpretable detection system capable of handling diverse and multi-modal manipulations – including object insertions, lighting alterations, background swaps, and voice dubbing – within a single, explainable pipeline.”
Overall, DeepShield wants to position itself as “not merely a detection tool, but a next-generation AI governance layer for digital media integrity – setting it apart from commercial offerings in both ambition and design.” The ultimate goal is a spin-off startup that He imagines licensing services such as deepfake forensics, media authenticity verification, enterprise compliance and digital governance to public and private enterprise.
Work commences in January 2026 with the scouring of large-scale, publicly available datasets such as the YouTube8M dataset.
Ant International’s winning deepfake detector looks to eliminate bias
Ant International has won first place at the NeurIPS Competition of Fairness in AI Face Detection. A release from the company says its entry trumped over 2,100 submissions from 162 teams globally.
The deepfake detection contest challenged participants to develop AI models that “not only achieve high-utility performance but also demonstrate fairness across demographic subgroups such as gender, age, and skin tone.”
“A biased AI is an insecure AI,” says Dr. Tianyi Zhang, general manager of risk management and cybersecurity at Ant International. “Our model’s fairness prevents exploitation from deepfakes and ensures reliable identity verification for all users, supporting our mission to deliver secure and inclusive financial services worldwide.”
The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) is set to develop a comprehensive security master plan for tertiary institutions nationwide.
The Chairman of the Board of Trustees (BoT), TETFund, Aminu Bello Masari, made this known during his remark at the opening ceremony of a two-day workshop on campus security towards the development of a security master plan for tertiary institutions in Nigeria, held in Abuja.
He outlined the various threats faced by tertiary institutions, including banditry, kidnapping and cyber intrusions.
Masari explained that the master plan aims to enhance threat prevention, detection and response capabilities.
According to him, the discussion at the workshop, which was attended by all the chief security officers of all tertiary institutions, will cover various aspects of campus security, including intelligence gathering and emergency response mechanisms.
He stressed the shared responsibility of campus security among government, security agencies, administrators, students, staff and communities.
The workshop is described as a critical national document that will shape campus security policies and operations.
He encouraged participants to approach the deliberations with dedication, innovation and practical solutions, adding that outcomes of the workshop will significantly impact the safety of campuses and the future of Nigerian tertiary education.
The participants, including chief executives, deans, security officers, and law enforcement representatives, were encouraged to share experiences and practical solutions to ensure robust, future-proof campus security.
“What we begin here today is not merely another conference. It is a foundational step in developing a comprehensive, forward looking security master plan for tertiary institutions in Nigeria.
“This master plan is expected to establish a security of time framework for all time sharing institutions to transcend institutional capacity for threat prevention, detection, mitigation and response, promote intelligence-led security operations and proactive risk management, protect students, staff, facilities, infrastructure and intellectual assets, deepen collaboration between institutions, security agencies and host communities institutionalized emergency preparedness, crisis management and business continuity protocols and integrate modern, physical and digital security technologies into campus operation.
“These deliberations are not theoretical. They form the building blocks of the national framework that will guide campus security policies, investments and operations for years to come. I am particularly encouraged by this diversity of participants. Present here are chief executives, Dean of Student Affairs, chief security officers, ICT professionals, security analysts and the representatives of law enforcement agencies,” he stated.
In his remarks, the Executive Secretary, TETFund, Sunny Echono, pointed out that some campuses are porous and easily invaded, making them attractive targets for criminals.
He recalled a previous mapping exercise to identify high-risk areas and establish emergency response mechanisms.
He said there is a need to interface with various agencies and units in case of a security breach, ensuring clear communication channels.
Echono stressed the importance of having clear communication channels to alert and respond to security breaches, involving agencies like the military, police and Civil Defence.
“Those high-risk areas we identified and see how you can have some emergency response mechanism. This is only the first layer that is there, at the security layer at the source. Naturally, you know you have to interface with so many other agencies and units in the events of such an occurrence,” he said.
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