ANALYSIS OF HATE SPEECH REGULATION ON TIKTOK SKITS IN NIGERIA
This study examines how hate speech is regulated on TikTok skits in Nigeria’s digital media space, asking whether the country’s regulatory frameworks are adequate and how well TikTok’s own content moderation copes with hate speech hidden inside short comedic videos. Two theories anchor the analysis: Agenda-Setting Theory (McCombs & Shaw, 1972; McCombs, 2014), which explains how unmoderated hate speech shapes what the public pays attention to, and Governance Theory (Rhodes, 1996; Flew, Martin, & Suzor, 2019), which accounts for the many actors involved in digital content governance. A systematic documentary research approach was adopted, drawing on academic journal articles, institutional reports, government policy documents, TikTok’s transparency records, civil society monitoring reports, and international regulatory frameworks published between 2019 and 2024. Two things emerged. First, Nigeria’s existing regulatory instruments, including the Cybercrimes (Prohibition, Prevention, etc.) Act 2015, the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission Code, and the NITDA Guidelines, are each inadequate on their own and, taken together, still fail to address TikTok-specific skit content. Second, TikTok’s Community Guidelines show serious enforcement gaps: algorithmic moderation reportedly misses an estimated 88% of ethnically charged Nigerian skit content, largely because the platform’s language-processing tools were never built for indigenous Nigerian languages. Five structural gaps drive this failure: legislative fragmentation, poor inter-institutional coordination, weak platform localisation, thin government-platform cooperation, and redress channels that ordinary users cannot reach. The study proposes a multi-layered governance framework to close these gaps and contributes to digital media governance scholarship by documenting regulatory failure in a major African digital market and outlining a co-regulatory model suited to linguistically diverse, low-resource-language contexts.
Keywords: hate speech, TikTok skits, content moderation, Nigeria, digital regulation, platform governance, documentary research
