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We Need More Nigerian Content in Broadcasting-Bolarinwa

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Engr Yomi Bolarinwa director general, National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), the agency that is responsible for the regulation of broadcast services in the country is one of Nigeria’s finest engineers. Bolarinwa has been in the industry for quite long time and he exudes passion for it development He spoke to ken nwogbo on a wide range of issues.

June 17, 2012 Deadline For Digital Broadcasting

The transition programme is actually from now till 2012. On June 17th 2012, broadcasting in Nigeria becomes digitalized. From now till June, 2012 there will be simultaneous transition from analogue signals and televisions to digital ones. This means that on the 17th of that month, analogue transmission will cease and we will all cross over to mainly digital transmission.

The major difference is the way signals are sent from stations to homes. Rather than send them in analogue format, they are sent in digital format; that implies that at home, people will get more content, high picture quality just like that produced by DVD, have interactivity with their broadcasters (they can answer questions while viewing programmes, with the help of their remote control rather than calling into the programme); people can get more information about programmes on air, more language channels – a broadcast that is usually a mono channel has the capability to have multiple channels. Take your handset for example, the language can be in Arabic but it gives you room to click on English and it will change every instruction to English. So the implication for digital broadcasting is that people can afford to view the same programmes at the same time but in different languages.

Set-Up Boxes

Essentially, what we have at the moment is analogue TV receive access. When you transmit digitally-digital is not compatible with analogue.

The set-up box which is like a converter will convert the digital signal to analogue signal so that a television set that is basically analogue can interface with the digital signal. The set-up box is a digital to analogue signal converter. But the name everyone in the industry calls it is the set-up box.

Nigerians and Digitisation

Part of the preparation is what you and I am doing now. We must inform the public; we must tell them what is required of them with this development. First, what are viewers supposed to do to continue to watch their favourite programmes.

They need a set-up box. If they have the financial wherewithal they can buy a new digital TV. They must also have an antenna that is good because in the digital era, it is either the signal is their or not. Unlike in analogue that you can watch pictures that are not very clear, in digital if the signal is poor, you won’t get anything. Having said that, we are all stakeholders; government is involved-the executive, the legislature, the broadcasters and then the viewers. Everybody has a role to play. Government must put in place policies and policy statements that will drive this transition. Legislators must work with the executive to pass regulation or bills that will ensure that this transition takes place orderly and smoothly. The regulators must enforce the policy; they must interpret the policy for broadcasters and viewers and drive it. The viewers must then take a look at what they have and what they need to have to enable them keep pace with current trends.

NBC and Local content

Well, clearly we are not happy. For example, look at the family belt between 7pm and 10pm; it cuts across. You find soap opera which pre-dominates except for the brief in-between news. We are not happy about that. Nigerians have the capability to produce even the soaps that we watch; that have local background. But what we have today are Mexican soap operas that everybody is always eager to watch and for us as regulators, it is not okay at all. On Sundays, Fridays, it is religious progammes back to back and we are not happy about that. There are contents even in religion; you can preach in several categories of programmes. Then you need to look at most of our stations, over 60 per cent of their broadcasts are produced by independent producers and so, it is like they just come, buy airtime and this we have been discussing and telling them that this is an area we need more content otherwise, viewers would be made to spend extra money without getting value back.

Broadcast Stations Dominance in Lagos, Abuja

It is not wise, of course. We as the regulators are doing the much we can. For example, you discover that it is almost impossible to buy an application form for those locations. Also, there should be an incentive for people to move into those areas since the broadcast industry is driven by advertisement and the advertisers have areas where they put their money; they have markets they want to reach and if their market is not at a particular place, they do not want to put their money there. So, all levels of government should encourage business people and entrepreneurs to establish stations in their domains.

Regulation of Internet Radio

What makes broadcasting unique is the content. You must have the ability, whatever technology you adopt to deliver. The regulator is always on top of you; the regulator must be capable and ensure that every signal within the Nigerian airwaves is being monitored and so, we are able to apply the rules and regulations of the National broadcasting Commission. Some people will tell you it is difficult to regulate on the internet-Google and Yahoo cannot disseminate particular information because the governments of their mother countries take note and do not approve of that and there is no computer you use on the internet that cannot be traced. It has an IP address and is traceable. So, there is nothing within the airspace of Nigeria that we do not monitor.

Modern NBC

I think the first kudos should go to government itself, the second should go to the Honourable Minister for Information and Communication, Mr. John Odey for giving us the latitude, the freedom to be ourselves. If you complain about all these broadcasts or write any letter against any of these stations today, to the minister, he will send it to the NBC and he will listen to the NBC’s professional advice and treat that letter based on the advice given to him and he wouldn’t mount any form of pressure on the NBC. So given that freedom, we are able to operate professionally, according to rules and regulations and that particularly, is responsible for the present status of the NBC.

There is no going back. The government itself has clearly told everybody in the last one year the role of the rule of law. Whatever the NBC is doing, it is not doing it for the commission but for Nigeria. The airwaves belong to Nigeria and Nigeria wants to know how many radio and television licenses are there and the criteria for licensing people (Is it free for every Nigerian to apply or for special kind of people?) Licensing is for all Nigerians; if you have the wherewithal and a good record and send in application and the frequency is available, you stand a good chance of getting the license.

Dormant Licenses

With all due respect, I disagree with you that there are licenses that are lying dormant. The code states that if you are given a license, what you get initially is provisional approval. If your license is finally approved, you now have a license. If you do not operate your license which has been paid for within two years, you will lose it. If you are given three months to activate your license and at the end you do not, you will lose it. Visit our website

Analogue and Digital Broadcasting

www.nbc.gov.ng, the list of our licensees is there and it is being updated regularly. If anybody comes to you claiming to have a license, if his name is not on the list, he does not have a license. Then, if after the time given to you have elapsed and you come on air; you will pay penalty. That is, if we are going to allow you operate.


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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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