19 Feb 2026 | Features
Short-form video is the medium of our time. The average teenager will spend hours a day on TikTok and Instagram reels, which are the main sources of news and entertainment for the 18-24 demographic.
Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, administers the most important algorithm in the English-speaking world. He is undoubtedly as consequential as David Zaslav or Rupert Murdoch – the CEO of Warner Bros and the owner of News Corp – but his name rarely makes headlines.
On Mosseri’s Instagram, videos proven to hold users’ attention will be shown to more people. “Watch-time” is the basic currency of his algorithm. This has forced creators, many of whom earn a living on the platform, to abide by a golden formula: hook, secondary hook, payoff.
The algorithm has spawned an entire coaching industry in which aspiring influencers pay veteran creators for crash courses in perfecting the formula. Each course teaches more or less the same thing: promise the viewer an answer to a question, keep promising, then answer at the end. Better yet, don’t answer it – promise to answer it in the next video.
Where watch-time is the quantitative component of these algorithms, “trends” are the qualitative. If a particular word, image or sound appears to be trending among a certain data demographic, unrelated content will be algorithmically choked out of that demographic’s feed. This forces creators to cluster their content around proven trends.
A trend is never a story. It is always a concept or feeling that can be immediately communicated within three seconds, because it is generally understood that creators have only three seconds to hook users before they scroll away. As influential creator coach Dominik Rieger will often remark: “The viewer must immediately know ‘This is for me’.”
When Sean “Diddy” Combs trends, as he often does, it is never regarding a piece of evidence or a development in one of his trials. What is, on paper, a story about sexual coercion and exploitation of power is translated by the algorithm into a static portrait: a shame-faced Puff Daddy slick with baby oil. Searching “Diddy” will take you to a trove of baby oil related brainrot, and barely a single piece of factual reporting. Diddy’s actions did not create a story to be followed but a crude vignette to be gawked at.
When US president Donald Trump’s shocking birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein was published by The Wall Street Journal, it did not become a major trend on TikTok or Instagram because the only way to parse the story was by reading the letter itself, which takes more than three seconds. As far as the algorithm is concerned, if an event’s essence cannot be compressed into a three-second span, it may as well have never happened. The proliferation of short-form video has created a media environment structurally hostile to sequential reasoning.
Young people’s attention is guided by an ever-narrowing algorithmic spotlight. Stories that are too big to be rendered by the spotlight are able to bask in pitch darkness and the people we allow to control the algorithms are not interested in changing that. In fact, Mosseri has been open about his efforts to speed up trends: “I want us to be better at trends. It takes still too long for things to pop on Instagram.”
The political implications of this media environment are clear. If short-form video platforms continue to transmute real-world events into less-than-superficial spectacles, the rich and powerful need not manually censor anything. If all chains of cause and effect have found their terminus in the platform algorithms, and if public consciousness is held inert by the same three-second hooks, what will be worth censoring?
20 Aug 2025 | Africa, News, Nigeria, Volume 54.02 Summer 2025
This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 2 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Land of the Free?: Trump’s war on speech at home and abroad, published on 21 July 2025. Read more about the issue here.
The air in Lagos hung thick like wet wool, heat rising off the asphalt in visible waves that curled into the sky. Ushie Uguamaye, a 24-year-old National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) member, pressed “record” on her phone, with sweat forming on her forehead and frustration bubbling in her chest.
It was 16 March. She had just left a supermarket and the maths wasn’t adding up. Prices had soared again and her NYSC allowance had evaporated before the month was halfway through. So, like millions of young Nigerians do when the country feels unbearable, she turned to TikTok. No script. No make-up. Just rage.
“Tinubu is a terrible president,” she said – her voice cracking not from fear but from exhaustion.
The video was raw, honest and wildly relatable. It caught fire across TikTok, spiralling into threads, stitches and duets. But it wasn’t just likes and solidarity that followed. Within 24 hours, she had reportedly received threatening calls from NYSC officials. They wanted the video gone.
In the space of a day, a plaintive cry from a weary citizen morphed into a national inflection point. Uguamaye’s unscripted online lament, uttered in a moment of economic despair, crystallised into something far more combustible: a challenge to authority. Her words became a litmus test for the boundaries of dissent in a fragile democracy.
In the aftermath of this impassioned viral video, a ripple of digital dissent surged across Nigerian social media. Her raw expression of frustration kickstarted the #30DaysRantChallenge movement. People congregated online to voice their grievances, from escalating food prices to the erosion of civil liberties. Each post served as both catharsis and indictment, painting a mosaic of a nation grappling with systemic malaise.
Parallel with this, another incident illuminated the tensions between free expression and institutional authority.
During a public event in the southern state of Delta, a group of nursing students responded to an MC’s introduction of the First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, as “our mother” with the chant: “Na your mama be this?” This spontaneous expression, which was captured and disseminated widely on TikTok, was perceived by many as a subtle rebuke of the administration and a rejection of the First Lady by implying “your mother, not our mother”. The students – particularly the one who posted the video – faced a swift backlash, and had to deliver clarifications and apologies to mitigate potential repercussions.
In a society where traditional avenues for dissent are often fraught with peril, social media emerges as both a sanctuary and a battleground. Yet, as these cases show, the state’s vigilant gaze ensures that even online expression is not beyond reproach.
A legacy of silencing dissent
These digital expressions of frustration are not isolated incidents but rather the latest chapters in Nigeria’s long history of suppressing dissent. From colonial times to the present day, the state’s response to protest has often been marked by repression and violence.
In 1929, the Aba Women’s Riot saw thousands of Igbo women protest against colonial taxation policies. They were met with brutal force by the British authorities, resulting in many deaths. Fast forward to the 1990s, when Nigeria was under a military dictatorship. The execution of environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others for protesting against oil exploitation in the Niger Delta highlighted the regime’s intolerance for dissent and drew international condemnation.
A return to civilian rule in 1999 did not significantly alter this pattern. The 2012 Occupy Nigeria protests against fuel subsidy removal were met with arrests and the use of force. More recently, the 2020 #EndSARS movement, which began as a protest against police brutality, culminated in the Lekki Toll Gate shooting, where security forces opened fire on peaceful demonstrators.
These events are still fresh in the mind of 18-year-old TikTok comedian President Shaks when he is creating content. “I am always really careful with what I post so I haven’t been threatened,” he told Index.
His caution isn’t paranoia but memory. The events of 2020, the blood-stained flags and silenced chants, still haunt Nigeria’s digital resistance.
“A lot of people died trying to protest for a better Nigeria,” said Shaks.
With the streets deemed too dangerous, TikTok and other platforms have become the last refuge for dissent. But voicing dissent online can also come with significant personal risk.
“Even social media isn’t safe,” he added. “They can still come and arrest you in your house if you do too much. Allegedly o.” He adds the “o” at the end of his sentence to emphasise his point.
The global precedent of online censorship
In the evolving landscape of digital governance, the USA has set a precedent that reverberates far beyond its borders. Its government’s actions concerning TikTok have provided a framework that other nations, including Nigeria, have observed and emulated.
In August 2020, during his first term as president, Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13942, citing national security concerns over TikTok’s Chinese ownership. The order aimed to prohibit transactions with ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, unless it divested its US operations. The administration argued that TikTok could be used by the Chinese government to collect data on American citizens or spread propaganda.
Joe Biden’s administration continued this scrutiny. In April 2024, he signed into law a bill requiring ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a ban. ByteDance was given nine months to find a US-approved buyer or the app would be shut down across the USA.
The administration contended that China’s control of TikTok through ByteDance represented a grave threat to national security. While the ban technically came into effect in January, Trump, now in his second presidential term, has so far granted TikTok two 75-day extensions to comply.
These actions have not gone unnoticed globally. In June 2021, Nigeria suspended the operations of X (then Twitter) after the platform deleted a tweet by the then president, Muhammadu Buhari. The government said there had been “a litany of problems” with the platform, including the spread of “fake news” leading to “real-world violent consequences”, and that it was being used to undermine “Nigeria’s corporate existence”.
Nigeria’s move to ban Twitter based on national security concerns mirrored the USA’s rationale for scrutinising TikTok, suggesting that the USA’s approach to online regulation has influenced other nations and provided a blueprint for justifying restrictions on digital expression.
Shaks is concerned that bans could happen on other platforms. “They’ve done it before with X, and TikTok is no different,” he said.
The interplay between national security and freedom of expression continues to be a contentious issue, with the potential to redefine the boundaries of digital discourse – and the actions of influential countries play a pivotal role in shaping global norms.
Comic relief or subversive speech?
In Nigeria, where protest is perilous and grief must be masked, humour has become both the shield and the weapon. In the era of TikTok, where the audience is vast and the state is watching, laughter is no longer just a reprieve but an act of calculated defiance.
“There is a line, ‘cause with the way things are in the country they can arrest you if you do too much,” said Shaks. “That’s why ‘allegedly’ is something people say 100 times to avoid those types of situations when speaking about politics or the state of the country.”
He says his satire is born out of necessity. For him, humour isn’t just creative flair – it’s strategy and survival.
“It started as a way to make such a heavy topic more approachable,” he said. “When you use humour, it feels less like a lecture and more like a conversation.”
Over time, he found that comedy allowed him to “point out the absurdities of corruption” in ways that resonated with audiences. But beneath the punchlines lies a deeper truth: “It’s a coping mechanism. Nigerians use laughter to cover up the fact that we’re going through a lot.”
While he is sceptical about whether online content creation can change things – “the protest in 2020 didn’t change anything” – he continues to post, joke and poke gently at power. His audience, he said, hasn’t turned on him. “Any time I make a joke about politics, I make it as subtle as possible. I don’t do too much, so I have never [had] a negative reaction from the public.”
But in this fragile republic, where truth is dangerous and silence is coerced, even a TikTok skit carries weight. Laughter, after all, is harmless only when the state says it is.
