As Nigeria prepares for the 2027 general elections, SBM Intelligence suggests that the fight against AI-powered misinformation could become one of the country’s newest technology markets.
SBM Intelligence, in its report titled ‘The Algorithm and the Ballot Box: AI, Misinformation, and the Political Information Environment Ahead of Nigeria’s 2027 Elections’, noted a growing commercial opportunity for companies building tools to protect democratic processes.
This is while most of the conversation around artificial intelligence has focused on the dangers of deepfakes and election manipulation. The report noted that Nigeria currently lacks the infrastructure needed to detect, verify and respond to AI-generated political content at scale.
With more than half of Nigerians relying on social media as their primary source of political information, demand is expected to grow for technologies that can identify manipulated videos, fake audio recordings and coordinated disinformation campaigns.
Nigeria has entered an era where protecting elections depends on technology rather than traditional monitoring alone. With AI-generated misinformation expected to become more sophisticated before the 2027 polls, companies that can verify digital content, monitor online narratives, detect deepfakes and improve public trust could find themselves serving one of the country’s fastest-growing public interest technology markets.