Teslim Adeyemo argues that Muslim withdrawal from social media does not protect the Ummah, but leaves false narratives about Islam unchallenged in the very spaces where they spread fastest.
In February 2026, a video began circulating through Nigerian WhatsApp groups and X timelines. It showed a young girl dancing at what appeared to be a celebration, while a man sprayed her with naira notes. The girl then handed him a cup, from which he drank.
Within hours, captions had attached a story to the footage: child marriage, northern Nigeria and the Muslim north.
The clip carried no location and identified no one. It did not need to. By the time PRNigeria traced the footage and published its fact-check on 25 February, the truth was almost too ordinary to go viral: the girl was the bride’s niece, serving as a flower girl at her aunt’s wedding.
The correction travelled nowhere near as far as the rumour.
Presence is protection
The correction existed because a Muslim journalist was present in the same online spaces through which the rumour spread and was watching closely enough to verify the footage before repeating the claim.
That is not incidental. Muslims already active on social media are often the ones catching and correcting false narratives about Islam as they emerge. Telling Muslims to withdraw from these spaces does not protect the Ummah. It weakens one of the few mechanisms currently capable of correcting the record in real time.
PRNigeria’s fact-check did not appear from nowhere. It required someone to monitor the platforms where the video was spreading, cross-reference the footage and establish the girl’s real relationship to the family before the claim hardened into accepted fact.
Fact-checking organisations across Africa, including Africa Check, Dubawa and PRNigeria itself, depend on precisely this kind of presence: journalists and contributors who remain inside these platforms long enough to identify a claim before it calcifies.
None of that work is possible from outside the feed.
A Muslim who has logged off cannot flag a false claim about Muslims, provide the context missing from a viral clip or reach the audience that has already seen the false version circulate.
Verification is not a skill exercised in the abstract. It takes place in the same space where the misinformation lives and at the same speed at which it moves.
What silence costs, and what fixes it
The gap between a false claim spreading and a correction arriving is where the real damage occurs.
The video reached its Nigerian audience within hours and remained largely unchallenged for as long as it took PRNigeria to trace it, verify it and publish the correction. During that window, the story had already been set: shared, discussed and folded into an existing narrative about the Muslim north that long predated the footage.
A Muslim who was absent during that period did not remain outside the incident. They simply played no part in shaping how it was understood while the narrative was taking hold.
The false version moves on outrage, which is fast. The true version moves on verification, which is slow. Every Muslim absent from that race is one fewer voice helping determine how the story ends, not one more voice somehow kept clean of it.
Framing disengagement as protection for one’s faith mistakes a lack of training for a virtuous choice.
Scanning a timeline for false claims about Islam, verifying a source before sharing it and responding to a narrative before it hardens are learnable skills, not innate abilities. Yet most Muslim communities have never taught them.
The instinct to warn people away from social media treats the platform itself as the danger, when the greater danger is entering it without the tools to understand and navigate it.
Da’wah has always adapted to the terrain in which it operates: from door-to-door engagement and the mosque to radio, television and now the social media feed, which moves faster than any of those earlier forms.
Training Muslims to monitor, verify and respond builds that capacity deliberately. It does more for the Ummah than another sermon warning people away from the terrain altogether.
A fair objection
The obvious objection is that social media carries real harm: addictive design, exposure to content that corrodes character and hours lost to platforms engineered to keep people scrolling.
That is largely true. None of these dangers should be minimised, and no one should pretend the risks are insignificant.
However, the response to a dangerous space should be competence within it, not complete evacuation from it.
Muslims do not withdraw from finance because it carries the risk of riba, or from universities because they expose students to secular ideas. They engage with knowledge, training and boundaries. Social media should be approached in the same way.
What the next viral video will need
The girl in the video was never a bride. She was the bride’s niece, dressed as a flower girl at her aunt’s wedding.
By the time many of those who had seen the clip encountered the correction, the algorithm had already moved on, and so had they.
That gap will continue to open, video after video, until Muslim communities begin closing it deliberately through training, rather than leaving the task to chance.
The question worth considering is not whether Muslims should be present on these platforms. It is why so few have ever been taught what to do once they are there.
Teslim Adeyemo is a development strategist and the founder of UmmahBuilders, a platform equipping Muslim community leaders with practical frameworks for institutional development and local governance. A former Director of Digital Media at the Dawah Institute, he holds a Master’s in International Affairs and Diplomacy with a specialisation in International Development. His work sits at the intersection of Islamic ethics, media strategy, and community development across Africa and the diaspora. He writes and consults on building Muslim institutions that translate faith into civilisational action. You can follow Teslime on LinkedIn and his Substack.
