MobWatch: Building a Community-Based Approach to Verification for Claims of Jungle Justice in Nigeria

[Opeyemi Lawal is an investigative journalist with the Foundation of Investigative Journalism (FIJ), Nigeria, and creator of MobWatch. She was a cohort member of the WITNESS’ Fortifying Community Truth project in West and Central Africa cohort for 2024.

Georgia Edwards is the senior program coordinator of Evidence and Investigations at WITNESS. She works with journalists and activists on investigations using visual evidence through video documentation, analysis and presentation and is part of the Fortifying Community Truth project, led by the Africa team at WITNESS]

Introduction

The proliferation of smartphones and social media has meant that more than ever, more people have the ability to film, share, and watch the documentation of human rights abuses – from airstrikes, to police violence, to mob violence.

Mob violence or “jungle justice” is a form of violence whereby a person gets attacked by another citizen without access to fair trial. In Nigeria, there are thousands of reports on social media of mob violence, where victims themselves, passerbys, or loved ones upload testimony narrating the event, often uploading videos or photos of the victim, perpetrators or scene of the crime. For example, one user @EMMANUELOLUDA14 posted onto X on July 30 2022, “Wondering when Jungle justice will end in Calabar, a body was dumped at Ikot Ishie Market dustbin overnight with legs tied. Must have been a thief I guess. The body is still up on the road, not a good sight at all. Especially for children growing up.”

While another user, @Abk_Abiso, reported on August 24 2022, that “I went out jogging and I came across a gathering of people burning thieves alive on Oron road, here in Uyo…I can’t believe I have just seen a jungle justice.” It is a common scene for a crowd to gather, wielding the most dangerous objects targeted at a stranger or victim(s) who lie in the midst of their chaos.

These posts are evidence to what some Nigerians know to be a pervading issue of social justice in the country; but this is not reflected by the state or the police. Instead, victims of mob violence go largely unrecognised. Coupled with this lack of desire to diagnose this issue, faith remains low in the police and state security in Nigeria, which means this problem continues, where citizens take the law into their own hands.

More videos = more justice?

Despite new videos being uploaded everyday of mob violence online – “user-generated evidence” is more accessible than ever – it has not led to a lot of justice for victims and their families. Some families have even accused the government of giving them no closure on the case.

Adebayo Okeowo and Rebecca Hamilton have charted the rise of user generated evidence since 2011, followed by the efforts to build institutions and approaches to leverage its use for justice and accountability. But this professionalisation of the field has had an “unintended consequence” to shift agency away from the communities filming violations, and into the hands of the Global North institutions where this field has largely emerged. This means that these resources are often still held out of the centre where these videos, for example in the case of Nigeria, first originated from. 

At the same time, as technology has advanced, so has the response from states and perpetrators who often weaponise the same tools  to delegitimise activists and call communities’ claims into question. In Nigeria, the police turned to social media to discredit the truthful claims of protesters, for example in the aftermath of the End SARS protests in Nigeria in October 2020, when they brandished the mass-shooting of protesters at Lekki toll gate as “fake news”. 

This places extra burden on frontline defenders to not just reliably document and film evidence of these violations, but to build a collection of material which has the ability to build a case strong enough to fight against this disinformation. Like the activists, journalists and protesters who turned to social media to report in their thousands about the police brutality during End SARS, as Nkem Agunwa notes, it took international organisations such as Amnesty International and CNN to build investigations for the tirade of state denial to stop; and for the government to acknowledge it.

Fortifying Community Truth: A Community-Based Approach to Verification

So, what would it look like if frontline defenders didn’t have to “wait in line” for their claims to be verified, or until their stories are deemed as “newsworthy”? What if these investigations were built with the knowledge and narratives within community networks, and then turned to “distant witnesses” in the Global North to reduce the burden on frontline actors to develop investigations, rather than centralising them there?  These questions were the catalyst for WITNESS to build a community-based approach to verification, and was also the basis for the partnership with the Global Justice Investigations Lab at Utrecht University.

So in May 2024, seventeen journalists and media practitioners from across five countries in West and Central Africa: Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Cameroon, led by the Africa team at WITNESS, met for the Fortifying Community Truth project. The training focused on geospatial analysis, data collection, archiving, verification, and presentation skills, which provided the foundation for the initiatives that they would embark upon over the next year.

This blog will focus on one of the projects from the cohort, MobWatch, to illustrate its community-based approach to verification.

MobWatch: A Case Study

While Mob violence is particularly devastating, it is unfortunately common in Nigeria. The victim is usually beaten to a pulp, burnt alive, tortured, harassed, embarrassed and even stripped naked as an alternative means of seeking justice for whatever wrongdoing. This scene is common, but the actual data on the number of people who have been forced to suffer this way lie with the ashes of those who have died and in the blood of those who were beaten without cause.  Despite it being common to see videos uploaded to social media or comments on chat groups, there was not much data where one could understand how, why, when, and where these events occurred.

This problem has lingered and will continue to do so without a system that not only keeps verifiable proof of the number of people who have suffered from the injustice but also serves as a tool to protect the truth of victims and their relatives and to demand accountability from the right government agency. According to Amnesty Intl, about 550 Nigerians have been victims of mob violence in the last 10 years. But the true number is far higher, whilst many cases go unreported or unacknowledged. To tackle this, new ways of demanding accountability and a reminder that respects the victims of the violence must be developed. 

This has given birth to MobWatch, a public archive tracking and monitoring mob violence in all 36 states across Nigeria.

MobWatch was designed to hold not only government agencies to account but also to name and shame perpetrators who continue to believe in jungle justice, acting both as an advocacy tool to fight for the reform of police, but also to hold the memory and as a public testimony to the violence and harm that mob violence causes.

The data on the platform begins from May 2022, when Deborah Samuel was lynched on her campus after being accused by Muslim believers of blaspheming their faith.  In this cycle, more than 16 hunters travelling from the southern part of Nigeria to the North were burnt alive by indigenes of Uromi, Edo State after being suspected of terrorism. 

Reflections on the MobWatch Methodology

MobWatch’s methodology involves tracking social media and local news and chat sites to find patterns and identify the common reasons behind mob violence in Nigeria, as well as building a case archive for every victim within the timeframe.

The database highlights incidents, providing details on names of victims, where they were attacked, how they were attacked, who their attackers were and key details such as what motivated the attack, whether the police were called to intervene and whether they confirmed the incident.

1. Collection

The monitoring on X proved the basis of the collection. The collection period spans between May 2022 after Deborah Samuel was killed, to present focus on specific key words which relate to how the public reports mob violence. The keyword “jungle justice” is more commonly used, and there were a number of incidents where users would report mob violence only in text, rather than posting photos and videos of the victims. There were a number of incidents which had been reported multiple times from separate sources, but also incidents where there was little more than a report via text, for example X user @910solu reported on May 26, 2022, that “Jungle justice still going on.” The user posted a video of himself driving past a jungle justice scene.

Meanwhile, the reports of jungle justice reported on X spiked in February 2023, the month when Nigerians went to the polls for their general elections.

2. Verification

The verification of the incidents of jungle justice rested on the information that was available in the public domain; each incident received a grading based on this assessment. For example an incident was graded as “confirmed” if the police reported the incident themselves, and if the police engage and confirm more incidents; more will change in the live database.

The incident was verified if a post on social media could be corroborated by a credible source.

Credible sources, as regards our research, would be media organisations within Nigeria that cover the national, regional, local, and community environment of news and that have built a reputation for trustworthy and accurate reporting. This is where a community-based approach is crucial, using local knowledge to understand what counts, and building inspiration from other other best practices and open methodologies which centre local context, such as Forensic Architecture’s methodology for their Cartagraphy of Genocide platform, alongside guidance from Mike Yambo, OSINT investigator, who acted as a faculty advisor for the cohort.

The key for verification was corroboration: the incidents were deemed “likely” if there was more than one unique social media source, but “unconfirmed” if there was just one reported incident from one user.

3. Analysis and Presentation

Currently, the platform has data uploaded for the first 6 months of the collection cycle, where 51 reports of mob violence had been found, surpassing other figures, showing the powerful nature of using open source analysis to build a collection, to show and advocate on new and previously unpresented patterns of violence.

From the archive, at least 40 Nigerians died from different public lynching cases, out of a total of 49 cases within the period. The number of victims involved is nearly twice the number of cases because in most cases, more than one victim is involved.

Conclusion

MobWatch platform was officially launched on October 31st 2025, and shows a pathway for how video-based strategies for accountability and justice can thrive, whilst leveraging and collaborating with global institutions.  By collecting, verifying and analysing the open-source audiovisual content, new patterns can emerge that protect the truth of communities but also serve as powerful tools for advocacy, transparency and reform.  MobWatch will continue to document cases of mob violence to be used by journalists, researchers and advocates in their work and be a platform for advocate for police reform, with its mission for a Nigeria where no one is dehumanised, harmed, or killed by mob violence – and where every act is recorded, remembered and met with accountability. Meanwhile, during collection, it was also common to find reports of jungle justice in other countries, such as Ghana, Kenya and Jamaica. This hints at the possibility of tracking similar cases in these regions.

Also, as part of its future growth plan, it is proposing to join the Casualty Recorders Network, accrediting its commitment to documenting every case of injustice and public lyching. It will also incorporate a geographical location feature that users can use to alert the police or other law enforcement agencies to an incident of jungle justice, thereby averting it.

To find out more about the project, visit the site: www.mobwatch.org

Photo Credits: Ayanfe Olarinde, Unsplash Licence