History in the Age of the Algorithm

By Toyin Falola

By devoting its fourth conference to “Humanities in the Digital Age,” Northwest University, Kano, is right on the money. Hardly do you find a more appropriate topic at a moment when Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the entire world. The university of the future will be far different from what we know today. I am glad to have been selected as the Keynote Speaker. I thank Dr. Murtala Muhammad, who facilitated the invitation.

Let me begin with one current reality.

In 2020, a video began spreading among Nigerian WhatsApp groups. It was forty minutes long, firmly delivered, with dramatic music and images that might have been mistaken for a legitimate documentary. It claimed that the Yoruba didn’t even originate from West Africa in the first place, that they’d arrived from ancient Egypt, goalkeepers of a vanished civilization whose secrets had been taken and buried by the British. In days, it’s been shared hundreds of thousands of times. It was not cited. It was all contrived.

We are living in an era where the emotional truth of a tale is repeatedly overcoming the factual truth of the record. Nowhere is this more dangerous than in history, since what we believe we know about the past has direct implications for the actions we take today. This shapes how we vote, who we trust, who deserves justice, and who we identify as the enemy. It is never the case that the stories that a civilization uses to explain its origins are nothing more than myths. Politics is also constantly involved.

2016 was the year when “post-truth” became the most popular word. However, the notion itself is far older. People have always chosen between comforting falsehoods and the unpleasant truth. States have traditionally altered the historical record for political ends. The new thing is really the infrastructure. False historical narratives have never spread this quickly, reached this many people, at this low cost, with so little responsibility attached. A historian at the University of Lagos may take ten years to do substantial studies on precolonial trading networks in the Niger Delta. There may be eight hundred experts who read her work. A YouTuber with a confident voice and a ring light may discuss the same topic in forty minutes, filled with blunders, and get two million views in a week. She can’t fight on such terms. Most of the time she doesn’t bother.

The actual issue is not the existence of disinformation; it has always been. The difficulty is that the creation of fake history has been industrialized, while the production of rigorous history remains in every practical sense artisanal. And the platforms where most people experience the past today- YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, WhatsApp- were not designed to produce educated citizens. They were designed to attract and retain attention. Engagement is not understanding, and we have learned that lesson long enough now that we really have no justification to keep seeming astonished.

MIT researchers have studied news flow on Twitter and found that misleading tales spread roughly six times faster than true stories, reach more people, and penetrate social networks more deeply. “Importantly, the study found bots were not the main driver. They were humans. False tales were more innovative, more emotionally gripping, more shared. It’s a really unsettling revelation, since it tells us the issue is not just platform design. The platforms are just making what human psychology already likes louder. They didn’t originate the need for emotionally rewarding lies. They backed that demand with a worldwide distribution network.

The YouTube recommendation system is a well-known entry point into progressively extreme material. A viewer watching a video on African precolonial history can be guided, step by step, into conspiratorial or ideologically distorted material on the same theme—not because that material is more accurate, but because previous users who watched the first video tended to keep watching similar content. The algorithm treats sustained attention as a signal of quality. WhatsApp introduces a distinct but equally critical problem: with end-to-end encryption, there is essentially no insight at scale into what is being transmitted. A lie about history may go through a thousand family and community groups with no brakes on it – no fact-check label, no downvote button, no counter-narrative showing next to it. Just the message, and the authority of the sender implied. Real historical explanation needs context, qualification, and time. Short-form film does this well: it provides a powerful, emotionally resonant argument that looks and sounds like documentary but satisfies none of the analytical demands that would make a historical argument honest.

There is also a basic asymmetry at work that seldom receives the attention it deserves. False historical claims are brief and emotionally rewarding. The falsehood is always first. It becomes bright. And sometimes when the correction comes out, the audience has moved on. Nowhere probably in the world has this specific sort of historical harm been more severe than in Africa, and to understand why you have to be honest about colonialism’s attack on African intellectual life. European academics and colonial administrators often assumed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that Africa had no history worth studying. In 1963, an Oxford professor told the BBC that “Africa has no history, only the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes”. This was hardly an odd or fringe stance. It was mainstream for decades. And it was not a side-effect of colonialism; it was the philosophical underpinning of it. If you could persuade yourself and others that the people you were subjugating had no history, no culture, no previous civilization worth mentioning, then what you were doing was not conquest. It was a civilizing mission.

The post-independence generation of African historians realized this and pushed back with serious, continuous work. They restored African historical traditions through oral history, archaeology, linguistics, and meticulous engagement with colonial documentation. That work was very important. Two generations after independence, the distortions of colonial history have not been addressed in public perception to anything like the extent that the evidence warrants. And social media has surged into that breach with tremendous enthusiasm.

It is only logical that African and diaspora groups are hungry for alternative histories, tales that recover what colonialism buried, and affirm what it denied. The grievance is valid. The difficulty is that the internet is filling that very reasonable demand with absolutely no quality control. Today on YouTube, Pan-africanism exists on a spectrum from sincere public research to serious myth-making to outright fabrication. If you don’t have the means to separate them, there’s no way for a viewer to distinguish them reliably.

Nigeria is a striking illustration. The Biafra War of 1967 to 1970 is one of the most contentious chapters in Nigerian history, and on WhatsApp it is relitigated with an intensity that sometimes makes it seem contemporary rather than past. There are stories from Igbo communities of purposeful targeting of people and the use of famine as a weapon of war, fully substantiated by the historical and journalistic record. In certain northern areas, the conflict is told largely in reference to the pogroms of 1966, which the federal official narrative has long downplayed. The federal narrative of national unity directly contradicts the separatist assertion that the root causes of the war have never been addressed. These are not other versions of the same events. They are frequently opposing versions of the facts. Various fatality estimates, various attributions of culpability, different explanations of who decided what and when. They live on platforms without editorial standards, without any need to engage with contrary facts, and without responsibility for the communities they inflame. The phrase “misinformed” is too mild for a young kid in Enugu or Kano whose view of Nigerian history has been shaped mostly by WhatsApp forwards. They have been given a political map of the nation which is meant to produce and perpetuate resentment.

Rwanda is a tragic example of what this can become. In the months preceding the 1994 genocide, a radio station ran a deliberate campaign of historical revisionism, depicting Tutsis as foreign invaders who had taken Hutu land and identity, and presenting the imminent bloodshed as a justified act of historical reclamation, rather than mass murder. The topic was history. The mechanism was amplification via the media. The figure was about eight hundred thousand dead in one hundred days. The digital environment, with no national boundaries and no identifiable broadcaster to hold accountable, has greatly expanded the process.

This problem persists because the education system has never equipped individuals to guard against it. Most people, when asked why we teach history in schools, would say it is to teach pupils about the past. That response is almost uniform, and points almost totally in the incorrect direction. The true objective of history education, the thing that makes it worth inclusion in a compulsory curriculum, is to acquire the capacity to think historically. Historical thinking is a particular skill set: the capacity to assess a source for reliability and bias, to recognize that every account of the past was produced from a particular perspective and is therefore incomplete, to understand causation as complex rather than simple, and to resist the human temptation to read the past as a story that was always heading toward the present. These talents are not inherent. These need to be taught, practiced, and reviewed again and again. In most educational contexts, they get almost no systematic consideration whatsoever.

Most history curricula genuinely teach facts: dates, dynasties, wars, rise and collapse of empires, accomplishments of the founding leaders. The issue is not the substance. But in today’s digital climate, material without approach is practically meaningless. The pupil who understands that European powers carved up Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884 will struggle when faced with a confident YouTube video that fills the background with fabrications. The learner who has learned to question who produced this historical assertion, for what audience, with what interests at stake, and what has been kept out, has a fighting chance. The first kind of learner is created by almost all formal history instruction. Only a handful make it to the second.

The situation is very dismal in many schools throughout Africa. In many postcolonial governments, history has been a contentious battlefield, pulled between nation-building and honest engagement with history. For two generations, many students have been taught nationalist fiction as history and colonial propaganda, conditioned to accept historical narratives based on political authority rather than facts. These adults are no better at spotting deception than those who had no history instruction at all. In other ways, they are less suited, since they have already internalized the practice of accepting authoritative-sounding historical assertions without investigating who created them and why.

Academic historians are not spared this censure. Most university history departments have gone on as if their primary audience is other experts. Journals are behind subscription paywalls. Cost beyond the reach of most readers, monographs are written in language that implies years of academic study. Public lectures are infrequent and poorly attended. Most individuals who might profit from it do not have access to the most rigorous understanding of history, for all practical purposes. The journalist fact-checking a viral claim, the instructor planning a lecture on precolonial Nigerian politics, the student writing on the Biafra War – they will all have a far simpler time accessing a YouTube video than a peer-reviewed paper. The academic community often accepts this as a sad aspect of the publishing environment, rather than acknowledging it as an active contributor to the catastrophe of historical illiteracy it now mourns. The professional incentive system makes things worse. Most history departments reward and recognize scholars based on their peer-reviewed publications, citation counts, and specialty recognition. Writing a newspaper column is (for nearly nothing). A public blog is almost nothing to do. Podcasting, creating accessible videos, and talking to journalists are relegated to hobbies done outside serious academic work. The outcome is a set of professional incentives that systematically disincentivize the very kind of public involvement this period requires.

The idea of the public intellectual as historian is not new. W.E.B. Du Bois was a professional historian who, from the outset, knew that historical argument was inseparable from political argument, and he addressed both concurrently without diminishing either. C.L.R. James’s account of the Haitian Revolution was a serious study and a straight-up engagement in the politics of the anticolonial forces then growing across the Caribbean and Africa. These historians were not concerned with making the past pleasant. They developed methods to make it comprehensible, without making it false. They understood that rigor and accessibility are not truly at odds; they require different skills, and those skills can be learned.

What content makers churning out historical falsehoods at scale have realized, and what academics have mostly failed to comprehend, is that history speaks through emotion before it speaks through reason. It’s not only gullibility that makes Afrocentric videos go popular on YouTube. It is aspiration—a true human need for a tale that does justice to a sad past. Academics have tended to disregard this emotional dimension, seeing it as distortion rather than an essential, valid part of how humans connect with the past. That fire is expensive. It leaves the emotional register of historical communication totally to those prepared to meet audiences where they are, including those ready to make up what the data doesn’t offer.

The ways out are not easy, but they are there. Universities need to recognize public participation as a valid area of scholarship, not an extracurricular activity. Historians need to join the discourse with platform firms and regulatory agencies about the amplification of historical falsehood, offering the particular knowledge that is often lacking from such conversations. The foundational materials of African history, many of which are still held physically and digitally in colonial archives in London, Paris and Brussels, need to be made available in forms that schools, journalists and communities can really utilize. And historians have to go into the trenches of pop culture: advising filmmakers and game designers on what to do before they start making it, not slagging them off in specialized periodicals that the producers and their viewers will never read.

All of this underpins a choice to be made by the discipline of history in deciding who it is for. Choosing to remain largely in academia while influencers and ideologues control public historical discussion is hardly a neutral professional choice. This is a political act with political repercussions. History is not a collection of entertaining anecdotes about dead people. It is the basic material on which communities construct their sense of identity, origin and common destiny. When such stuff is consistently generated at scale, the implications don’t remain in the past. They show up in elections, in courtrooms, in communities where people have come to irreconcilable views of reality and can no longer find a ground on which to discuss anything. The post-truth period is not only an unpleasant information environment for historians to learn to navigate. Democratic life rests on a common factual base. And it’s that basis that’s being slowly eroded, one viral video, one sent message at a time. Historians did not create this. But they are among the few individuals with the expertise, the standards of proof, and the institutional standing to resist it with any real power. The issue is whether the discipline will decide the stakes are high enough to risk the unpleasantness of doing so.