10th U6+ Consortium of African Universities International Conference

The spread of social media bots (automated accounts that simulate human behaviour) has drastically changed the digital information ecosystem, presenting problems like content authenticity, misinformation, and user trust. Most studies on bot activity have been in the West. Very few studies have focused on young adults of developing regions, Mostly Nigeria, on how they perceive and engage with such content. This paper explores the awareness, exposure, and engagement levels of Nigerian university students with bot-generated content on major social media platforms like Twitter/X, Facebook, and Instagram. Through a quantitative survey, students from different Nigerian universities were sampled, with a structured questionnaire that focused on three aspects: (1) awareness of bot-generated content and the ability to recognise it, (2) the degree and type of exposure to such content, and (3) engagement habits like sharing, liking, and commenting. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse the data for associations between demographic variables (age, gender, field of study, social media literacy) and the three aspects. Initial results indicate that most students are often exposed to bot-generated content, yet their awareness of the identifying signs is only average, and the rate of critical engagement, like fact-checking before sharing, is quite low. Besides, the study points out the lack of digital literacy which increases the risk of misinformation and manipulation. These results highlight the importance of media literacy programmes tailored for Nigerian higher education students to be able to critically assess content in a digitised environment dominated by bots. The article adds to the increasing discussions about AI, misinformation, and youth digital literacy in Africa by suggesting policy, curriculum, and platform-level changes.