Fake News Alert: Truth Behind Jack Dorsey’s claim on Nigerian BTC Holdings

Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey’s popular tweet highlighting that 32 percent of Nigerians own Bitcoin was recently proven false. Dorsey’s tweet generated exceptional figures of over 4,600 retweets and nearly 20,000 likes at the time of reporting.

Dorsey linked the open letter titled, ‘Why Progressives Should Love Bitcoin: An Open Letter to Senator Elizabeth Warren.’, and misleadingly quoted its stats without context, which led to a vicious cycle of fake news across the media.

The open letter’s author had cited Statista survey report, a notable database company. The quote stated, “…32 percent of Nigerians own Bitcoin, the highest percentage in the world…” However, what both, Jack and the letter’s author missed was a thorough reading for the published survey.

Survey’s actual claim

Dubawa, Nigeria’s indigenous independent verification, and fact-checking project clarified that the claim of 32 percent Nigerians using bitcoin had been wrongly cited from the outcome of a survey by Statista. The Statista Global Consumer Survey 2020 had ranked Nigeria at the top with “32% higher than some citizens from countries even within the G7 with the United States, Germany, and Japan with 6%, 5%, and 4% respectively.” It has chosen the survey respondents from 74 different countries, out of which the Nigerian population that used or owned cryptocurrency 32% higher than the rest of the countries.

Moreover, the survey clearly mentioned that the respondents from each country amounted to a minimal 1,000 to 4,000 bracket. In lieu of the small survey group, making a nationwide generalization is not possible for the researchers. Unless the survey sample size meets a certain number underlying the population of the country, it is deemed invalid to be used in reports.

“Triple-A, a Singapore financial company, noted that there are over 300 million crypto users worldwide with 13 million of them in Nigeria representing just 6.31% of the over 200 million population of the country.”, stated Sahara Reports piece on the false report.