The Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD) has reported a moderately risky digital environment around the 2026 Osun State Governorship Election, with some political party websites recording persistent access and technical anomalies.
The assessment, conducted through CITAD’s PAWSOM-MONITOR (Privacy Abuse, Websites and Social Media Monitor), recorded 20,984 website checks across 15 monitored political party websites on August 15, including the night before the election.
According to the latest report released on Sunday, the monitored websites recorded an overall success rate of 80.58 per cent, while the digital risk score stood at 41 out of 100, classified as moderate.
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The latest findings represented a slight improvement from an earlier assessment conducted on August 8, 9 and 13, which recorded a 79.61 per cent success rate and the same risk score of 41 out of 100.
CITAD said the earlier assessment recorded no incidents, indicating that the overall digital environment remained relatively stable throughout the monitoring period.
However, the organisation identified some areas requiring further investigation.
Of the 15 monitored websites, 10 were classified as operational, four as operational with anomalies, while one was classified as unreachable from the monitoring server.
The website of the Allied Peoples Movement (APM) recorded the most significant concern, as all three checks conducted during the final verification period failed.
The monitoring system repeatedly returned an “isp_block_detected” result. Although the website returned response code 200 during the checks, PAWSOM-MONITOR classified it as “Unreachable From Monitor” with moderate confidence.
CITAD, however, cautioned that the finding did not by itself establish that the APM website had been blocked or deliberately restricted.
The Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) website was accessible during all three checks but was classified as “Operational With Anomalies”.
The websites of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), National Democratic Congress (NDC) and Zenith Labour Party were also classified as operational with anomalies and were recommended for further human review.
Overall, PAWSOM-MONITOR recorded 16,908 successful checks against 4,076 failed checks during the monitoring period.
CITAD urged political parties participating in the Osun election to take the availability, security and reliability of their official digital platforms seriously and promptly address technical concerns and anomalies identified by the monitoring system.
The organisation also advised political parties and candidates preparing for the 2027 general elections to proactively address technical, accessibility and security concerns that could undermine their ability to communicate effectively with voters.
It recommended that political parties establish mechanisms for regularly monitoring their websites and official social media accounts to quickly detect outages, account restrictions, hacking attempts, impersonation, loss of access and other technical or security challenges.
Political parties and candidates were further advised to ensure that their official social media accounts were clearly identifiable and adequately secured against account takeover, impersonation and other forms of digital abuse.
CITAD stressed that no confirmed incident of deliberate censorship, politically motivated website blocking or external interference was established by the monitoring system during the reporting period.
It explained that PAWSOM-MONITOR’s automated findings were designed to identify signals requiring further investigation and could not, on their own, establish responsibility for any disruption.
The organisation also said the pilot monitoring exercise had focused primarily on website availability due to the limited deployment period of less than one week, while some of the platform’s other functions were deferred.
It said the broader objective of PAWSOM-MONITOR included monitoring the abuse of communication platforms used by political parties and candidates, as well as assessing compliance with the Nigeria Data Protection Act.
According to CITAD, it will update PAWSOM-MONITOR over the next few weeks and deploy its full monitoring features ahead of the 2027 general elections.
The expanded system will monitor both websites and social media handles of political parties and candidates, while also tracking the use of voters’ personal data to identify possible violations of the Nigeria Data Protection Act in the electoral context.
CITAD Executive Director, YZ Ya’u, said the organisation would continue monitoring Nigeria’s digital electoral environment, with particular attention to website availability, possible access disruptions, DNS anomalies and other digital rights concerns that could affect the ability of political parties, candidates and citizens to participate meaningfully in the electoral process.
