The Minister of Communications, Digital Technology and Innovation, Samuel Nartey George, has disclosed that his ministry has taken action resulting in the removal of graphic footages of the helicopter crash on August 6 from Facebook and Instagram.
Speaking on JoyNews on Tuesday, August 12, 2025, he said his ministry made this possible by reaching out to the Meta team, which he says has a moderation unit based in Ghana, to remove the footages that were circulating on its platforms.
This follows widely circulated footage shared on several social media platforms in the aftermath of the fatal helicopter crash at Adansi Sikaman on August 6, 2025, which claimed eight lives.
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Meta has a content moderation team in the country. As soon as we reached out to them, that the footage was not just circulated on WhatsApp but also on Instagram and Facebook; it was done. On Instagram and Facebook, a lot of that content has been removed. If you go online today on Facebook and Instagram, you will hardly see the footage that we’re talking about of charred remains burning. Almost all of it has been taken off. That’s what we’ve done with Meta, he said.
According to him, they faced challenges in trying to stop the footage from further being shared on WhatsApp and haven it entirely removed.
He explained that due to the platforms policies and its end-to-end encryption, the videos could not be blocked or removed from WhatsApp.
However, when it comes to WhatsApp, the policy of META was that they would not be able to block encrypted conversations between two people because it’s end to end. You realise that they’ve changed their policy. At first you could actually just send a video to hundreds of people in your contact, now you can send to a maximum of I think five at a time and it has to be people you are encrypted end to end with and all of that, he continued.
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Sam George assured of his ministrys commitment and willingness to engage with platform operators to address issues of this nature.
I think that at the policy level when we meet at International Forum, we’re still going to pick that up with the platform operators and say to them that there are issues like this where the platform should be able to say that, look, we’re taking this off, whether it’s encrypted or not, we will block this. It ought to be possible. But like I keep saying, we will work not in isolation, but with best practices. We’re working with platform operators, he added.
The minister, who is also the Member of Parliament for Ningo-Prampram, made this known when he hinted at his ministrys plan to implement legislation aimed at guiding the medias reportage and coverage of tragedies in a more respectful and less graphic manner.
MAG/VPO
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