DISABLING DISINFORMATION IN AFRICA: BUILDING A COMMUNITY OF CRITICAL PRAXIS
BACKGROUND
As part of the Africa Center’s ongoing work to understand and mitigate disinformation, this workshop brought together 26 leading African counter-disinformation practitioners, researchers, and civil society stakeholders in Nairobi, Kenya on December 7-8, 2022. The purpose of this gathering was to establish and empower a trusted community to exchange information and strategies, identify gaps in current practices, and develop a collaborative space to accelerate the development of effective African counter-disinformation measures.
Combatting disinformation is a challenge unique to the digital age and the connectivity it makes possible. Expanding internet penetration is providing African countries with a promising array of socio-economic opportunities but has also opened the door to new supercharged ways for malign actors to disinform citizens through coordinated and concealed campaigns. This shifting landscape is swiftly bringing the continent into the global question of what digitalized information ecosystems will deliver.
These spaces could be open, reliable, and public-serving platforms. Alternately, Africa’s information systems could be intentionally warped and weaponized to spread deceptive and divisive content that neutralizes the exchange of competing ideas, transparency, and accountability--processes that undergird democratic societies. The latter is being aggressively pursued by anti-democratic actors who have identified and sought to exploit vulnerabilities in digital networks. Their systematic assault on accurate and accessible information is a threat that Africans are increasingly concerned about and devising strategies to counter. As part of this, African citizens are spearheading efforts to build resilience and African ownership over changing information systems.
This workshop sought to connect and support leaders in these efforts by facilitating discussions and strategic thinking. Following is a distillation of some of the key observations from these discussions as well as priority actions identified for countering disinformation on the continent. Africa Center for Strategic Studies
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
i. Understanding the moment
ii. Sponsors and African contexts
iii. The African case study highlights
iv. Towards a counter strategy
v. Gaps and pathways forward
Understanding the Moment: What we are up against and why it is a different beast an evolving digital threat to democracies. The workshop clarified the concept of disinformation, distinguishing it from earlier analog forms of authoritarian propaganda as well as from normative democratic forms of influence-making. A working definition of disinformation used at the workshop was: the intentional dissemination of false or misleading content, often through deceptive digital channels, for political purposes. Narrowly scoping disinformation to its most malign forms allows for focused counter strategies and a clear articulation of why disinformation poses a threat to democratic stability.
Contemporary disinformation campaigns leverage the algorithmic reach and anonymity provided by web-based media platforms to systematically seed and amplify inauthentic and false content. These tactics are asymmetric tools that can be initiated inexpensively from a distant location to manipulate the information landscape for millions of people. By doing so, the sponsors of these campaigns can dominate users’ online experiences, feeding them unreliable and polarizing information that they perceive as coming from authentic voices. These distortionary strategies are inherently anti-democratic and are often part of a broader political objective. By deliberately cloaking their origins and seeking to spread demonstratively false information, these operations deviate from the public diplomacy and persuasion strategies practiced by democracies in the pursuit of domestic and international affairs.
A multi-faceted problem spanning the supply and demand of information systems. Workshop participants underscored how systematic, sophisticated, relentless, and multidimensional disinformation campaigns targeting Africa have become. Participants described a plague of disinformation directed at citizens, particularly around pro-democracy movements, elections, and moments of crisis and uncertainty. Several participants mentioned that they came away with a deepened appreciation for the extent and seriousness of the problem and the fact that we likely only know a fraction of the webs of coordinated disinformation being spun across the continent.
Africa Center for Strategic Studies Combatting disinformation requires understanding the inner workings and interactions of complex human and technological systems, political and economic incentives, and state and non-state actors spanning the supply and demand sides of the problem. Malign actors produce false narratives and seek to weaponize media distribution and consumption channels to broadcast these misleading stories through highly coordinated and deeply networked campaigns. Social media platforms and search engines often enable disinformation for economic reasons, distributing its charged content through their algorithmic networks for clicks while declining to invest in monitoring it adequately.
Segments of the public consume and amplify this content through practices informed by culture, psychology, and history as the false content and misleading narratives may align with their assumptions, speak to perceived grievances, or stir emotionally charged responses (humor, outrage, surprise). Each of these stages of creating and spreading disinformation requires specific attention and contextualized counter strategies to address the full spectrum of the problem. A response as agile and robust as the challenge. There was consensus around the need for a multi-tentacled counter-disinformation strategy that entails a whole-of-society approach to address both the supply and demand side of the problem. The workshop focused on the vanguard of this strategy—the on-the-ground work already underway and led by non-state actors (civil society, researchers, and journalists) and what a successful pathway forward for their collaboration and enhanced undertakings looks like. Participants evaluated what was working and also identified remaining hurdles and how to address them. Promising work is underway but gaps remain. Participants assessed current African counter-disinformation efforts as having made significant strides in the past several years yet still having considerable ground to make up in the face of the scale and sophistication of the challenge.
Current efforts were described as outnumbered, fragmented, underfunded, and at times complacent. In scoring their countries’ success in mitigating disinformation on a scale of 1-5, estimates ranged from .3 to 3, underlining the need for more concerted and integrated strategies.
II. The Sponsors of Disinformation Targeting Africa and Their Objectives Russia. With more than 16 known operations on the continent, Russia has been the leading purveyor of disinformation campaigns in Africa. The Kremlin’s coercive and irregular strategies Africa Center for Strategic Studies for gaining influence on the continent are predicated on the continual obfuscation and misdirection that disinformation provides. Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch who leads the infamous Wagner Group paramilitary force, has exported disinformation campaigns to every African country where Wagner has operated, leveraging the fact that informational confusion can be as effective as strict autocratic control and censorship for insulating corrupt and despotic elites from public accountability.
Creating a climate of uncertainty and distrust, Russia’s multi-channel disinformation system is designed to drive citizens away from public forums and to throw up their hands in bewilderment at the onslaught of misleading and contradictory information they come across. These campaigns also seek to indoctrinate a subset of true believers—often discontented young men in urban settings with time to spend online—who amplify Russian disinformation by proxy. Russian messaging seeks to prop up weak and isolated regimes (such as CAR and Mali) that are dependent on the Kremlin and to push pro-Russian narratives that present the Wagner as saviors and Putin as a friend of Africa in a global conflict against the West. Russia’s disinformation system operates through multiple channels simultaneously to reinforce and amplify its messaging by continuously pumping out a high volume of skewed, misleading, and false information across print, radio, in-person (including orchestrated street protests and false flag ops), and digital mediums—and then cross-amplifying all of these formats.
Over time, Russia has become increasingly sophisticated in franchising its disinformation efforts to third parties (to present its messages as coming from African voices) and in infiltrating closed platforms (WhatsApp and Telegram) to avoid detection and takedowns. Chinese Communist Party. Compared to Russia, disinformation strategies deployed by China in Africa have flown relatively under the radar. This is a product of the slicker design and a better-masked rollout of Chinese disinformation, which has made it potentially more resilient and successful than the destabilizing Russian disinformation model.
The early 2000s “media going out” era of the CCP’s information strategies (when, for example, media hubs for Xinhua and CGTN were established in Nairobi) has been superseded by a new era under the umbrella of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative (popularly known as the “Belt and Road Initiative”). Part of OBOR is massive infrastructure funding for a digital “silk road” along which CCP disinformation strategies are being laid out. The provision of this infrastructure to African countries is accompanied by the deployment of the Chinese informational ideology developed by the formerly named Central Propaganda Department (now the Publicity Department of the Central Committee). The United Front Work Department (UFWD) has been central to the transfer of an ideology based on closed and closely controlled information Africa Center for Strategic Studies systems to China’s foreign OBOR partners.
This model involves strict control over information via the amplification of official narratives, internet blockages and blackouts, and a media profession trained to endorse state narratives. In Africa, the CCP has promoted this ideological model through several pathways:
1. Artificially amplifying Chinese diplomats and state narratives on social media;
2. Leveraging ownership stakes in African media groups to influence their editorial practices;
3. Co-opting African voices to amplify Chinese narratives that are not based on the facts—an example being secret payments to African social media influencers to promote Chinese messages.
Underfunded and weak, Africa’s media environment has proved vulnerable to these types of attacks and manipulation. Domestic African actors. Examples from Uganda, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo illustrate that domestic political actors in Africa have adopted and adapted sophisticated disinformation strategies to their purposes. In the lead-up to the January 2021 presidential election in Uganda, press freedom was severely curtailed. Opposition politicians, especially the youth movement led by Bobi Wine’s National Unity Platform (NUP), turned to social media to share information and to provide organizing updates on the election. The ruling party’s disinformation network tried to undermine the opposition’s social media efforts and the growing popularity of the NUP by promoting false narratives and denigrating Bobi Wine as well as posting in support of Museveni. In the DRC, fake accounts and pages were rebranded from being “clickbait” to seemingly legitimate news organizations and political pages.
They were then able to spread flattering stories in support of a Congolese politician. In many African contexts, particularly autocratic-leaning states, domestic political actors have been the beneficiaries of foreign-backed disinformation campaigns. Savvy African political actors have leveraged and amplified these campaigns with their networks. An example of this comes from Sudan where the Rapid Support Forces have welcomed Wagner’s portrayal of the other transitional actors as pawns of the United States.
As Tessa Knight has described, coordinated domestic disinformation uncovered is likely just the tip of the iceberg. It is almost certainly expanding as governments and political figures learn to Africa Center for Strategic Studies 6 manipulate social media algorithms through fake, duplicated, and coordinated content production. Militant Islamist Groups. Al Shabaab in East Africa and Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Basin have leveraged social media to spread their militant Islamist ideologies and to recruit new members. They have been early adopters of new technology and adaptive in their use of it. Al Shabab has developed interlinked websites and social media pages in Kiswahili and Somali, including 30 Facebook pages with over 39,000 followers, which have been used to call for violence around Kenya’s elections. These pages are backed up offline so that they can be quickly put back online if they are detected and removed. These pages direct followers to the Telegraph and other closed social media platforms where individuals can be indoctrinated and recruited without any content moderation.
The continued existence and pathways of these Facebook pages and Telegram channels point to glaring holes in social media platforms’ content moderation despite their claims of success in removing militant Islamist pages and content. Additional external actors. Several other external actors have been active in sponsoring disinformation campaigns targeting Africa. These include Iran, Israel, and the Gulf States (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar) The overlapping messages from multiple disinformation actors are a distinguishing feature of many of Africa’s information ecosystems. This complex reality complicates disinformation work, which must disentangle multiple messages, actors, and geo-strategic objectives to inform and build resilience to these campaigns. III. African Case Study Highlights Sudan.
By 2012 there were 15 million Sudanese internet users out of 40 million people in the country. Many Sudanese rely on Facebook for news. Online spaces were critical to the organization and messaging of the movement that forced al-Bashir’s regime from power in 2019. During the revolution and in the rocky transition that followed, there was a war over information. Military factions and armed groups have purchased newspapers and sponsored online disinformation campaigns. Beam Reports and other research organizations such as DRFLabs have revealed that much of the disinformation targeting Sudan is emanating from the military leaders vying for power. The Sudanese Armed Forces and Sudanese intelligence services led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan often appear to be supported in these campaigns by Egypt and Russia. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemetti”) have at times been backed by disinformation emanating from Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates.
However, alliances in Africa Center for Strategic Studies 7 the disinformation realm have not been clear-cut, with multiple actors. This underscores the multi-dimensional nature of Sudan’s information wars. Additionally, external actors are sponsoring their campaigns, such as Russia’s social media blitz around its desire to acquire a Red Sea naval base and its attacks on pro-democracy groups, as well as Ethiopia’s campaigns around the Renaissance Dam to harm Sudan-Egypt relations. Some pro-democracy groups have grown frustrated and have misguidedly dabbled in their small-scale attempts at disinformation, mainly through the promotion of fake and misleading photos/videos attacking the military and RSF.
Disinformation campaigns in Sudan have often come pre/post significant political turning points in the country’s recent history. For example, after the 2021 coup, a campaign attacked and disparaged pro-democracy movements. In the lead-up to the military government expelling the head of the UN mission, an online campaign targeted the head of the mission. This campaign was linked to military accounts. Some of the techniques used to spread disinformation in Sudan include creating social media pages sharing straightforward news building a following and then pivoting to gradually spread disinformation. Disinformation actors purchased some of these news pages. Many young Sudanese social media users are savvy and engaged in spotting RSF/SAF disinformation and calling it out. The capacity to research and uncover coordinated inauthentic activity is still relatively low as this work requires specialized investigative journalism skills. Since independent journalism was not permitted under Bashir, few Sudanese have these skills even if they are technologically savvy.
Participants expressed hope that Sudan’s resistance committees would learn from Egypt where media outlets were bought out and manipulated to reputation wash democracy leaders following the revolution there. Several East African participants noted that they are seeing a lot of the same misleading online content disseminated in Sudan. This is a reminder of the inherently transnational nature of digital spaces. Kenya.
The disinformation environment in Kenya is one of the better-studied online spaces in Africa. Disinfo attacks have targeted the electoral process. The IEBC (Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission) has been subject to campaigns to discredit their work and neutrality. These include huge hyperactive Twitter campaigns to spread disinformation about the Commission’s chair (including fake screenshots of WhatsApp chats between him and politicians). Research has been done to map the hashtags these campaigns have used to show Africa Center for Strategic Studies the common actors behind their coordinated spread. Kenya’s judiciary and judicial process have been the target of similar attacks.
TikTok in Kenya appears to be inundated with disinformation. Many conspiracy videos are viral among Kenya’s users. There are known disinformation spreaders who have been banned from Twitter and Facebook in Kenya but continue to be active on TikTok. Meanwhile, when civil society groups in Kenya toured the country for voter education, they found apathy among many young people who asked why the IEBC wasn’t on TikTok. Africa Check is communicating with IEBC about working with them to share fact checks on IEBC’s social media pages. They are working to develop a pre-bunking model of proactive debunking and explaining ahead of the next election. Disinformation in Kenya is profitable. Paid “keyboard warriors” can make a living creating fake accounts and posting fake and misleading content in coordination with other actors.
Russia is using religion in Kenya to propagate its influence online through disinformation campaigns with narratives such as “Thank you Putin for securing the fate of Christianity in Kenya.” Like in Sudan, regionality features in Kenya’s disinformation challenges. Many of the sponsors of campaigns affecting Kenyan social media spaces, including Russia, operate sock puppet networks that are regional in their messaging. China appears to have recruited a regional network of Africans who write pro-Chinese articles that are published and spread online in Kenya.
Central African Republic. Disinformation campaigns create influence in countries with weak media institutions, like CAR and Mali, by reaching both on and offline populations through multiple channels. This can be best countered by strengthening trusted media outlets. Launched in 2000 by Fondation Hirondelle, Radio Ndeke Luka is the most trusted and listened-to radio in CAR. 63% of the country listens to it daily. Studies show that listeners to Radio Luka are more likely to verify information and think twice before sharing it. Radio Luka is a success story about building a trusted platform for information and is much more relied upon than Wagner-connected Radio Sengo in CAR. South Africa.
Disinformation is a potent political tactic in South Africa. During the state capture campaign by the Gupta brothers in the 2010s, a public relations company, Bell Pottinger, generated inaccurate and misleading content to distract the public from corruption revelations. Participants underscored that Bell Pottinger’s role in this disinformation was the company’s downfall (it went into bankruptcy in 2017)—a reminder that consequences are possible for disinformation actors when civil society organizations hold them accountable. Africa Center for Strategic Studies.
Media literacy and fact checks have faced limitations in South Africa when the targeted audience strongly wants to believe the disinformation (especially around charged topics like xenophobia towards migrants) because it affirms their existing points of view. South Africa is the world’s most unequal society (World Bank), which contributes to these dynamics. Nigeria. Several participants spoke about their work in Nigeria and the challenges its media markets and online spaces present. One success relayed by fact-checkers in the group is the development that Nigerian politicians are now aware that their statements will be fact-checked and have acknowledged that this has made them more careful about the claims they make.
The Nigeria Factcheckers Coalition has fact-checked five presidential town halls. Nonetheless, countering disinformation is still a niche field in Nigeria’s media spaces. There is a cautious desire among Nigerians working on counter disinformation to involve government agencies since that is seen as a key step in making an impact to moderate social media spaces and demand action on the part of social media companies. However, there are concerns about the incentives of governmental actors who may be overzealous and counterproductive in their responses. Other participants stressed that democratic-leaning countries have been more resilient to disinformation and that to keep this momentum, policymakers need to be educated about the problem and non-governmental actors need to find areas of common ground to begin making strategic regulatory inroads.
Towards a Multi-stakeholder Counter-Disinformation Model “Hostile influence operations are repositioning the citizen in the vanguard of security” Contrasting anti-communication. Much disinformation is effectively “anti-communication” aimed at subverting constructive and open dialogue across both on- and offline spaces. Combatting disinformation must therefore seek the opposite: to cultivate constructive, trustworthy, and ongoing exchanges. This can be a delicate and challenging process, especially in places already under the corrosive influence of widespread disinformation or where regimes in power benefit from or are complicit in the disinformation being disseminated.
Citizens are not waiting around to act and are working with groups they trust or founding new organizations to protect pathways to reliable information and build safer online spaces. Credible and adaptive pillars. Strengthening these established initiatives that citizens trust and supporting their replication offers an entry point for mitigating disinformation. The trusted “2018 Ranking of Counter Measures by the EU28 to the Kremlin’s Subversion Operations,” European Values, August 18, 2018. Africa Center for Strategic Studies groups involved in these efforts are often civil society organizations, education institutions, and media. In many countries in Africa, nongovernmental organizations and media are among the most trusted pillars of society.
In Kenya, civil society organizations recently passed media as the most trusted institution in the country, reflecting the faith citizens put in their work.2 In addition to their credibility, non-governmental actors (NGAs) encompassing civil society, media, and educational organizations often benefit from their adaptability and their ability to innovate quickly, allowing them to keep pace with the constantly evolving strategies deployed by disinformation actors. These groups also operate close to the ground, putting them in a position to understand the impact of disinformation and to rapidly react. Charting a concerted and collaborative course.
NGAs are most effective when they focus on working as part of a dense collaborative ecosystem to fight disinformation on all the fronts required. Societies with healthy information spaces rely on multiple layers and institutions to create protection and empowerment. In combatting disinformation, the vision is towards a whole-of-society approach with a high degree of interoperability. This framework will inevitably require adaptation depending on the specific context but provides a starting point for a multistage strategy. “73% Of Kenyans Trust NGOs Than Any Other Institution,” March 11, 2022. Africa Center for Strategic Studies.
A strategic entry point: strengthening societal awareness and resilience. Efforts to address the demand side of disinformation (the public’s consumption and interaction with it) are underway in certain African countries. NGAs are strategically focusing on what is most within their power and scope: raising societal understanding about disinformation and building resilience to it through new initiatives and networks. This approach recognizes that citizens equipped with the knowledge and tools to recognize and raise awareness about untrusted sources can help slow the reach and potency of disinformation by choosing not to amplify it in their networks.
Currently, awareness about disinformation, how to define it, and how it works in digital spaces, is low in many African countries. As internet penetration expands rapidly, many African countries are also starting from a low point in their digital literacy. Focusing on citizens’ awareness and resilience can have a major impact, but it is important to recognize that it faces inherent limitations to what the public can accomplish in countering the deluge of disinformation. Effectively containing the supply side (production and distribution) of disinformation necessitates the cooperation of social media companies as well as receptive policymakers. This remains an uphill struggle.
To illuminate disinformation’s threat to democracy and African sovereignty, it is important to connect the dots and map out exactly who is behind disinformation campaigns, their ties and objectives, and the negative impact they are having on information ecosystems. This research continues to be more of an art than a science, requiring different methods and creativity. The skillset that investigative journalists develop is well suited to this kind of puzzle-solving. The role of independent media outlets, professional media training, and protections for journalists are essential to supporting this type of work. Trained open-source intelligence (OSINT) researchers are also adept at this type of actor mapping, which reveals the common denominators behind disinformation campaigns and exposes their intentions: why they are going to these covert extremes to manipulate the public and avoid scrutiny.
This skill set is developing in Africa as journalists, fact-checkers, and coders see its importance, but it is still a small community of individuals doing this kind of investigative analysis for public consumption. Communicating with the public. Getting digestible research into the hands of the public is crucial for creating a counter-disinformation impact. Strategically communicating this information to the people confronting disinformation directly and providing them with tools to guard against it is a huge challenge as it requires reaching millions of people in a crowded global information environment.
The online information environment is fragmented and differs by location and platform. This means that disinformation awareness building must be multichannel, proactive, and context-specific to meet people where they are and anticipate disinfo trends before they spread. Counter-disinformation tools and analysis can attain greater reach when they are communicated through a diversity of mediums including, social media sites, radio programming, and video platforms. Strategies that leverage micro-influencers, prebunking, partnerships with community-level online pages/groups, and rapid reaction initiatives (ideally in partnership with social media companies) during moments of information confusion can deliver timely information to citizens through trusted channels.
Building trust in counter-disinformation analysis through quality controls and branding is a key step in strategic communication. Factcheck groups and research hubs in Africa are aware of this and are solidifying their reputation through consistent work and an accessible interface. They are also working with local partners and influencers to promote their work. Africa Center for Strategic Studies Quality multilingual content is key to gaining traction with local audiences and creating impact. Examples from participants included educational cartoons, short videos, well-designed intuitive websites, and online games.
This content was tailored to the languages and ways of speaking that the intended audiences would recognize and engage. Part of educating the public includes empowering people to search for reliable information themselves, to discern disinformation, and to explain the cost of disinformation to their networks. Digital literacy training and civic education courses for young people and the media are being rolled out in creative ways by groups like the Youth Café in Kenya and Pen Plus Bytes in Ghana. Stitching together these efforts. Successful counter-disinformation organizations intentionally undertake all three elements of researching, mapping, and communicating themselves or through collaborations. An African example of this model is Beam Reports in Sudan, which is explicitly organized into three components: fact-checking (researching claims and debunking), explanatory reporting (connecting the dots for the public on the actors and objectives), and social affairs (understanding the social context and communicating effectively). Beam publishes its findings in Arabic to best reach its audience and produces short videos explaining its findings. Its team also actively uses social media and colloquial humor to call out and raise awareness of disinformation on the platforms that Sudanese young people are using.
Citizens in Sudan enjoy and engage in this content, further amplifying it. Learning from the Debunk Model. Founded in 2017 and based in Lithuania, Debunk.org is an independent technology think tank and NGO that carries out disinformation analysis and runs educational media literacy campaigns in 8 countries. Debunk.org was established in response to Russian disinformation campaigns targeting the Baltics and the poorly developed and coordinated media/strat-comm response to those information attacks. A flexible and incremental framework. Debunk’s rapid progression into a multi-faceted and trusted hub of analysis, communication, and training provides lessons for how to build, connect, and strengthen Africa’s counter-disinformation responses.
The core of Debunk’s credibility comes from the research methodology it has developed to expose disinformation campaigns through clear evidence, to understand the local context, and to map the sponsors of these campaigns. Working with the EU and other leading organizations to synchronize best practices, this model has taken time and trial and error to refine and put into practice. Through training of researchers and dedicated volunteers who provide data on closed platforms (WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.) Debunk has created a coordinated team. Debunk has also invested in strategic communication tools, forming partnerships with local media to disseminate their findings through trusted channels. As they have expanded their reach as a trusted platform, Debunk has pursued campaigns to pressure tech companies into taking Africa Center for Strategic Studies action to avoid amplifying disinformation and has begun helping to shape policies and laws to hold disinformation sponsors accountable in Lithuania, including work to criminalize the construction of bot farms. In recent years, Debunk has expanded further to work closely with Lithuanian’s Parliament and governmental agencies to strategically use the power of the government to communicate about, regulate, and prosecute disinformation.
This has been an incremental process of educating government officials and politicians and understanding the environment in which they are operating. By learning from Debunk’s approach and timeline, African counter-disinformation practitioners may be able to accelerate their work and avoid reinventing the wheel for what works. Challenges for Researchers, Reporters, and Civil Society and What Can Be Done Workshop participants were asked to break into three groups based on their primary professional roles: researchers, reporters, and civil society leaders.
The groups discussed areas where they have seen their profession make progress in countering disinformation, the challenges that they’re currently facing, possible solutions to those challenges, and ways forward toward actualizing those solutions . Africa Center for Strategic Studies Research CSOs + Fact Checking Orgs Media Enhancing understanding Countering disinfo Providing training and capacity to counter disinfo Building an evidence base Combining fact checking with gamification Forming partnerships and cross-publish Transfering knowledge across contexts Publishing major disinfo efforts Linguisitic and cultural diversity Expertise on context beyond fact checking Extensive networks of fathering and assesing counter disinfo Elevating storytelling about counter disinfo campaigns Collecting evidence Disinfo speed Funding Capacity Traditional media propogates disinfo Carrying the weight alone Access to data Scalability and reach of fact checking Lack of cohesive public sphere/echo chambers Reliable funding Efforts are not always evidence-based Lack of technical expertise Fragmentation.
Lack of access to best media monitoring tools Cognitive biases with readers and journalists Competition between researchers Quantifying impact Lack of coordination in covering stories; choosing what to fact check Translate fact checking into local languages Coordination across languages [word] Build more extensive, coordinated counter disinfo partnerships Funding Regional level counter disinfo campaigns and coordination Training with counter disinfo, access to tools Sustainable funding Critical thinking across contexts Focus on who is spreading the disinfo, networks involved Need training for nontraditional places like radio, Tik Tok, offline spaces Clue + fact checking Combine counter disinfo efforts with use of influencers, gamers, accessible efforts Build multistakeholder network to do things we can only do together Build local capacity through funding, tool, and tech 4) Ways Forward Networks of journalists Democratize access to data Getting media attention by mapping actors Forming fact checking coalitions (i.e. in Nigeria; at the regional level) Build partnerships between research organizations Use Artificial Intelligence + Machine Learning to increase scalability of counter disinfo efforts 1) Successes 2) Challenges 3) Solutions Africa Center for Strategic Studies Each of the three workshop breakout groups underscored the need for regional/continental coordination in the face of campaigns that are often sponsored from abroad and multinational in nature.
They also emphasized the funding challenges they face and the barriers that competing for the same sources of funding creates for collaboration. Researchers. Capacity, data, and collaboration. This group underscored that there is currently a shortage of trained researchers capable of doing disinformation analysis and actor mapping in Africa. They stressed that data access is one of the largest challenges they face as social media companies are scaling back what information they make available and as African researchers face barriers to even accessing that information given social media companies’ focus on EuroAmerican countries and their privileging of partnerships in those countries. They also discussed how competition between researchers means that data is not shared and that there can be redundancies in findings produced by multiple organizations.
Another issue is the variety of methods, platforms, and tools that these groups are using, which can hinder the interpretation of results and create an unnecessary sequence of trial and error for each research team. Other researchers stressed that there is not enough community-level work being done to assess the attitudes and perspectives of African consumers of information and to understand their information practices and perspectives, which is especially important for designing counter-disinformation communication strategies that resonate and are effective at the local level. Partnerships and data access. This group suggested that research partnerships on the continent and with European and American.
The organizations could help strengthen their work and open avenues for gaining access to better information. Lobbying and devising mechanisms for open access to social media data and algorithms is another longer-term goal. Reporters. Coordination, breaking through, and technical literacy. Reporters in the room noted that they often struggle to grasp how digital disinformation operates and to understand its implications and how it is affecting society. They mentioned that there are no good mechanisms for coordinating coverage of stories between outlets and reporters, which can result in many stories on one country/event but relatively few on another. They pointed out the challenges of breaking through in a media environment clouded by disinformation and in which consumers are fragmented and often siloed in their information spheres. Training and cross-language coordination. Training was highlighted by this group as something that more journalists and African media outlets need access to to understand disinformation and how to investigate it. They mentioned that more reporters need to focus on who is spreading disinformation, the networks involved, and why they are doing it. This often entails the need to work across languages and regions and connect broader dots. Africa Center for Strategic Studies 19 Civil Society. Scalability, local languages, harassment, impact metrics, and quality.
This group faces an array of challenges, including finding ways for their education programs and fact-checks to reach a critical mass of users. They often struggle to communicate to their audiences since most disinformation tools and reports are not translated into African languages. They can be subjected to harassment by “disinformation militias” who target and troll them online. Assessment is also an ongoing issue for understanding how much impact their work is having on communities and making course corrections based on this data. Several participants said that while many groups are doing quality fact checks and education programs, their work can be hindered by the poor quality of other efforts that are not evidence-based and tarnish the work of the industry. (It is important to note that faux fact-checking and training presented as genuine are also a disinformation tactic). Coordination. This group also pointed to the need for better-coordinated counter-disinformation problem-solving counter disinformation networks to share resources, elevate understanding, and prevent redundancies. Creative solutions and problem-solving. While some of the challenges highlighted by the three groups are unique to African contexts, others have been faced, troubleshot, and overcome by organizations like Debunk in other contexts.
Transferring these lessons through the creation of a community of practice and the organization of informal and formal follow-up exchanges can be a way forward for helping African organizations accelerate their timelines for expanding their impact. Potential Ways Forward for the Counter Disinformation Community of Pratrainingcilitate technical research training between Debunk and African researchers. • Produce and promote research products. • Convene forums for researchers and civil society to engage and educate policymakers and the public. • Organize counter-disinformation programs that bring together French, English, Arabic, and Portuguese speakers to bridge languages and regions in Africa.