Fake News Africa: Here’s Facebook Action, Strategy

The advent of globalisation and the associated increase in internet penetration of various countries has broadened the use of social medial for news and information sharing, multimedia message sharing among others. Several countries have emplaced varying degree of measures to regulate the use of the social media also known as the digital media. However, with a constantly increasing internet usage, it has been quite difficult keeping a proper check on information that is disseminated through the social media.

This limited ability to regulate and confirm the validity of the information that is spread through the digital media has endangered the political structure of several countries. A clear example is the 2016 United States of America’s presidential election.

The election was characterised by several false information being disseminated through the digital medial in an attempt to sway voters. To a reasonable extent, some school of thoughts have opined that the spread of fake news such as the news on Hilary Clinton being responsible for a child molesting centre few days before the election contributed to the election of Donald Trump as US President.

The Way Forward

Facebook which is one of the digital media giant has commenced measures that are geared towards curbing fake news in Africa. One of these measures includes the February 2019 partnership with DUBAWA and Africa Check amongst other fact checking platforms in order to fact check information before they are allowed to spread through Facebook. This measure is envisaged to significantly curb the menace of fake news through the digital media and hopefully restore some level of confidence in digital medial news pretty soon.