No abstract

Social media presents a robust stage for disseminating time-sensitive information that is needed during a public health disease of global concern such as COVID-19. This study finds out how the 23 anglophone Sub-Saharan African countries’ national health ministries and infectious disease agencies disseminated COVID-19 related information through their social media accounts within the first three months after the declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. COVID-19 related qualitative and quantitative data types were collected from the social media accounts of the surveyed national health ministries and agencies for analysis. Over 86% of the African countries had presence on social media; Facebook was the most popular, though Twitter contained more posts. One of the credibility issues that was noticed is that most of the health ministries’ and agencies’ social media accounts were unverified and access to the social media accounts was not provided on most of their official websites. Information dissemination became more deliberate and increased significantly after the announcement of the fist cases of COVID-19 in the countries under review. Awareness creation, updates and news constituted the major categories of information that were disseminated, mostly in the form of derivative social media information before the announcement of the first COVID-19 case in the surveyed African countries. Campaigns against misinformation were barely undertaken by most of the countries. Strategies used by some countries included the employment of social media influencers and creation of content in local languages. Strategies that include development of health information content that targets different groups in African societies and the inclusion of elderly in the community and religious leaders as non-state actors in health information communication were recommended.

With the problem of ‘fake news’ in the digital media, there are efforts at creation of awareness, automation of ‘fake news’ detection and news literacy. This research is descriptive as it pulls evidence from the content of online fabricated news for the features that distinguish fabrications from the legitimate political news around the time of the U.S. Presidential Elections (276 articles in total, from November 2016 ‐ June 2017). Certain stylistic and psycho‐linguistic features of fabrications may be apparent to the news readers: fewer words and paragraphs but longer paragraphs, more slangs, swear words and affective words in the stories. Such features could be used for educational information literacy campaigns for spotting so‐called ‘fake news’. Other informative features may require specialized analytical tools (or further training) to notice the presence of more words, punctuation marks, demonstratives and emotiveness in fabrications but fewer verifiable facts (or named entities) in their headlines.

The LiT.RL News Verification Browser is a research tool for news readers, journalists, editors or information professionals. The tool analyzes the language used in digital news web pages to determine if they are clickbait, satirical news, or falsified news, and visualizes the results by highlighting content in color-coded categories. Although the clickbait, satire, and falsification detectors perform to certain accuracy levels on test data, during real-world internet use accuracy may vary. The browser is not a replacement for digital literacy and is not always correct. All processing is completed on the local machine-results are not sent to or from a remote server. Results may be saved locally to a standard SQLite database for further analysis.