INTERNATIONAL NEWS - Concerns about “fake news” have dominated discussions about the relationship between the media and politics in the developed world in recent years. The extraordinary amount of attention paid in scholarship and in public debates to questions around truth, veracity and deception can be connected to the role of “fake news” in the 2016 US presidential election, and US President Donald Trump’s use of the term to dismiss his critics.
The term “fake news” itself is controversial because it’s poorly defined.
The panic created by the spread of misinformation in general has led to introspection by journalists and a reassertion of professional values and standards.
The rise of false information has complex cultural and social reasons. Until now, though, the phenomenon has been studied mostly as it happens in the US and Europe, with relatively little attention to the situation in African countries.
This is despite the fact that disinformation on the continent has often taken the form of extreme speech inciting violence or has spread racist, misogynous, xenophobic messages, often on mobile phone platforms such as WhatsApp.
To fill the gap in information about “fake news” in sub-Saharan Africa, we conducted an online survey in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa earlier this year. Our study had three goals: to measure the prevalence of disinformation, to learn who people believe is responsible for stopping fake news, and to understand the relationship between disinformation and media trust.
Our survey, in which 755 people took part, reused questions from another study on the topic conducted in 2016 by the US-based Pew Research Centre. In this way we are able to compare our results with those in the US.
Our findings suggest that African audiences have low levels of trust in the media, experience a high degree of exposure to misinformation, and contribute – often knowingly – to its spread.
Findings
There are five takeaways from our study.
First, media consumers in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa perceive that they are exposed to “fake news” about politics on a fairly regular basis. Almost half of Kenyan respondents said they often encounter news stories about politics that they think are completely made up. More alarmingly, only a small fraction (ranging from 1% to 3%) say they have never come across fabricated news. In the US, that figure is much higher (12%).
Second, surveyed Africans said they shared “fake news” with a much higher frequency than Americans do: 38% Kenyans, 28% Nigerians and 35% South Africans acknowledged having shared stories which turned out to be made up. In the US only 16% did so. When asked whether they had shared stories that they knew were made up, one-in-five South Africans and one-in-four Kenyans and Nigerians said “yes”.
