AFRICA
Alliance of organisations to combat fake health news
International and regional organisations, together with fact-checking groups, have joined forces to form the Africa Infodemic Response Alliance (AIRA) in a bid to detect, disrupt, counter and combat the ‘infodemic’ of misinformation surrounding COVID-19 and other health emergencies on the continent.The launch of the alliance was announced by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 3 December.
The alliance aims to support African countries in the development of ‘infodemic’ strategies, which could include the timeous sharing of details of misinformation on health issues by media outlets and journalists.
“AIRA is a big milestone in the fight against the COVID-19 infodemic and health misinformation in Africa,” AbdelHalim AbdAllah, from the AIRA Network Secretariat at the WHO Regional Office for Africa in Congo, told University World News.
The alliance members are Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the United Nations Verified initiative, the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNESCO and United Nations Global Pulse. Participating and supporting bodies include fact-checking organisations such as Africa Check, Agence France-Presse Fact Check, PesaCheck, Dubawa and Meedan.
Larry Atkins, a journalism professor at Temple University in the US and the author of the 2016 book, Skewed: A critical thinker’s guide to media bias, welcomed the launch of AIRA.
“Not only is there a worldwide coronavirus pandemic, there is a worldwide pandemic of misinformation being spread regarding COVID-19, including in Africa. Fact-checking organisations such as AIRA are essential in educating people on scientific facts and truth so that people can make informed choices about their actions and behaviour,” said Atkins.
Although Africa accounts for only about 3% of the global total of COVID-19 cases — about two million out of about 66 million — and 53,000 out of 1.6 million deaths — the African continent faces a problem familiar throughout the world: pandemic misinformation.
The database of Princeton University project on COVID-19 misinformation narratives includes nearly 400 stories that have been circulated in Sub-Saharan Africa since late January.
Idayat Hassan, director of the Centre for Democracy and Development, Nigeria, told University World News: “NAIR is a welcome development to fight the infodemic, as well as allowing the generation of context-specific knowledge on how misinformation is affecting the COVID-19 responses on the African continent.
“The lack of knowledge production on how misinformation is affecting the COVID-19 response itself has led to several people dying from fake cures, disbelieving the virus is real,” added Hassan, who is the author of a March 2020 article titled “The other COVID-19 pandemic: Fake news”.
Academic community’s role
AbdAllah said there was a lot to learn about infodemics and the African academic community would play a crucial role in supporting AIRA’s research agenda, since research was one of five areas of work for the alliance.
“Over the coming year, the AIRA secretariat will be engaging with the African academic community to try to find answers to research questions around infodemics and infodemic management,” AbdAllah said.
“With the African region taking on a leadership role in forming regional collaborations to fight infodemics, we hope to also be the first region to have university programmes and dedicated research centres for the study of infodemiology and infodemic management,” AbdAllah said.
Asked about the significance of AIRA for African universities, John Elvis Hagan Jr, a senior lecturer at the department of health, physical education and recreation of the college of education studies at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, told University World News: “African universities, as part of their social and corporate responsibilities, have a key mandate towards providing deeper insights on the mechanisms that may foster beliefs, their acceptance and or rejection of somewhat false information related to COVID-19.
“Therefore, multidisciplinary collaborations with sister institutions of higher learning could provide useful insights on the linkages between the epidemiological concepts and behavioural practices that would guide effective interventions toward managing the virus by using the reduction of fake news or misinformation as a control strategy,” added Hagan who is the co-author of a June 2020 study, “Rising above misinformation or fake news in Africa: Another strategy to control COVID-19 spread”.
Asked about the support African universities could offer to AIRA, Hagan said: “African universities ought to partner with scientific and research institutions [such as the Africa Centre for Disease Control, WHO] to provide accurate public health information related to COVID-19 to guard against misinformation and the numerous conspiracy theories on COVID-19 churned out by the media, political actors, social commentators as well as on social media by internet bloggers.
“Applied research from African universities and partnering institutions on the use of innovative technologies (including natural language processing, text-mining methods – data-mining algorithms) to recognise online content that have no scientific basis would be very crucial towards the fight against the COVID-19 infodemic,” Hagan added.