Fact from fiction
Hunting down the fake news frauds
We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic … mis- and disinformation spreads faster and more easily than coronavirus”
Tedros Ghebreyesus
WHO director-general
Herman Wasserman is a hunter, but not the sort that carries a rifle. Wasserman has become one of Africa’s foremost fake news hunters. In the age of disinformation, his experience and ethics are increasingly sought after on the continent and beyond. A University of Cape Town professor, with laser-beam eyes that belie his casual demeanour, Wasserman was awarded a R4.5m grant this year to spearhead a study in the Global South on disinformation “deliberately created to harm a person, social group, organisation or country”.
He is not a traditional white knight but his stand against the dark arts practised online, by freewheeling trolls and their more sinister counterparts, amounts to a quest. Not a futile quest either.
The downfall of Bell Pottinger, after being exposed for orchestrating social media campaigns supporting the Guptas and their state capture cronies in SA, demonstrates that the forces behind the “information disorder” can be stopped, he notes.
“These forces often map onto pre-existing tensions in already polarised societies,” says Wasserman in an interview on campus in the deserted UCT Centre for Film and Media Studies, which he directed from 2015 until 2020. “It is encouraging that we took the fight to them and we won.”
A recent example of the routing of orchestrated forces on social media took place in December 2020 when Facebook removed nearly 500 accounts and pages, set up to manipulate African users, for “co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour”.
These fake accounts — created under names resembling those of local people and where altered photos were shared — were linked to competing Russian and French disinformation campaigns wanting to influence voters in the Central African Republic, according to social media analytics investigator Ben Nimmo.
Facebook said the campaigns targeted the country ahead of its December election but also reached users in 13 other countries, including Libya and Cameroon.
That is why the launch of disinfoafrica.org by Wasserman and professor Dani Madrid-Morales, from the University of Houston, couldn’t come too soon.
Wasserman has been researching misinformation and disinformation in African countries for five years and establishing a platform to track this problem was the logical next step.
“Academic research is often accused of not having practical [value] but it is clear this work has a direct impact. Under the pandemic it has become more urgent,” says Wasserman.
Recognising the power of social media and other platforms to influence people’s behaviour, the World
Health Organisation held its first “infodemiology conference” four months into the pandemic, inviting Wasserman to give a keynote address.
The health body defines an infodemic as an “overabundance of information — some accurate and some not — occurring during an epidemic”.
WHO director-general Tedros Ghebreyesus says: “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic … mis- and disinformation spreads faster and more easily than coronavirus.”
The sources of inaccurate and misleading information vary widely, from family members sharing unfounded miracle cures right into the corridors of power, where no less than the Tanzanian President John Magufuli last month made unfounded claims that Covid-19 vaccines were unsafe.
“Vaccinations are dangerous. If white people were able to come up with vaccinations, a vaccination for Aids would have been found ...,” said the president, urging people instead to steam and pray against coronavirus.
In SA, chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng told a group in prayer at Tembisa Hospital: “If there be any [Covid-19] vaccine that is the work of the devil meant to infuse 666 in the lives of the people, meant to corrupt their DNA … may it be destroyed by fire.”
“Mis- or disinformation literally can have deadly consequences in a pandemic,” Wasserman says, observing that false information and rumours have spread rapidly and widely under the pandemic.
“If I search the words ‘fake news’ on my WhatsApp conversations, it’s striking how often that phrase comes up. It is not because I’m surrounded by conspiracy theorists or people who don’t trust the ‘Evil Mainstream Media’, but because there is just so much unverified information floating around that some of it is bound to end up on your screen.
“The fact that people are labelling it as dubious at least shows that people are engaging what they receive critically. But they still share it, even if they are uncertain whether it is true. This has been especially evident during the pandemic,” he says, giving examples.
“A friend of a friend who has it on good authority that the alcohol ban would be reinstated soon; a screengrab of a graph with statistics from Sweden; a video about someone claiming to have found a drug that protects against Covid,” he says. “You can almost see the fear and anxiety jumping off the screen, or, conversely, the desperation for any straw of hope that they can cling to.
“So, disinformation isn’t only about the big conspiracies of Albanian teenagers working in troll farms or Russian secret agents plotting to meddle in elections. It’s a culture that has become rooted in our everyday lives.
“This is why, when I spoke at the WHO’s conference about the ‘infodemic’ last year, I made the point that we have to design responses that are culturally and contextually specific.”
Facts alone are not enough to block misinformation, given that misinformation is influenced by social dynamics, beliefs and material circumstances, he says.
“Just like a virus needs a host environment, misinformation always circulates within particular contexts, between people with particular identities, histories and cultures, constrained or amplified by particular regulatory policies,” Wasserman writes.
Together with colleagues, Wasserman has been conducting research in several African countries on disinformation to find out how common it is, who should stop it, and about trust in the media.
“A disturbingly large percentage felt they have a high exposure to perceived mis- and disinformation,” says Wasserman, and often shared it knowingly.
Why was this?
“Firstly, there is a misplaced sense of civic responsibility, for instance to pass on a ‘miracle cure’ to family even when it looks dodgy, ‘just in case it’s true’.
“The second reason in the African context was for fun. There is a tradition of joking and satire which plays an important, and often progressive, role in societies,” he says, referencing the latest study on people’s motivations for sharing misinformation, published on Thursday.
For example, jokes and memes about the coronavirus, featuring people on TikTok in homemade PPE, or politicians, started almost immediately after the first confirmed case in KwaZulu-Natal and flew around on platforms like WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook.
Socio-cultural, political and psychological reasons drive the reflex to humour, says Wasserman.
A robust pavement radio tradition across Africa helps to build community but can amplify misinformation.
This is not news to Wasserman, the editor-in-chief of African Journalism Studies and the Annals of the International Communication Association.
He is a pre-eminent academic in this field, having published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles, 50 book chapters and contributed to 14 books on the topic of media in Africa and the Global South, and ethics.
Wasserman has won more than a dozen awards for excellence in research, writing and theory, from UCT and Stellenbosch University to universities in the US and St Petersburg in Russia, during his career.
With a PhD in literature, Wasserman started work as a general reporter in Die Burger newsroom in 1995, before moving into the arts field, which was his passion then.
He took up fellowships abroad, as well as teaching at the universities of Sheffield and Newcastle in the UK.
In 2010 Wasserman was excited to return to SA as the deputy head of Rhodes University’s School of Journalism and Media Studies before coming to UCT, when both he and his wife received job offers in Cape Town.
Last year he won the UCT Vice-Chancellor’s Book
Award for his publication of Media, Geopolitics, and Power: A View from the Global South. His new book, The Ethics of Engagement: Media, Conflict and Democracy in Africa, was published this month.
“Media ethics has been a main interest over the years,” says Wasserman, who got drawn to the topic when he started exploring the soft power exerted by China in Africa and Africa-China relations.
“I had a specific interest in how African journalists would respond to China,” says Wasserman, who was a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2014.
A teacup from China is perched on one of the bookshelves which fill two walls of his office. The third has a window overlooking Cape Town and the fourth, behind his desk, is decorated with framed awards and degrees.
Asia falls within the four sub-regions of the Global South — including Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa — to be covered by the fake news study this year, funded by the International Development Research Centre.
“The biggest change in the last 10 years in the way we interact, and driving the media landscape, has been that everything has gone online. Online it is easy to create and to share.”
As for kids, they also fish in the digital sea, says Wasserman. He has three children, one of whom built a gaming computer after watching how to do it on YouTube during lockdown.
With the big shift online — particularly during the pandemic — many people choose to be in their own comfortable “filter bubbles and echo chambers”. But they are often adversarial and antagonistic to others and confirm our own biases, says Wasserman.
Fear, uncertainty and anxiety are among the emotions which stoke this misinformation and mistrust, causing increasing polarisation. US politics is a glaring example of this. Wasserman says that people are overwhelmed and do not know where to turn or who to trust.
“It has become very difficult to be confronted with other opinions. We need to get out of our bubbles and listen to what makes people tick.
“We should think about why something is shared. We should be critical but not so cynical we do not believe anything.
“It is difficult to navigate through the information disorder but there are good tools online for fact checking. Ordinary people can fight back, and we can empower ourselves.”
On Wasserman’s wall hangs a poster of a poem by
Dutch poet Remco Campert, celebrating the power of action and inquiry: Resistance does not start with big words/ but with small deeds.
The final lines, Asking yourself a question begins resistance/ Then ask that question to another, are in essence the beacon that guides Wasserman’s work.