How Government Responses to Misinformation in Africa Restrict Freedom of Expression and Do Little to Tackle the Problem

Abstract

While misinformation has been recognised as a problem in Africa and around the world, from ancient Egypt into modern times (Darnton 2017; Posetti and Matthews 2018), concern about the effects it may have has grown sharply since political upheavals in the Global North in 2016. Harm caused by false information goes beyond the field of politics. Misinformation has been identified as provoking vigilante violence and civil unrest in countries such as Ethiopia (Nur 2019) and Nigeria (Adegoke 2018), leading to the use of ineffective and dangerous medical treatments for Ebola (Ogala and Ibeh 2014), malaria (Faive Le-Cadre 2019), and coronavirus disease 2019 (Busari and Adebayo 2020) and harms to mental health (Kulundu 2019), businesses (Ghana Fact 2019) and much more. As the public have shown their own concern (Wasserman and Madrid-Morales 2018), so the number of statements made by political leaders has increased. “In a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country like ours, fake news is a time bomb. And in recent weeks, many anarchists have been doing everything possible to detonate the bomb”, Nigeria’s Information Minister Lai Mohammed told reporters in 2018, calling for public vigilance (Okakwu 2018). At the same time, Senegal’s President Macky Sall made a speech demanding that the education ministry develop a media literacy strategy to “counter ‘fake news’ and other false information” (Cissé 2018). In two research papers published in June 2021, seven colleagues and I examined the two primary responses taken: (i) the introduction of new, or stricter, laws against “false information” published or broadcast on traditional and social media and (ii) promises of teaching “media literacy” in state-run schools. This article sets out the findings of these papers; the failure of the current policies to meet their stated aim of reducing the harm caused and proposes alternative responses that could reduce harm without restricting legitimate media and political debate.