23 March 2021, EWN, Graig-Lee-Smith
Organisations such as Media Monitoring Africa and the Real411 have been used to mitigate the spread of disinformation.
Director William Bird said that some of the key trends over the last year included unproven theories, such as that COVID-19 didn’t really exist and that certain vitamins could prevent the disease.
Bird said that social media was mostly used as a tool to spread these falsehoods.
“Some of the other kinds of things that we’ve seen are the classic conspiracy theories about COVID-19. That it’s all invented by a western evil force and sometimes that might be an evil Chinese force and sometimes it might be an ‘evil Bill Gates’.”
Bird said that the spreading of fake news about COVID-19 was another pandemic in its own right.