Ordinarily, there should not be anything like fake news because news is a truth-driven information developed and distributed by a group of people or an individual who have the ability, capability and professional principles of generating and communicating what constituted the news to the public. However, the emergence of the new technologies and the failure of people to hold unto telling truth led to the addition of “fake” before news in recent times.
Apart from fake news, which is part of information pollution ecosystem, misinformation and disinformation are also key components of the ecosystem. From academic scholars to members of varied professional associations, especially those in the media and entertainment industry, misinformation is a concept that has the tendency of misleading the public despite an avalanche of elements of truth in the information. Disinformation, on other hand, does more harm than misinformation, is an attempt of a source to deceive the public using propaganda.
Considering how these components are being traded in the economic, social and political life of every country, our analyst and other partners in the Europe started regional research [focusing on West Africa] a few months ago with a specific focus on knowledge of and attitude of West Africans towards FMD in the sub-region. This piece presents part of the preliminary findings.
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From over 200 citizens of the region, who participated in the first stage of the research, it emerged that the majority is familiar with fake news, political bias, misinformation, hate speech and media literacy than other components of fake news, misinformation and disinformation. Over 90% of the citizens are extremely worried about the FMD.
The more they are familiar with fake news and political bias, the more they have interest in taking a media literacy course or attending media literacy training. Their familiarity with media literacy as a course or training only led to having 2.7% interest in going through the course or training. The results further indicate that the more they are familiar with disinformation and hate speech, the more they are disinterested in learning media literacy or going through any training associated with it.
Looking at the preliminary outcomes, it is surprising that the citizens are not ready for media literacy course or training despite the fact that a large number of them are consuming news contents from social media and online bloggers, sources that have been established by a number of previous researches as conduits of fake news, misinformation and disinformation in the region.
Though, 46.5% of the citizens said media literacy course is not popular in the region, Mustapha Muhammadu Jamiu, the European Leading Investigator and Assistant Professor at the RUND University, Russia, notes that the results clearly indicate that there is a need for further studies on factors that could influence the citizens’ non-interest in having media literacy course or training.