Mauritius is playing host to the Africa Facts Summit 2023. The two-day summit opened yesterday at the University of Mauritius, bringing together 48 factchecking organizations working across the African continent. Andrew Dudfield, CEO of the UK-based Full Fact, argued that the rise of generative artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, was posing new challenges. “What apps like these are, are machines that are making more and more plausible guesses on what information should look like,” Dudfield argued. Thanks to the emergence of technologies such as ChatGPT, “we are faced with huge amounts of new content that is being created out of old content,” he added, “and in an election environment, that could be affected by anything from another nation-state to a bored teenager.”

Lee Mwiti, Chief Editor at Africa Check, pointed out that disinformation was generated for financial, political, ideological or personal gain. Mwiti explained that whereas disinformation in the global north tended more to be linked to state actors and ideological differences, in the global south on the other hand, disinformation did not just concern state actors and ideology did not play as big a role.

Mevan Babakar, News and Info Credibility Lead at Google News Lab – which has funnelled $12.5 million to fund fact checking organizations across the world –, explained that the most common forms of disinformation she came across was what she described as content manipulation; “these are old images that come up again but with the dates, locations and the identities of the people in it changed”.

One example that was raised at the summit was the parliamentary and presidential elections that were held in Nigeria in February. Caleb Ijioma of the organization Round Check recalled that that election saw a large number of young voters participating which posed a challenge; “quite a bit of false information and doctored images started making the rounds”. What was unique about that election, Silas Jonathan of the organization Dubawa pointed out, was that where Nigerian elections since 1999 have usually been two-horse contests, the one in 2023 saw four viable candidates participating, each with their core of supporters. “Facebook essentially became an echochamber for disinformation,” Jonathan argued.

In the 2015 election in Nigeria, disinformation was not considered a serious problem, “then in the 2019 we started becoming scared and in 2023 election officials admitted that disinformation and malinformation were affecting every aspect of the election,” said David Ajkobi of Africa Check, “you had things like coordinated attacks on candidates on ethnic grounds” adding that even while the election results were being contested at the Supreme Court there was a lot of disinformation being spread about that too.

Paul-Joel Kamtchang of Data Cameroon pointed out that in Cameroon, one problem is that access to information is not yet regulated with no freedom of information act in place, “across Africa the situation is the same except in places like Tunisia, the Ivory Coast or Burkina Faso where they have such laws on the books”.