We’ve all seen them. The dangerous fake news on social media. That’s where professional fact-checkers come in. And professional fact-checkers are also the backbone of Viral Facts Africa, a fantastic campaign led by the Africa Infodemic Response Alliance (AIRA), bringing together various trusted health bodies, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF etc. targeting health misinformation on the African continent.
Behind Viral Facts Africa’s media content is Fathm, a media consultancy and agency based in the south of England. I had a long chat with Tom Trewinnard, one of Fathm’s two co-founders, to find out more about the Viral Facts Africa campaign and misinformation campaigns in general. I learned a lot of interesting things that I now want to share with you all.
Our goal is to identify viral misinformation and debunk it. Ideally, we want to identify misinformation before it can spread. We often see what we call “information gaps”. These are questions or fears that people have. We can listen to them through different social media platforms and try to inject some authoritative fact-based information into the conversation with the goal of limiting the space that misinformation has to spread.
We’re also trying to raise people’s awareness of how misinformation works and what they can do to stop the spread of it. There’s a UN “Verified” campaign that we work with, which is focused on “pause, take care before you share”. Don’t just do that immediate, very easy thing that social networks push you to do, which is to hit share right away. Instead, pause and check. Is this something that’s making you feel angry or afraid? We know that misinformation often plays on emotions.
There are two ways for us to learn about misinformation, passive and active. A lot of the big UN agencies have started what they call social listening exercises. There are tools that let you search public social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, based on keywords. You can see spikes in people talking about vaccine side effects, or vaccines and fertility, etc.
WhatsApp is much more challenging because it’s end-to-end encrypted. So we rely on fact-checkers who have what they call “tip lines” that people can send questions to, questions such as “I have seen this in a WhatsApp group? Is it real or false?”
And then, the fact-checkers will build a database around that. We also have various other open channels where people can send us their questions, for example, on Twitter.
In general, we aim to produce at least five information products per week, sometimes more. The videos themselves have been viewed over 100 million times since January.
How do you disseminate the content you produce?
We deliberately opted to give people full access to our content hub to download our content and post it natively rather than having them reshare content from our accounts.
We’re also not actively directing people to our website. We want them to go straight to social channels and see what we’re doing there because we’re extremely active on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. So rather than us building a full-service news website, it’s much better for us just to put the content that we’ve worked on front using a social media wall powered by Walls.io.
The social wall plays an important role because one risk of this kind of work is that people can take our logo and use it to make their own Viral Facts video. So if you’re not sure a video is genuine, the social wall is the place to go if you want to see what Viral Facts have actually produced. It’s like an anthology.
Walls.io is light-touch for us. We occasionally do a bit of moderation. And we’ll use different Walls.io features to highlight pieces of content or, if things are getting duplicative, we might pull things out. All of that is super easy.
We’re a lean operation, and the value that we can bring is identifying people’s questions, producing content, just getting it out there. So if we then have to spend extra hours every day just putting content on our website, that’s a big burden.
And it’s not easy to do in an elegant way. I’ve worked on similar things where we’ve done that, and it creates a lot of work and, frankly, just does not look as good. We looked at different options, and Walls.io seemed like the most stable and user-friendly way of doing that. We’re really happy with the tool.
The social wall is a protection shield against misinformation. It would be easy enough for dishonest actors to create fake videos and slap the Viral Facts Africa logo onto it — an easy way to spread more misinformation.
But how do you prove the authenticity of social media content?
By putting all Viral Facts Africa-produced content on the social wall, Fathm provides everyone with an easy way to double-check if Viral Facts Africa-branded content they have seen online is genuine and has actually come from Viral Facts Africa.