CHARMAIN NAIDOO: Finally, a voting decision is made!

Extract In an opinion piece he wrote for the New York Times, the publisher of an online Indian news portal, Samir Patil, called fake news an infectious disease rather than a technological or scientific problem with a quick fix.   It should be treated as a new kind of public health crisis in all its social and human complexity, he wrote, adding that the answer might lie in the way epidemics — which have similar characteristics — are dealt with.

I went back over my years as a journalist covering pandemic outbreaks — Asian flu; swine flu; Ebola; HIV/Aids among them — and realised that all those have needed both public- and private-sector involvement.

Research has had to be funded; global plans put in place to tackle containment; outbreaks tracked; medicines developed and tested; healthcare provided. The list is long.

This gargantuan, multi-pronged approach, Patil thinks, is what is needed to respond to and tackle disinformation and fake news. And I think he’s right. It’s an all pervasive virus, this hideous new concoction of our times, fake news.

This morning, less than a week before our elections, my helper showed me several messages sent on WhatsApp to her phone by friends and members of her family. All forwarded and re-forwarded messages included pictures, video, and texts that cited a host of promises coming, apparently, from EFF leader, Julius Malema.

One message promised that there would be no forced removals if EFF voters were to build shacks on unused land. Another promised free education for all. Another said grants would be increased to amounts that left my helper open mouthed as she asked, increduloulsy, where the money would come from.

Fake news!

Right now, 900-million Indians are voting in a five week-long process to elect representatives to the lower house of their parliament. In that vast country, there has been so much disinformation that politicians, members of the public and a concerned media are finding it difficult to separate truth from fiction.

Here in SA, with just days to go, and with the political vote-grab stakes never having been so high, I suspect there will be a surfeit of fake news. I’m not sure if/how anyone can control that

Facebook has sent in hundreds of thousands of fact checkers whose job it is to confirm what is real and correct the amount of misinformation being spread through doctored images and videos, and through text messages that contain not a shred of truth. 

Yes, India’s problems are greater than those we encounter here at home. How’s this for a mind-blowing statistic: Microsoft published a study in which they found that more than 64% of Indians came across fake news online. They’d surveyed 22 countries and Indian’s exposure to fake news was the highest.

It has to be said that India has the most social media users in the world: 300-million on Facebook, 200-million on WhatsApp, 250-million on YouTube… Few countries can compete with those figures.

And so when, as has happened during this election, made-up BBC surveys predicting a win for one party surface, or a fake video of a party leader telling Indians he has a machine that can convert potatoes into gold is released, the damage caused is monumental.

Here at home, early in the lead-up to our elections, the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) — in partnership with Media Monitoring Africa — launched an online reporting platform so that cases of fake digital information can be reported. But we all know that once information is out there, it’s hard to change the message, to correct the misinformation.

So, to tell the end user that the information they received on a closed WhatsApp group — such as Julius Malema promising to considerably up the current grant amounts — is incorrect is almost impossible.

One thing that emerged from the Indian example is that people from that country were found to be particularly gullible. They were also more likely to believe what they read and saw if it came from members of their family or people they respected and trusted (bosses, teachers, etc).

Here in SA, with just days to go, and with the political vote-grab stakes never having been so high, I suspect there will be a surfeit of fake news. I’m not sure if/how anyone can control that.

There will probably be fake statistics, fake promises, fake quotes — and it will be hard for us to tell if the WhatsApp forwarded by Aunty Sylvia is genuine or doctored news.

Earlier this year, HBO released a film called Brexit: The Uncivil War — a TV drama that deals with the lead-up to the 2016 referendum in Britain. It shows, through the activities of the strategists behind the Vote Leave campaign, how orchestrated social media campaigns won the referendum. As we know, the UK is to leave the EU though nobody knows exactly when, or how.

Being manipulated by social media is a pain in the neck. And frighteningly dangerous.

X marks the vote

Me? I’ve finally made my decision as to which party I will vote for. I made my decision based on information I received from someone I trust.

I heard his actual (not doctored) voice being interviewed on Radio 702, giving me real information, real facts, real figures and real statistics.

I believed Tony Leon, former leader of the DA, when he quoted the think-tank Good Governance Africa’s findings, based on 213 municipalities judged on administration, economic development and service delivery.

Ranked from best to worst, of the 20 top-performing municipalities, 15 were run by the DA, either alone or in coalition — and in the bottom 20 there wasn’t one DA administration.

“This is really an argument about government, and the DA can show it has governed certain parts of SA,” Leon said. “The [DA-run] Western Cape was the only province that produced an 83% clean audit sheet. No other province got near that. It’s the only province that produced 75% of the net new jobs in the last year.”

I’m convinced. X.