How African countries respond to fake news and hate speech

ABSTRACT

While scholars have already identified and discussed some of the most urgent problems in content moderation in the Global North, fewer scholars have paid attention to content regulation in the Global South, and notably Africa. In the absence of content moderation by Western tech giants themselves, African countries appear to have shifted their focus towards state-centric approaches to regulating content. We argue that those approaches are largely informed by a regime’s motivation to repress media freedom as well as institutional constraints on the executive. We use structural topic modelling on a corpus of news articles worldwide (N = 7′787) mentioning hate speech and fake news in 47 African countries to estimate the salience of discussions of legal and technological approaches to content regulation. We find that, in particular, discussions of technological strategies are more salient in regimes with little respect for media freedom and fewer legislative constraints. Overall, our findings suggest that the state is the dominant actor in shaping content regulation across African countries and point to the need for a better understanding of how regime-specific characteristics shape regulatory decisions.

KEYWORDS:

• Content regulation
• fake news
• hate speech
• Africa
• structural topic modelling

Acknowledgements

We wish to extend special thanks to Daniela Stockmann, Lance Bennett, and Tina Freyburg for valuable comments in developing this paper. We thank Mikael Johannesson and Theo Toppe for inputs on the data preparation and analysis, and Caroline Borge Bjelland and Jean-Baptiste Milon for their research assistance, partly funded by the Norwegian Research Council project ‘Breaking BAD: Understanding the Backlash Against Democracy in Africa’ (#262862). We also thank the research groups at the Comparative Politics Department at the University of St.Gallen and the Department of Administration and Organization Theory of the University of Bergen, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and encouraging comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

All authors contributed equally to the design and implementation of the research, to the analysis of the results and to the writing of the manuscript.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the Factiva Global News Monitoring & Search. Restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for this study. R scripts for data preparation and analysis are available from the authors in the Github repository https://github.com/lisagarbe/ContentRegulationAfrica

Notes

1 In preparing for the textual analysis, the body of textual data was properly pre-processed, white space, punctuation, and so-called ‘stopwords’ (the, is, are, etc.) were removed, as well as the search terms we used to delimit our body of texts (Benoit et al., 2018). Our full script for importing, preprocessing and analysing the corpus is available on GitHub: https://github.com/lisagarbe/ContentRegulationAfrica.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Norwegian Research Council [Grant numbers 288489, 262862].

Notes on contributors

Lisa Garbe

Lisa Garbe is a postdoctoral researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Her research focuses on inequalities in internet provision and use with a focus on authoritarian-developing contexts.

Lisa-Marie Selvik

Lisa-Marie Selvik is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen. Her work focuses on information rights, with a focus on contentious processes of advocacy on freedom of information laws in Africa.

Pauline Lemaire

Pauline Lemaire is a doctoral researcher at Chr. Michelsen Institute, and a PhD candidate at the Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen. Her research focuses on regime - youth interactions as mediated by social media.