Citizen journalism in Morocco: the case of fact-checkers

ABSTRACT

Social networks are becoming a site of unprecedented diffusion of fake news and misinformation in Morocco. This fact does not only affect people as individuals but also undermines social order and cohesion in general. To fight back, a number of journalists and researchers have engaged in fact-checking processes to verify claims and information. In this regard, this study considers fact-checking as an emerging journalistic brand that has the potential to promote healthier public debate in the contemporary media environment in Morocco. For this reason, a qualitative approach is adopted to explore the nature of a group of Moroccan online fact checkers to understand their motivations, practices, process of production, and the impact they have made in the public sphere. The significance of this research resides in the fact that it tracks a trend in Moroccan media landscape and investigates its importance in creating communities of interest. Also, exploring this new online trend will help in providing a different perspective on the richness and diversity of content, and change how people think about the online media environment in Morocco.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizen journalism
• fact-checking
• fact-checkers
• online journalism
• Morocco
• social networks

Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions on the manuscript. The authors are also grateful to Prof. Fatima Sadiqi from Fez University for her feedback and comments on the first draft of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Mustapha Fekkak has 633,000 subscribers; Najib Mokhtari, 206,000 subscribers; and Othmane Safsafi, 106,000 subscribers.

2 This idea of symbolic power has its origins in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory. It is the fourth concept dealt with along with cultural, economic, and social capital. It refers to reputation and position an individual or organisation can create or have in a specific context or location. For instance, a business organisation symbolic capital is associated with its ability to make a good quality service or product and therefore, in return raise its profit.

3 User Generated Content means internet users generate their own content and share it with communities of their choosing (Wirtén and Ryman 2009).

4 Hespress is an Arabic online newspaper launched in the Moroccan online media context dominated by French, which gives it a linguistic advantage over other online newspapers. Hespress was founded by Mohamed Amin Kanouni and Hassan Kanouni in February 2007. They both worked before with an Egyptian company called ‘egyxp’ to build a website in Arabic, because Moroccan companies didn’t have the know-how at that time. However, the institutional structure of Hespress is different from traditional newspapers. It’s more open to freelance journalists and other partners to post articles on the website. Hespress has no editorial board that strictly limits the general direction of publications. Thus, one can find a large variety of opinions, topics and backgrounds in published articles, which helps it promote itself as ‘credible’ source of news. In brief, the rise of Hespress is due to the use of Arabic at an early stage, the effective institutional structure, and the professional adoption of web technologies.

5 Fifteen children and teenagers allegedly sexually assaulted a donkey in the small rural town of Sidi Kamel in the communal providence of Sidi Kacem- middle of Morocco.

6 ‘DABA 2007’ is a Moroccan non-profit organisation created in 2006 by Nourdine Ayouch to promote more participation in politics (L’Economiste 2006).

7 Selwane.TV is a YouTube channel founded by Abdellatif Jelzime to share videos of all political parties, including those boycotting the elections.

8 A randomised field experiment, conducted during 2014 US elections, proves that professional values and journalists’ status concerns are the primary drivers for the fact-checking trend (Graves, Nyhan, and Reifler 2016).

9 ‘Scientific miracles in the Quran’ also called Ijaz in Arabic is a biased mainstream interpretation of Islamic religious texts which claims that the Quran contains ‘scientific facts’ before being discovered by scientists.

10 The Moroccan government decision to adopt permanently the GMT + 1 has stirred a national debate and caused outrage in Moroccan social media because of its repercussions on the health and sleeping habits of Moroccans

11 In 2018, an online campaign has called for the boycott Afriquia brand after oil prices fell globally, while locale prices are still high.

12 In 2019 a national movement called ‘The Forcibly Contracted Teachers’ launched a number of strikes and protests. Thousands of teachers protested against the government policy to hire teachers under annually renewable contracts every year since 2016.

13 In July 2015, the Moroccan cabinet council approved two decrees of the Ministry of National Education regarding teacher trainees in provincial centres for the professions of education and training, the most important of which separates training from recruitment. In other words, the new decree stipulates that the state disengages from guaranteeing jobs to teacher trainees at these state centres of training. The aim of this decision is to provide abundant and cheap labour to the schools and institutions of the private sector which are notorious for exploitation and harsh working conditions. This pushed teacher trainees to mobilise to dismantle the two decrees and defend the ‘Moroccan Public School’.

14 Small-production is defined by Bourdieu (1996) as ‘Art of art’s sake’ (124); he gives as an example the works of Emile zola ‘“J’accuse” [a published letter to expose antisemitism within the French system] is the outcome and the fulfilment of a collective process of emancipation that is progressively carried out in the field of cultural production: as a prophetic rupture with the established order, it reasserts against all reasons of state the irreducibility of the values of truth and justice and … the independence of the guardians of these values from the norms of politics and from the constraints of economic life’ (129).

15 When ‘culture became a commodity not only in form but also in content’ (Habermas 1991, 166).

16 The concept of public sphere owes much of its academic popularity to Jürgen Habermas and the publication of his pioneer book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989). In this book, Habermas argues that the public sphere is ‘made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state’ (176). Later in his book Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1996), Habermas explains that this public sphere ‘is reproduced through communicative action for which the mastery of normal language suffices; it is tailored to the general comprehensibility of everyday communicative practices’ (360). In clear terms, for Habermas public sphere is formed when citizens, of any state, are able to enjoy fundamental freedoms of thought, opinion and expression.