An Exploratory Study of “Fake News” and Media Trust in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa

ABSTRACT

In recent years, concerns about the perceived increase in the amount of “fake news” have become prevalent in discussions about media and politics, particularly in the United States and Europe. However, debates around “fake news”, even if some object to the use of the term due to it being loosely defined, appear to speak of processes that occur not only in the Global North but also elsewhere. In Africa, mis- and disinformation campaigns have been used to influence political agendas, and governments have responded with countermeasures. This article explores the phenomenon in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa using data from a two-wave online survey (N = 1847). We find that perceived exposure to disinformation is high, and that trust in social and national media is low. We also identify a significant relationship between higher levels of perceived exposure to disinformation and lower levels of media trust in South Africa. The limitations of this study, which focuses on a subset of the population that is highly educated, the implications of our findings, and recommendations for future research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• fake news
• disinformation
• misinformation
• media trust
• Kenya
• Nigeria
• South Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Herman Wasserman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2553-1989

Dani Madrid-Morales http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1522-5857

Notes

1 Data from Google Trends shows that, worldwide, interest in the term “fake news”, measured as the relative volume of searches for a keyword, climbed rapidly between October 2016 (relative popularity value of 3) and February 2017 (77).

2 At the 2018 International Communication Association Annual conference, the largest in the field, there were 40 mentions of “fake news” in titles and abstracts of papers, panels and pre-conferences included in the programme. In 2017, there were three mentions, and in 2015 and 2016, one each year.

3 Not only did the government pledge to combat politically motivated misinformation, but different initiatives led by the civil society and private companies were launched in 2018 (Funke 2018).

4 We pre-tested the survey by recruiting participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), a widely used crowdsourcing platform. While we initially considered using the platform to recruit survey respondents as well, the number of users in our selected countries was too small.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation [Grant Number 93493].