Over the past 10 years, several misinformation-debunking initiatives have emerged in the region. They were essentially born from adapting European or West African fact-checking models and are doing remarkable work in putting unreliable information back into context, enabling several million connected and unconnected people to access certified information and make informed decisions — even though much remains to be done in this field given the local context of illiteracy, low internet penetration, and access to information...

These initiatives have managed to forge relationships with tech giants such as Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.), TikTok and many others to label misinformation on these digital platforms. Unfortunately, despite all these efforts to demystify misinformation and disinformation, and despite recent innovations in this field such as door-to-door dissemination of verified information in rural areas or broadcasting this content on local radio stations to increase audiences, and the integration of artificial intelligence to counter this harmful content, no initiative has devoted itself all these years to scientific research to decode the methods and actors of misinformation, nor has any focused on educating the connected community on how to report such erroneous content.

Aside from a few mentions of these problems in some research papers or funded case studies, it is rare to see work that addresses them on a regular basis to enable the general public to know which entities are manipulating this data and how the community can take action to protect itself against these influence campaigns.

In addition to this research work, Factualité Afrique, through its various projects such as "Afrique Filigrane", which is responsible for authenticating sources, documents, events via interactive maps, incidents, images, etc., will launch capacity-building sessions targeting key information-sharing actors, notably encrypted groups on WhatsApp and Facebook, influencers, political and religious leaders, and citizen movements, in order to introduce them to the reporting practices for harmful content already available in the settings of the social media platforms most used by misinformation perpetrators at the regional level — namely Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, YouTube, etc.

A dedicated team within Factualité Afrique will personally follow up with platforms and regulators to have content removed that undermines the integrity of human life and to reduce the visibility of offensive content (privacy violations, harassment, hate speech – xenophobic, coordinated inauthentic behaviour, foreign interference and influence, extremist propaganda, etc.).

Far from becoming a showcase for censorship, the project aims to be a guardian of a healthy internet where human life is protected, and where community standards are followed and enforced for the benefit of collective learning rather than an arena for mass dumbing-down.