Curbing “Covid-Infodemic”: An Assessment of Fact-Check Sources of Dubawa Nigeria and Dubawa Ghana

Abstract

The novel coronavirus disease, officially described as 2019-nCoV (or COVID-19) by the World Health Organisation has caused over 4.6 million deaths worldwide as at  September 17, 2021. With the World Health Organisation's guidelines, individual country's Centres for Disease Control disseminate information on preventive measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 pandemic through different media platforms to educate the populace about the virus. Unfortunately, these media  (both conventional and new) platforms have been inundated with misinformation  and disinformation about prevention, control, and cure of the disease causing an  “infodemic”. In response to an epidemic of misinformation about the pandemic, the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced a new communication initiative “to flood the Internet with facts and science while  countering” the fake news related to COVID-19. This paper investigates sources of fake news reports on COVID-19 in Nigeria and Ghana by fact-check websites: 
Dubawa Nigeria and Dubawa Ghana. The research design is built on online content  analysis. The key findings show that majority of fact-checked reports were false  and largely emanated from gossip/disinformation blogs. More specifically, the 
coding-sheet (http://bit.ly/DUBAWA) shows that 106 reports were fact-checked, out of which 84% falsely sourced from gossip/disinformation blogs peddle fake news about COVID-19 in both Nigeria and Ghana. The paper recommends that 
Dubawa in both countries should continue to fact-check reports and flag sources of fake news about COVID-19. Moreover, it strongly advocates for campaigns  (News Literacy) against gossip/disinformation blogs which have been the major 
sources of fake news reports in a bid to curb misinformation and disinformation 
about COVID-19