Working Paper: Trust in Institutions, COVID-19 Related Information Seeking and Vaccination Messaging in South Africa
Data for this study was collected between May 24 and June 5, 2021. Facebook and Instagram users located in South Africa were invited to participate via paid advertisements. The study consists of two parts. First, we surveyed 1,585 South Africans to understand their general attitudes towards COVID-19, as well...
Herman Wasserman Presents on Emerging Trends and Impacts of Disinformation in Africa to UNDP
Herman Wasserman recently gave a presentation on “Emerging Trends and impacts of Disinformation in Africa” to the Oslo Governance United Nations Development Programme. The presentation provided a general overview of the issue of disinformation in the region, trends emerging from his and Dani Madrid-Morales’ research and possible interventions to counter...
Social media users in Kenya and South Africa trust science, but still share COVID-19 hoaxes
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to widespread disinformationcirculating on social media globally. This includes false information about the virus, its origins and possible cures for the disease it causes. Much of the inaccurate information was related to China, the country where the first cases of an atypical pneumonia were...
Herman Wasserman to Present at Countering Vaccine Hesitancy Conference
Herman Wasserman will give a presentation on how to tackle disinformation around Covid-19 vaccines to an international meeting of Academies of Science. The conference, ‘‘Countering Vaccine Hesitancy’, is hosted by the Interacademy Partnership and will highlight how academies – as trusted and credible voices – can counter vaccine hesitancy,...
Wasserman and Madrid-Morales present research at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary China, University of Pennsylvania
Herman Wasserman and Dani Madrid-Morales will present their paper “What Motivates the Sharing of Misinformation about China and Covid-19? A Study of Social Media Users in Kenya and South Africa” at the international conference “Narratives of COVID-19 in China and the World: Technology, Society, and Nations” hosted by the...
Working on a New Book on False News in the Global South
The lead researchers of the Misinformation, Disinformation & False News Research Project, Herman Wasserman and Dani Madridd-Morales, are working on an edited volume titled Rumors, false news and disinformation in the Global South. It will be published by Wiley, and it is expected to come out in early 2021....
New Research Grant to Study Misinformation on COVID-19 and China in South Africa
One of the lead researchers of the Misinformation, Disinformation & False News Research Project, Herman Wasserman (University of Cape Town), has been awarded a Research Grant by South Africa’s National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Funds from this twelve-month project, that will start in April 2020, will...
Research Presented at Comparative Misinformation Workshop, Harvard University
This week we presented preliminary findings of our comparative study on motivations for sharing misinformation and disinformation in several Sub-Saharan African countries at the Comparative Approaches to Disinformation Workshop, held at Harvard University. This ongoing project uses focus groups to compare sharing practices across five (soon to be six)...
New Publication in African Journalism Studies
Africa’s leading academic journal in Media and Communication, African Journalism Studies, has published the paper “An Exploratory Study of “Fake News” and Media Trust in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa” by Herman Wasserman and Dani Madrid-Morales, lead researchers of the Misinformation, Disinformation & False News in Africa Research Project....