Fighting "fake news": What tools do we need to combat misinformation in SA?

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How big is the problem of "fake news" in South Africa, and what can we do about it?

Join us on the 30th November for an evening of talks and discussions between the people who've been studying "fake news" locally, those who've already built tools to try and stop it, and journalists and technologists who have ideas for developing those tools further (or building something new).

We want to bring together all those who are worried by the "fake news" phenomenon and can do something about it, including journalists, activists, academics and developers.

Speakers will include researchers from Wits who've been documenting fake news and misinformation in South Africa, a group who has been identifying "Guptabots" on Twitter and Media Monitoring Africa, which has been building tools to help establish story credibility.

The why
We know that misinformation is a huge issue in South Africa politics and media - the country has been shaken to the core by PR-generated propaganda, out-and-out lies and multiple reports of dubious provenance that have been used to dupe the public and further particular agendas.

Through it all, it's become apparent that social and mainstream media have been manipulated with to amplify the effects of misinformation. From deceptively convincing media outlets to armies of Twitter bots, separating truth from lies is becoming harder each day.

To put it another way, there's a crisis in our democracy which seems to mirror the phenomenon of "fake news" that's rocked overseas nations in recent years.

But what do we really mean by "fake news", and is what form does it take in South Africa? And whatever the problem is - because it clearly exists - how can we use technology to fight it?

And where the technology already exists and has been developed locally, what can we do to improve it or make more people aware of it?

Hacks/Hackers Johannesburg has teamed up with the JAMLAB (http://www.journalism.co.za/jamlab/) media startup accelerator help with efforts to fight fake news and misinformation in South Africa.

This session will be the first in a series on the topic: with your help we'll use it to put together a programme for a full day hackathon on the subject early in 2018, supported by the Mozilla Foundation.

Interested in coming along? Sign up here or at https://bit.ly/2w0Xcs6