Maputo, 10 Apr (AIM) – To fight against disinformation is to save lives, declared the Mozambican chapter of the regional press freedom body, MISA (Media Institute of Southern Africa) in a Wednesday release.
MISA was referring to the tragedy on Sunday night, when at least 98 people drowned when their boat capsized off the coat of Mozambique Island, in the northern province of Nampula.
A fundamental factor behind this disaster was disinformation about cholera. People packed onto an overcrowded fishing boat to escape from a supposed cholera outbreak in the Lunga administrative post in Mossuril district.
But the local authorities say that is no cholera in Lunga, and blame the tragedy on disinformation.
“Disinformation about cholera in Mozambique is an old problem, particularly in the central and northern regions”, says MISA. “There have been several cases in which local leaders and health workers have been attacked by crowds, because they were accused of responsibility for the spread of cholera”.
This could have been based on the apparent similarity between the words “colera” and “cloro” – chlorine, which is used by the authorities to disinfect water, precisely to combat water-borne disease such as cholera.
The Sunday shipwreck, MISA adds, shows how “disinformation has damaging consequences for society”.
MISA stresses that “fighting against deceitful advertising and disinformation, in the digital world and offline, is one of the greatest responsibilities of all of us, in this ‘post-truth’ era, in which people are not much concerned with factual information, but value their own beliefs”.
Fighting against disinformation, MISA said, “thus means providing a public service par excellence, since good quality information is power”.
That was why MISA devoted a great deal of attention to fact checking, added the release.
MISA had launched its fact-checking service during the Covid-19 pandemic. Faced with disinformation against vaccines, “credible information had to be made available against those narratives which called on citizens not to accept vaccination”.
MISA argues that the fight against disinformation should be waged by everyone, and particularly by the mass media.
“What happened on Mozambique Island was partly the result of the absence of credible information, including by some of the media”, said MISA. “For its part, the government should be pro-active, not only in making quality information available in good time, but also in promoting consistent digital literacy activities, to arm citizens with tools that allow them to distinguish between real information and simple rumours”.
MISA warns that there will be no victory against disinformation “while citizens do not change the way in which they consume information, becoming critical and verifying everything before sharing it. We must wage this struggle now. Otherwise we shall be incubating still more tragedies”.
(AIM)
Pf/ (449)
