FACT CHECKING THE PANDEMIC IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH: CORRECTION STRATEGIES BY LATIN AMERICAN AND AFRICAN META FACT CHECKERS

Abstract

Much of the professional fact-checking activities that were once conducted by political journalists and news media during electoral periods or political debates, or what Luengo and Garcia-Marin (2020) call fact checking of top-down claims, now focus on assessing dis/misinformation emerging from social media users, or bottom-up claims. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of fact-checking organizations rose substantially in three key regions of the world (Asia: 35 to 75; Africa: 9 to 19; and Latin America: 18 to 38) (Stencel & Luher, 2021). To further address the recognised need for bottom-up fact checking, Meta recently added 28 fact-checking organizations to their funded partnership program (Facebook, 2021) and opened up access to their detection and engagement measurement tools (Full Fact, 2020). This new fact-checking infrastructure has made the geopolitics of dis/misinformation more visible globally because fact checkers can monitor online spread in near real time. This study investigates the Facebook communication of domestically produced fact checks of Covid-19 vaccine misinformation by Meta’s third party fact checkers. Specifically, we investigate the Covid-19 vaccine fact checks that Meta-affiliated fact checkers in the so-called Global South have selected and how they are packaged for dissemination on Facebook.