South Africa ranks just after Singapore for the world’s most accurate and reliable reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic. This is according to Covid19 Infodemics Observatory, which monitors the spread of fake news relating to the global pandemic in various countries.
SA’s lockdown regulations has criminalised the spread of misinformation, fake news and misleading news reports on the coronavirus pandemic. Platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter have now also put regulations in place to curb the spread of fake news and misinformation.
Any South African found to be distributing misinformation or fake news may be fined and/or imprisoned for six months.
The Infodemics risk analysis was gathered from over 100-million public messages, the news reliability from the URL of ‘reliable news sources’, the average amount of unverified posts per day from each country and unverified social bots.
Machine learning techniques were used to quantify the collective sentiment and psychological states of each country as well as social bot pollution and the reliability of news.
After collating all of the information, five countries emerged among the world’s least misleading for coronavirus news based on these sources.
The top five countries in the world with the most reliable spread of coronavirus news include:
- Singapore
- South Africa
- France
- Ireland
- Malaysia
South Africa scored a native reliability of 78.29% beaten only by Singapore with a score of 90.72%.
Picture: Pixabay
