Laughing through the Virus the Zimbabwean Way: WhatsApp Humor and the Twenty-one-day COVID-19 Lockdown

In many African countries, jokes represent one of the many means used by citizens to cope with a crisis. Chibuwe and Munoriyarwa explore how Zimbabweans utilize WhatsApp jokes, which are anchored in the concept of the "everyday," to cope with pandemic-induced lockdowns. COVID-19 jokes provide citizens momentary relief from fear and function as a defense mechanism against COVID-19 and its effects, enabling citizens to confront and rationalize fear, death, and suffering. Chibuwe and Munoriyarwa argue that jokes are also a means of speaking truth to power by disgruntled citizens attempting to cope with a health crisis, in a context characterized by corruption, state repression, and bad governance.

Guardians of truth? Fact-checking the 'disinfodemic' in Southern Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic

Based on virtual ethnography and online interviews, we provide new evidence of how fact-checking organizations based in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia responded to the influx of conspiracy theories, mis- and disinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study seeks to answer the following questions: What kind of responses did ZimFact, Africa Check and Namibia Fact Check put in place to combat the spread of the 'disinfodemic' during the outbreak of COVID-19 in Southern Africa? To what extent were these interventions effective in terms of combating the viral spread of the 'disinfodemic' in the broader information ecosystem? It argues that through a combination of manual and technology-enabled verification processes, these organizations were partly able to debunk some of the harmful, conspiratorial and misleading claims related to the coronavirus. It demonstrates that fact-checking alone is not enough to stem the 'disinfodemic' unless it is complemented by an ecosystem that prioritizes access to information, media literacy initiatives, proactive takedown interventions by platform companies and increased public awareness on truthful and credible public health information. Furthermore, fact-checking organizations need to increase the speed at which they respond to the 'disinfodemic' if virality, which is the major driver of this 'phenomenon', is to be mitigated. We recommend that fact-checkers should implement efficient mechanisms of decentralizing their activities, amplify the sharing of verified information, forge collaborative initiatives with key actors and ramp up critical media literacy programmes.