Digital Misinformation is a Major Threat to Democracy in Africa

This must-read is published in Global Risk Insights:

Africa has long lagged behind the rest of the world when it comes to digitisation, with less than four in ten Africans lacking reliable connection to the worldwide web. Indeed, all ten countries with the lowest levels of overall internet penetration are located across Sub-Saharan Africa. However, Africa’s status as a digital backwater is eroding as the so-called ‘digital divide’ closes at an unprecedented rate, exemplified by the adoption of national digital strategies in Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, South Africa and Mauritius, countries whose forward-thinking governments see digitisation as a quick fix solution to some of the continent’s most pervasive developmental issues. More significantly, as existing emerging markets across the Middle East, Asia and Latin America rapidly approach saturation point over the coming years, several of Silicon Valley’s ‘Big Tech’ leviathans have set their sights firmly on African markets as the future. Google’s ‘Next Billion Users’ or Facebook’s ‘Free Basics’ exemplify these aggressive market entry strategies, which offer up a range of limited digital services (including Facebook itself) to new customers in frontier markets at little to no cost. Although techno-optimists have avidly jumped aboard the ‘Africa Rising’ bandwagon, portraying images of glittering  technopolises such as Kenya’s ‘Silicon Savannah’ and South Africa’s ‘Silicon Cape’, the most glaringly obvious manifestations of Africa’s digital awakening so far have come in the form of viral disinformation, fake news, violent extremism and rising digital authoritarianism, all of which threaten to derail Africa’s fourth industrial revolution before it has truly begun.

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