It can get tedious scrolling through social media these days. For every fake message you receive via WhatsApp or see on Facebook about COVID-19, remember this: It could be worse.
So much worse. In fact, South Africa ranks as the second country in the world that reports on COVID-19 accurately; beaten only by Singapore.
The Covid19 Infodemics Observatory aims to monitor and track the spread of fake news directly related to the new coronavirus pandemic.
Using machine learning techniques, the project collected data from more than 100 million public messages to tally the spread of fake news versus accurate reporting.
South Africa’s COVID-19 news rating
Thanks to the South African government’s stance on fake news – by criminalising the spread of misinformation – South Africa received a reliability score of 78.29%.
The only country to beat us to the top spot is Singapore, with a rating of 90.72%. In addition, South Africa scored a Risk Index of 0.006, compared to Singapore’s 0.004.
The infodemic risk index takes into account the average amount of content posted each day; the truth reliability of native news and the truth reliability of bot-generated content.
However, keep in mind that netizens in Singapore post an average of 4 179.2 tweets per day, compared to South Africa’s 21 451.5 public tweets per day.
Disclaimer, the figures change day-by-day. Accurate and update to date information can be found at the COVID-19 Infodemics Observatory.
“We are fully transparent about our methodology but we are aware that, as all algorithms, our method is very accurate but not perfect. If you are a journalist or a news media, we kindly invite you to get in touch with us to enhance the classification. We thank the community of journalists who already got in touch with us for this purpose”.
COVID-19 Infodemics Observatory
The report can be viewed here.
Compared to the rest of the world
France is third on the list of most reliable countries, with a reliability score of 75.23 and a risk index of 0.022; followed by Ireland with a risk index of 0.026.
Malaysia and Hong Kong take the fifth and six spots, with a risk index of 0.36 (based on 37 043 tweets per day), and 0.036 (based on 8 284 tweets per day), respectively.
It’s no surprise that the USA didn’t make the Top Ten list. The USA’s risk index is 56 times higher than South Africa, while the UK has a risk index is 27 times higher.
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