Landmark alliance is launched in Africa to fight COVID-19 disinformation – World



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Brazzaville, 3 December 2020 – The World Health Organization (WHO) today launched a new alliance, the Africa Infodemic Response Alliance (AIRA), to coordinate actions and pool resources to combat disinformation around the COVID pandemic -19 and other health emergencies in Africa.

Digital platforms have been inundated with information related to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic in late 2019. Information about the virus has been shared and viewed over 270 billion times online and cited nearly 40 million times on Twitter and websites. web-based news in the 47 countries of the WHO African region between February and November 2020, according to UN Global Pulse, the UN Secretary-General’s initiative on big data and artificial intelligence.

Much of this information is inaccurate and misleading and continues to be shared by social media users either intentionally or unknowingly every day. The COVID-19 infodemic is amplified online through social media, but health disinformation also circulates offline.

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