Disinformation has been an almost constant threat in the Global South, haunting middle and lower-income countries for decades, if not more, long before it suddenly exploded in advanced democratic regimes. In a previous post, I recounted my daily experience swimming in a vast disinformation ocean. Some researchers have argued that colonialism was one of the first examples of disinformation . While context differences among Global South countries should not be ignored, the embryonic development of media and telecommunications was a common trait in the 1970s, not to forget that many majority-world countries had recently escaped colonialism and were busy building new nation-states and national identities.
At the time, governments and local elites controlled most, if not all, means of communication, the latter running a handful of private media outlets while receiving government subsidies and other under-the-table payments. Radio was the most accessible, but local populations lacked trust in the media and public institutions. The widespread use of TV in the 1980s provided slight relief as a few new media channels emerged. The Internet only started to diffuse widely in the early 2000s, thus opening a broad set of communication channels mostly immune to government or traditional media control .
The emergence and diffusion of Internet technologies open the door to creating digital disinformation. While challenging the traditional control over the means of communication by local elites and the state, it has developed global networks where the scalability and diffusion speed of (dis)information have reached unprecedented levels. At the same time, production costs have decreased substantially. Yet, local media and telecommunications development are still comparatively incipient.
The standard narrative for the emergence of disinformation in the developed world suggests that information overload, political polarization, decreasing trust in institutions, a weakened press sector and states promoting disinformation are critical drivers . That matches, for the most part, what many Global South countries have been facing for many decades.
However, disinformation in the Global North has unique characteristics as engaged agents and actors have access to a wider variety of communication channels, digital tools, networks, infrastructure and financial resources to push their goals while having global reach. Global echo chambers are thus much easier to recreate. On the other hand, the digital communication tools used to recreate and spread disinformation locally differ, and adoption varies across the diverse Global South contexts.
Propelled by the globalization of “fake news,” research on digital disinformation took off in 2017 . Like most other research areas, the Global North has spearheaded such efforts.
Madrid-Morales et al. were the first ones to attempt to quantify disinformation research output dealing with the Global South. They found that between 2016 and 2020, less than 30 percent of the total (out of a sample of 3,800 articles published between 2000 and 2020) had such a focus. And almost half of those centered on the Asia Pacific region, with Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America hovering around 20 percent each — or seven percent of the top 20. The authors also show that before 2016, disinformation research was mainly published in psychology and health journals, but the tide started to change that year when communication journals surged ahead. They also raised the issue of local contexts, which, for the most part, is ignored by the body of research.
Wang et al. provide a different but complementary perspective using a sample of almost 5,700 articles published in 2,116 publications in English between 2002 and 2021. Research articles are classified by country of origin, which can be considered a proxy for national research capacity. The sample includes 139 countries in total. The leaders are the U.S., UK, Australia and China, with the first being responsible for over 40 percent of the total output of the top 20 countries globally, down from almost 70 percent in 2002. Similarly, the top four together accounted for over 60 percent of such production in 2022. India, Brazil, and South Africa are among the top 20, but their joint output is less than 10 percent. None of the top 30 academic institutions publishing disinformation research are in the Global South (including China), except for one in Singapore. Only one of the leading authors is in China, the rest residing in the Global North. The authors also find that research publication accelerated in 2019 due to the eruption of COVID-19, which triggered a parallel disinformation pandemic.
The authors also propose an interesting classification using digital technologies and COVID-19 as a reference. Before the emergence of the Web, disinformation academic research was primarily published in psychology journals, thus confirming the findings of Madrid-Morales et al. Once it emerged and brought along social media, research started to switch to new platforms and issues related to trust, bias, fake news, etc. After COVID-19 showed its ugly face, the research focused on public health disinformation. However, once the pandemic was globally tamed, it started to target what authors call “big data technologies” such as machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), detection, and fact-checking, among others. Unfortunately, data on related AI research is not included in the article. I have already provided a general overview of this in a previous post.
This group of researchers’ critical review of disinformation in the Global South reveals four crucial gaps.
- The context gap. Here, context is much larger than geography and encompasses the socio-economic and political structures under which actors and entities, public and private, operate. Included here is the implicit assumption that what works in the Global North works everywhere else.
- The historical gap. Research on Global South disinformation has been absent for many decades. As one researcher has suggested, people in that set of countries are used to being fed disinformation daily .
- The capacity gap. There is relatively weak research capacity in Global South institutions and organizations. Moreover, research produced by such institutions has to overcome many hurdles to be published in high-impact journals.
- The language gap. The exclusion of non-English academic work from mainstream research projects, which has direct impact on all of the above. On the other hand, publishing in Swahili, Arabic, or Spanish shows that local capacities are more readily available than usually assumed — albeit not large enough to close the capacity gap.
Raúl
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