TruthAfrica: The surprising Poland-Africa alliance fighting disinformation
It wasn’t long ago that fact-checkers in Poland noticed a surge of online misinformation about Africa — anti-science claims about vaccines, anticolonialist claims involving Russia and anti-immigrant claims about refugees. The Polish Ministry for Foreign Affairs noticed it, too, and sought to fund independent journalism projects to do some debunking and fact-checking.
The result was a project called “TruthAfrica,” fact checks for Polish and European audiences about what was actually happening in countries like Nigeria, Algeria, Angola, Chad, Egypt, Uganda and Zambia.
Related Knowledge Center: Fact-checking and its detractors
Fact-checking has become a familiar tool for political reporters to hold office-holders and candidates accountable. But critics ask if fact-checkers sometimes miss the forest for the trees, and if the practice often struggles with false equivalency the way conventional political coverage does.