In the wake of ongoing campaign activities leading to Liberia general elections scheduled for October 10, people have developed different strategies to reach potential voters.
A link containing a message that incumbent President George Weah is giving out free 10GB of internet data and LD$500 to all his supporters to rally online and vote for his re-election is now going viral.
In the viral message also, there are four other links for different GSM subscribers to access the free data.
Is the Link Authentic?
A careful review of the different links revealed that the name of Lonestar Cell GSM is misspelled as “LONESTERS”. When you click any of the four links it takes you to the same web page which contains one of the campaign flyers of President Weah.
On the web page, there is a box to enter your mobile number. But in the box, there’s a +263 which is the country code of Zimbabwe and not Liberia’s +231.
Also, at the bottom of the web page there is a campaign flyer of Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
Mr. Mnangagwa recently won a second term in office in an election held in August 2023 in that African state.
We checked the Facebook page of President Weah but did not see any information about the Liberia leader giving out free 10GB internet data and LD$500 for supporters to rally and vote.
Neither did we find any information of such on the Facebook pages of the President’s party – the Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC).
To verify this link, we also found an article from TECHZIM, which states on its Facebook page that it is a news and blogging site. In the article, the write spoke to officials of Mr. Mnangagwa ZANU PF party and they warned people against opening the viral link and providing their mobile numbers, warning that they are not running any such promotion.
Conclusion
Based on these facts, we therefore conclude that the viral message with claims that President Weah is giving out 10GB data and LD$500 to supporters for rally and vote is fake. The same message surfaced in Zimbabwe in August 2023 in the lead up to the country’s elections.
This report was developed with the support of Internews through the USAID Media Activity project. The funder has no say in the editorial decision leading to the production of this content.
