Facts matter now than ever! In Liberia, if you randomly walked up to someone and asked them, “why are you acting this way?’’, chances are so high their response would either be one, or a combination of more than one, of the following: ‘I heard it from the radio’. ‘I saw it on the internet’. ‘I read it in the newspaper’. ‘I heard it from a government official.’ All this points to but one thing: people’s daily actions as regards how they relate to the greater society are mostly influenced by publicly available information they come across. Sadly nowadays, most of this information is misleading, manipulated or plain wrong.
Liberia is experiencing a share of the global advent of information technology which makes tons of different information available at the click of one’s fingers. And with this comes the risk of taking misleading or false information as true. Thus, the problem of fake news prevalence in Liberia is compounded by little or no knowledge on how to sieve through this information load so as to differentiate facts from lies among media houses who share these information and the public who receive them.
Come to think about this for a moment. If people’s daily actions are influenced by the publicly available information they come across, what would happen if these information are left unchecked for facts? Shattered or broken systems, toxic democracy, public mistrust in, and resistance against public policies for public good, violence and chaos are probably few of the many results we can have.
That’s why at LocalVoices Liberia, we are not taking fact-checking lightly. Our fact-checking desk is daily monitoring all the media, tracking, fact-checking and publishing findings on potentially dangerous or harmful claims made on them so as to guide public debates.