The Ghana Fact-Checking Coalition has identified Artificial Intelligence trends as one of the major challenges during the 2024 General elections that fuelled misinformation and disinformation.
The Coalition on January 29, 2025, launched its Post-Election Coalition Report highlighting critical findings, successes, and challenges in combating disinformation and misinformation during the election period.
Speaking at the launch, the Programme Manager of the Independent Journalism Project with MFWA, Kwaku Krobea Asante revealed that social media contributed to about 79% of disinformation particularly highlighted by smear campaigns and AI-generated tactics.
“Coming into this year, people had concerns about the impact and the influence of AI on elections, looking at the operation of AI in 2023, people were looking at how it will influence the year 2024 and the election that will be conducted.”
According to him, the Coalition saw a massive recycling of old photos and videos by people to create the narrative that it was something new just to spark argument around that particular video or audio and that was a result of the excessive use of AI in the country during the election season as well as the controversy centred around the passage of the LGBTQ bill.
“We saw other tactics as well, smear campaigns, recycling of old photos and videos and the weaponization of narratives on LGBTQ also saw disinformation. Particularly this year, there was so much of it, due to the back and forth in parliament on the passage of the law, it became the topic of discussion”
He further called on the government to institute a Digital Information Literacy Project to enhance election integrity citing disinformation as the major threat to countries’ democracy in the coming years.
“With some commitment to digital and media literacy, especially targetting communities with these concerns. The solution is no longer the work of the media or fact-checkers. The country must make it a national policy to address the masses, focusing on communities schools, and churches on these issues and educate them on how they can spot disinformation and how to debunk false information on their own.”
With all the achievements bagged by the institution, the Coalition however faced a major challenge concerning the difficulty in getting timely information from major stakeholders including the National Election Taskforce and the Electoral Commission. This gravely impacted turnaround time for a number of claims the coalition was working on.
Director of Training at the Electoral Commission, Dr. Serebour Quaicoe also urged the media to play an instrumental role in disseminating the findings of the coalition to eradicate dis/misinformation in our electoral process.
“The media must also be interested in churning out the truth by pushing publicity for fact-checking bodies… because they conduct the findings but how many people get to hear of it, so let’s also do our part,” he advised.
The GhanaFact (FactSpace West Africa), Fact-Check Ghana (Media Foundation for West Africa), and DUBAWA Ghana (Centre for Journalism, Innovation and Development) formed the Ghana Fact-checking Coalition to monitor and verify election-related claims to promote information hygiene during the elections.
The Ghana Fact-checking Coalition worked from Media Situation Rooms in Accra and Tamale. It collaborated with local and international partners to deploy technology and an “on-the-ground” network of journalists to monitor live narratives about the elections and produce real-time reports to debunk them.
In doing its work, the Coalition adhered to the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) standards, ensuring fairness, transparency, and non-partisanship.
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