Election Misinformation and Fake News Target at Africa | This Week In African Tech 9

Facebook earlier this year purged a network of hundreds of pages, groups and Instagram accounts it labeled as producing “coordinated inauthentic behavior” toward Africa.
The activity originated in Israel and was largely targeted toward Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, Angola, Niger, and Tunisia.
It was mostly political in nature and primarily paid for by Archemedes Group, a global political consulting firm, Facebook said.
Examples included a “Make Nigeria Worse Again” trolling initiative aimed at the campaign of Atiku Abubakar, who was challenger to Nigeria’s incumbent president Muhammadu Buhar

Internet penetration on the Africa continent according to the GSMA is % and looking to increase to
Even as Continent that has the same one of the lowest internet penetration rates , its is not immune to the scourge of fake news and online armies
According to the New York Time : CAIRO — Days after Sudanese soldiers massacred pro-democracy demonstrators in Khartoum in June, an obscure digital marketing company in Cairo began deploying keyboard warriors to a second front: a covert operation to praise Sudan’s military on social media.
The Egyptian company, run by a former military officer and self-described expert on “internet warfare,” paid new recruits $180 a month to write pro-military messages using fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Telegram. Instructors provided hashtags and talking points.
The secretive Egyptian effort to support Sudan’s military on social media this summer by the company in Cairo, New Waves
The campaign was exposed on Aug. 1 when Facebook announced that it had shut down hundreds of accounts run by New Waves
The New Waves owner, Amr Hussein, retired from the Egyptian military in 2001 and described himself on his Facebook page as a “researcher on internet wars.”
Facebook said the Egyptian and Emirati companies worked together to manage 361 compromised accounts and pages with a reach of 13.7 million people. They spent $167,000 on advertising and used false identities to disguise their role in the operation.
In Zimbabwe , the online activist group namd varaksahi by the president which means have gone on the path of chatbots with fake accounts propagating and pusing agend and sometimes fakenews on the African continent

Internet bots are software applications that are used online for both legitimate and malicious purposes. Hackers use bots to perform repetitive automated tasks online at a very high rate, which is impossible for a human to achieve.
While facebook is working on safe guarding and stopping online trolls and chat bots and organized online misinformation campaigns for the western world and the USA Electiosn
Questions
Should African civil society and governance acitivist groups be having more pointed African centric conversations with the social media platforms on the topic ..
To be fair these platforms have generic policies that help catch the online trolls and misinformation but I wonder if a clear conversation needs to be had about whatsapp and its clear role in online misinformation on the content. I am talking when African aunties send you weird natural remedies to the panic that happened a couple of weeks ago where it was said because of the xenophobic attacks in South African , MTN was stopping the movement of money on its mobile money platforms
-Should electoral commission begin to have anti online misinformation policies as they approach elections in each country ?
-What is the role of the tech ecosystems in helping , stave off this problem ?
Well sometimes it is the government that are perpetrators