Assessing Individual Strategies for Combating Misinformation in the Global South: Evidence from Kenya

The global proliferation of information and communication technology (ICT) has been accompanied by shifts in the quantity, content, and speed of online misinformation. To combat the deleterious impacts of misinformation, governments, organizations, and individual donors have attempted to improve the capacity of fact-checking initiatives. While these efforts have helped to minimize the damage of many contentious misinformation narratives by undermining their perceived veracity, fact-checking efforts remain ill-suited to address many types of misinformation. Moreover, even when assessing narratives that can be comprehensively disproven, fact-checking efforts are often hindered by limited resources, resulting in lengthy delays between the appearance of misinformation and its correction. These deficiencies are even more acute in the Global South, where limited resources are exacerbated by minimal monitoring from social media companies. Using the controversial outcome of the 2022 Kenyan General Election as a case study, we examine these outputs by utilizing Tweets related to electoral fraud to develop a novel survey experiment. Using this data, we test which actions available to ordinary citizens and community volunteers, including social corrections and social accuracy nudges, are most efficacious in reducing respondent belief in misinformation and propensity to share.