Debunking election disinformation during Uganda’s internet shutdown
Prior to the country’s 2021 election the Ugandan government shut off its internet. PesaCheck went back to basics to beat election disinfo.
By Pius Enywaru and Leah Kahunde Ndung’u
As night fell on January 13 as Uganda’s citizens were preparing to vote in presidential and parliamentary polls the next day, a country of 44-million people was cut off from the world when the government blocked internet access.
For our fact-checking team in Uganda, who were monitoring the possible deluge of mis- and disinformation surrounding the election, the task suddenly became a lot more difficult.
Deprived of online and open-source tools for fact-checking, as well as most means of sharing the debunking to Uganda’s voters, PesaCheck had to quickly adapt its fact-checking processes to stop disinformation before it could impact Uganda’s democratic processes.
Triggering the shutdown
Days before the election, an investigation by Code for Africa’s partners, the Digital Forensic Research Lab, revealed a complex network of websites, public relations companies, bots and sock puppet accounts working across Facebook and Twitter to spread disinformation about candidates challenging incumbent president Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Movement party. The investigation led to both platforms purging these accounts and ones linked to them for coordinated inauthentic behaviour. Days later, the Ugandan government would blame this purge for their own internet shutdown.
However, this process had already begun weeks before when Ugandans were denied access to Google’s Play Store, Apple’s App Store and social media sites through a directive from the Uganda Communications Commission. At the time, it was still possible to bypass these government restrictions by using a virtual private network (VPN) — a tool that lets users access region-restricted websites and content — but when the complete shutdown happened, even VPNs proved ineffective at circumventing the state’s measures.
Back to basics
As the leading fact-checking presence in East Africa, PesaCheck was well prepared to combat anticipated false claims around the election: an allocated team of fact-checkers were ready to do rapid checks of election-related claims, which would be identified as they appear on social media and news sites, and through community submissions, many of which now come through our Check-powered WhatsApp tipline.
PesaCheck had also prepared dedicated social media content and a special election edition of our WhatsApp newsletter with links to articles debunking trending election-related misinformation. The internet shutdown, while not entirely unexpected, forced the team to re-think and adapt strategies for countering misinformation.
The team went back to basics: phone calls.
We quickly began receiving calls from journalists and citizens, requesting help verifying misinformation spreading through the vacuum created by the shutdown. The team also began swiftly fielding calls to officials and organisations mentioned in the claims, from government, military and police spokespersons to opposition leaders.
Our team in Uganda also resorted to navigating the dangerous landscape in Kampala to debunk claims by physically visiting locations appearing in posts. When the government denied there was a heavy military presence at the home of presidential candidate Robert Kyagulanyi, we coordinated a fact-checking visit to his home to verify the claim. It was confirmed true when the team encountered a military presence at the residence.
As our Uganda-based fact-checkers worked on the ground, Kenya’s fact-checkers helped plug the gaps. They monitored election-related hashtags and online conversations and phoned their Uganda colleagues for help translating claims so they could be fact-checked.
They also used open-source tools such as Google reverse image search, Yandex and Tineye to debunk them in real-time and share the results with Uganda’s team and our audience. We found that some of the highly emotive images and videos doing the rounds online claiming to show the situation in Uganda during and after the election were taken in 2016, or were of unrelated events. Claims of ballot boxes being marked, seized and set ablaze were from years before.
The election-focussed WhatsApp newsletter still went out to our audience across Africa, and a version was also sent to subscribers living in Uganda to access when their connections were restored.
Return to normal
Uganda’s Prime Minister Ruhakana Rugunda, in a post-election interview with local television station NBS, said internet access would be restored in a phased manner after a threat assessment had been conducted. That process began on January 18 when access to the web was partially restored, with social media sites remaining blocked to users without VPNs.
Internet and social media were only fully restored a month after the shutdown. On February 10, ICT Minister Peter Ogwang apologised for the “inconvenience caused”, saying the intention had been to ensure security during the election period.
Perhaps predictably, as internet access returned we saw an increase in misinformation about the concluded election, with inaccurate claims of ballot stuffing, protests, torture and murder surging online.
Lessons learnt
As fact-checkers working in countries where internet freedom is not guaranteed, access to a VPN is vital to continue debunking mis- and disinformation.
In scenarios where full internet access is disabled, fact-checkers must fall back on the fundamental principles of journalism — leveraging their contacts and conducting first-hand research.
The meaningful relationships that PesaCheck had built with citizens and journalists in Uganda meant that, even outside of existing digital relationships, they approached PesaCheck for verification. Our relationships with legacy media in Uganda meant that we were able to leverage newspapers, television and radio to ensure that fact-checks were communicated.
Having access to fact-checkers and editors working across Africa via phone calls meant that our team was never fully cut off, and could continue to receive and check claims, and shape the international narrative forming around the elections.
Finally, being agile and able to adapt to changing circumstances was critical to us continuing our work. No amount of resources would have enabled our team to succeed if they hadn’t been able to adapt their work to the challenges they faced.
With fact-checking playing an even greater role in the media and civil society, we hope our experience can help other organisations plan for and successfully navigate similar disruptions to combat misinformation and strengthen democracies around the world.
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PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water/sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of civic technology and data journalism labs, with teams in 12 countries. CfA builds digital democracy solutions that give citizens unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions, and that strengthens civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability. This includes building infrastructure like the continent’s largest open data portals at openAFRICA and sourceAFRICA, as well as incubating initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative and the sensors.AFRICA air quality sensor network.
