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Ph/ DR: DRC/ Social media: Young people trained in content production pledge to fight misinformation
« From a smartphone, I will produce videos to relay good information ». Blessing Kasasi, 15, is a women’s and children’s rights activist. She participated in Kinshasa in a training supported by MONUSCO on the production of digital content using a smartphone. It was Saturday July 8 in Kinshasa.
In all, thirty young people grouped together in a relay club and several other organizations took part in it at the end of June. The objective was to strengthen their capacities in the fight against disinformation, which is taking on worrying proportions on social networks. “There is no point in taking an image broadcast for just purposes, diverting it from its context and manipulating it in order to harm”, said Himlish Nketani Nsiala. The law student at the Catholic University of Congo also participated in this training.
He particularly regrets the disinformation that surrounds the work of the UN Mission in the DRC. He pledged to ” make [son] better so that information on the mandate and work of MONUSCO reaches a greater number of the population”.
The participants will thus constitute a digital army capable of detecting false information and images diverted from their context in order to oppose the real facts, thus indulging in “fact-checking”.
Create engaging content
“How to create engaging video content to fight misinformation on the web?” » is the theme developed by Giscard Mido, from the Digital Marketing organization – one of the two trainers. In this module, it was a question of explaining how the telephone can be used to reverse the trend of “fake news” which abounds on the web. To do this, the participants were equipped with the mechanisms for collecting, processing and disseminating verified news, in particular on the importance of cross-checking information and verifying it at source. To allow them to combine theory with practice, MONUSCO provided learners with essential tools for content production, namely smartphones equipped with editing software.
MONUSCO, which organized this training, wishes to involve several layers of the Congolese population in the fight against disinformation which has already caused several damages, with their harmful consequences within the communities. Beyond the production of videos, the participants were also introduced to shooting and photojournalism.
Professor Guillaume Kingh-Farel, another trainer, edified them on the different faces that misinformation and manipulation can take on social networks. According to him, “these practices are used as a weapon of war to undermine MONUSCO’s peace efforts in the DRC”.
It is on the basis of “fake news” detection techniques that the members of the relay club will now work to attack the false information distilled on social networks by simultaneously distributing objective and credible information.
The relay club is a structure made up of young volunteer students who have understood the need to counter the virality of false information by disseminating good and true information to a wide audience. (Source :United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO).
