Online disinformation and the African firm

In Africa, many businesses depend on word-of-mouth, and they rely increasingly on social media. For these businesses, fake news can be devastating. The continent’s dominant youth population is a main target for foreign and local businesses operating on the continent. They access most of their news o...

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Main Author: Raji, Rafiq
Other Authors: Nanyang Business School
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Language:English
Published: 2020
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Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/142641
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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spelling sg-ntu-dr.10356-1426412023-08-21T06:20:28Z Online disinformation and the African firm Raji, Rafiq Nanyang Business School Business Business::General Africa Online Disinformation In Africa, many businesses depend on word-of-mouth, and they rely increasingly on social media. For these businesses, fake news can be devastating. The continent’s dominant youth population is a main target for foreign and local businesses operating on the continent. They access most of their news on the Internet, especially social media. Internet platforms are an easy and relatively inexpensive means to add comments and criticism that whether true or not, can dominate online conversations. Such information is easy to manipulate to mischievous ends. Thus, online disinformation is becoming a matter of great concern for African businesses. This paper focuses on the more important issue of online disinformation, defined as the purposeful sharing of false information on the Internet with the intent to mislead or cause harm, as opposed to misinformation, which similarly involves sharing information that may be false, but without the intent to mislead or harm. Businesses are increasingly targets of disinformation, sometimes with devastating consequences. Yet there is relatively little material on this in the literature and media, and even less with respect to African firms. This article aims to fill this gap by addressing the following questions: How do African firms or foreign firms operating on the continent deal with online disinformation? What strategies are most effective in combating corporate fake news in Africa? And what pitfalls should African firms avoid with respect to online disinformation? Published version 2020-06-26T01:58:30Z 2020-06-26T01:58:30Z 2020 Newsletter Raji, R. (2020). Online disinformation and the African firm. Africa Current Issues, 17. doi:10.32655/AfricaCurrentIssues.2020.17 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/142641 10.32655/AfricaCurrentIssues.2020.17 17 en Africa Current Issues This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). application/pdf
institution Nanyang Technological University
building NTU Library
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider NTU Library
collection DR-NTU
language English
topic Business
Business::General
Africa
Online Disinformation
spellingShingle Business
Business::General
Africa
Online Disinformation
Raji, Rafiq
Online disinformation and the African firm
description In Africa, many businesses depend on word-of-mouth, and they rely increasingly on social media. For these businesses, fake news can be devastating. The continent’s dominant youth population is a main target for foreign and local businesses operating on the continent. They access most of their news on the Internet, especially social media. Internet platforms are an easy and relatively inexpensive means to add comments and criticism that whether true or not, can dominate online conversations. Such information is easy to manipulate to mischievous ends. Thus, online disinformation is becoming a matter of great concern for African businesses. This paper focuses on the more important issue of online disinformation, defined as the purposeful sharing of false information on the Internet with the intent to mislead or cause harm, as opposed to misinformation, which similarly involves sharing information that may be false, but without the intent to mislead or harm. Businesses are increasingly targets of disinformation, sometimes with devastating consequences. Yet there is relatively little material on this in the literature and media, and even less with respect to African firms. This article aims to fill this gap by addressing the following questions: How do African firms or foreign firms operating on the continent deal with online disinformation? What strategies are most effective in combating corporate fake news in Africa? And what pitfalls should African firms avoid with respect to online disinformation?
author2 Nanyang Business School
author_facet Nanyang Business School
Raji, Rafiq
format Newsletter
author Raji, Rafiq
author_sort Raji, Rafiq
title Online disinformation and the African firm
title_short Online disinformation and the African firm
title_full Online disinformation and the African firm
title_fullStr Online disinformation and the African firm
title_full_unstemmed Online disinformation and the African firm
title_sort online disinformation and the african firm
publishDate 2020
url https://hdl.handle.net/10356/142641
_version_ 1779156242759942144