Fake news and social media regulation in Zimbabwe : a case study of the 2019 national #shutdown

Abstract

Abstract: The question of “fake news”1 and social media regulation has become a central concern for governments worldwide, the private sector, media regulators and – gradually – media scholars (cf. Rochefort, 2020). In recent years the ubiquitous presence of “fake news” on various social media platforms, from national to global scale, has provoked a flurry of government-sponsored and private-sector sponsored regulations to deal with it (Allcott et al.2017). For instance, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, recently proposed that governments should help Facebook to regulate social media and weed out “fake news”.2 This may be because, as Parkinson (2016) writes, influence of verifiably false content on Facebook cannot be regarded as ‘small’ when it garners millions of shares and that social media companies have a responsibility when millions of users receive false information from their sites3. Still, this plea from Zuckerberg is surprising, not least because it suggests that social media companies may be losing the battle against “fake news”. Indeed, Koebler and Cox (2018) point out that “Moderating billions of posts a week in more than a hundred languages has become Facebook’s biggest challenge...M.A. (Communication Studies