The National Media Commission (NMC) has welcomed the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA)’s Ghana Fact-Checking Coalition initiative.
The initiative seeks to mitigate the menacing threat misinformation and disinformation pose to the country’s peace, stability and democratic consolidation.
NMC described it as “one of the most crucial interventions needed to protect our nation’s information space in the last lap to the elections.”
In a press release copied to The Ghanaian Times yesterday, the Executive Secretary of NMC, Mr George Sarpong, said MFWA, Dubawa, FactSpace West Africa and other civil society organisations working on information integrity announced the formation of the Ghana Fact-Checking Coalition.
“The NMC welcomes the initiative and congratulates all the organisations involved in the ground-breaking coalition, it is one of the most crucial interventions needed to protect our nation’s information space in the last lap to the elections,” he said.
He stated that the “deluge of malign information” operations observed from both internal and external sources in the past couple of weeks gave cause for concern.
Mr Sarpong said leveraging collective experience, expertise, credibility and resources of these organisations, the Coalition had enhanced the country’s capacity to address these threats and offered hope for the containment of disinformation and Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI).
He said the Commission encouraged all stakeholders working to promote peaceful elections to cooperate with the coalition.
Additionally, he noted that the commission expressed the hope to support the coalition by making available to them the Ghana Media Watch App, a cutting-edge technology for monitoring disinformation planned to be launched on Thursday, November 14, 2024.