Whatsàpp messenger12/8/2023 This company mentioned that it was “offering a WhatsApp-based helpline, real-time data, and automated responses to common questions in numerous languages” on COVID-19 as a Health Alert, which has proven to be so popular that the World Health Organisation (WHO) partnered with the company,, to create a similar bot to reach a global audience. Although this does not completely prevent the spread of misinformation, it at least reduces its spread by four-fifths or 80%. Despite the drawbacks from this messaging application, the benefits are profound, and recently a South African organisation developed a WhatsApp bot to provide the latest information on the coronavirus. Since the start of this pandemic, WhatsApp was already put to the ultimate test with misinformation being widely spread as very little was known about COVID-19 in the beginning, creating an atmosphere that was ripe for fake news about this virus to prevail. This has prompted African governments to team up with technology giants such as WhatsApp to halt the spread of misinformation which has proven to be a difficult task. WhatsApp recently imposed stricter limits to the number of forwarded messages, which was previously five, to just one. The importance of this application in fighting the coronavirus is immense as WhatsApp is the most popular platform in Africa. In this blog post, I will discuss how this platform has been used to tackle this pandemic, how governments have responded to this platform and its role in regional integration in the African continent, and whether it can be an effective tool for the continent to prepare for the next health crisis. In Zimbabwe, WhatsApp alone accounts for almost half of all internet traffic and this is a trend repeated in many African countries, with some countries having even higher usage, such as Kenya, which is estimated to be 74%. However, while it has proven to be a useful tool for the distribution of information and has been helpful in the fight against the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) such as alerting people to wash their hands and practice good hygiene, it has unfortunately been a source of fake news as information is easily “shared” by its users, often without fact-checking, which has caused panic amongst some sections of the population. WhatsApp Messenger has become the most popular messenger application on the African continent for a variety of reasons, most prominently as a news source.
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