By Haggai Matsiko
Disinformation has yet again come into sharp focus in public debates as Uganda enters the 2025-2026 general elections season.
The debate is timely. While the main parliamentary and presidential elections are still months away, electioneering activities begun this January with the update of the national voters’ register and nomination of candidates is expected later this September and October.
Research has shown that disinformation around elections takes root on social media, often undermining electoral integrity and stoking post-election violence.
For a country that has never experienced peaceful transfer of power since it attained independence in 1962, stakes are even higher this time. AGORA spoke to experts who shared insights on how the disinformation problem can be countered.
Dr. George Lugalambi
Executive Director, African Centre for Media Excellence (ACME)
Invest in providing high quality news and information to citizens
The first thing, says Dr. George Lugalambi, the Executive Director, African Centre for Media Excellence (ACME), should be to appreciate that if the quality of the information the public receives is not paid attention to, then the ability of a citizen to make decisions is undermined.
“If you aggregate bad decisions then ultimately the sum of all those poor decisions that are informed by poor and misleading information translates into policies that might misrepresent the best interests of the citizen.
“What then our job really should be, those of us in the professional business or the professional industry, is to invest in providing the highest possible quality of news and information to citizens and to our audiences,” Lugalambi says.
He adds: “To this end, ACME trains journalists and produces research aimed at making the media a more effective platform for the provision of information on public affairs, a tool for monitoring official power, and a forum for vibrant public debate.
Understand the technologies used in manipulation of information
ACME also trains journalists to understand how the manipulation of information works and the technologies that are used.
Lugalambi says: “I think for journalists, whether they are activists or whether they are campaigners for free speech, it is important to…have the ability to use the tools available to check to verify information, to fact check, for example, the truthfulness of information to the truthfulness of news”.
Turn purveyors of disinformation into focus of reporting
Additionally, Lugalambi says journalists and other producers of information and news have to spotlight people who use disinformation for harmful purposes, including corroding civic space.
“I think if we get a critical mass of people who are out and paying attention to those who have made it their business to create negative information that is harmful to public discourse and turn them into a focus for our very reporting, I think that is one way that you can really put the pressure on them, keep the pressure on them so that they get exposed.”
Angelo Izama
Journalist and tech enthusiast
Demystify the disinformation technologies
Journalist and tech enthusiast, Angelo Izama, emphasizes the need to demystify the potential technologies and red flag likely abuse.
“It is important to demystify this technology early such that it is not strange to people who might encounter it. Also, those who may choose to use it won’t have the advantage of surprise.”
Izama says timely red flagging of abuse of this technology is the easiest way to prevent further harm.
“If a video is manipulated, if voice is AI generated; whatever is manipulated for political purposes, that should be red flagged immediately.”
John Musinguzi Blanshe
Winner of the African Investigative Journalist of the Year 2024
Make fighting disinformation a daily job
Journalist John Musinguzi Blanshe and winner of the African Investigative Journalist of the Year 2024, says fighting disinformation should be a daily job.
“I have seen people who do fact-checking, but you do fact-checking after a week. That may not be effective. We should be at any time ready to say, this is fake, so that we counter it as early as possible, before it spreads very fast towards subgroups and then reaches deep, deep in the villages where you may not catch it.”
Fact-checking should be embedded in newsrooms
Second, Blanshe adds, this work shouldn’t be left to small organisations.
“I think it [fact-checking] should be embedded in the newsrooms, [such] that a newsroom which has one or two million or three million followers can easily counter these facts,” Blanshe notes, “They [newsrooms] have also been victims of fake news. We have seen people creating fake posts of Daily Monitor, fake posts of NTV, fake posts of NBS, and then they come out and say, “Oh, this is not true. We have not put out this.” I feel they need to also be at the center of fighting this information.”
Blanshe adds that journalists need to be more aggressive in their reporting.
Given that politicians tend to say wrong, fake, and innacurate things whenever they are asked to comment or whenever they are addressing the public, journalists need to arm themselves with facts and always be ready, in their reporting, to offer alternative information.
“For instance, information about budgeting, it is there, it is around so we can use it and counter the disinformation that politicians want us to put in our news outlets and news products.”
Jimmy Spire Ssentongo
Makerere University senior lecturer and activist
Understand the psychology producers of disinformation
Makerere University senior lecturer and activist, Jimmy Spire Ssentongo, says it is critical for consumers of information to understand the psychology of [procucers] of disinformation.
In this era, where there is so much information yet people don’t have much time, Ssentongo explains, thinking twice about whatever information is received and trying to understand the possible motives of whoever is sharing it, what they are sharing, when they are sharing it, and that entire context, would be very helpful in countering disinformation.
“Let’s say one is an activist,” Ssentongo explains, “what do you expect from those that he is always exhibiting or always critiquing? [One] would expect that, of course, they are not happy with it.”
As they say, Ssentogo adds, if one calls out corruption, it fights back, if one calls out bad governance, bad governance fights back.
“So how is it likely to fight back?” Ssentongo asks rhetorically. “By tarnishing.”
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