Students attend workshop with Africa Check
Carina van Wyk (in glasses on the right), head of education and training at Africa Check, a fact verification organisation, presented a one-day workshop to students and lecturers from the School of Communication. Image: Christinet Zaal
The fact-verification organisation Africa Check recently hosted its first-ever on-campus one-day training session for prospective journalists on the Potchefstroom site of North-West
University (NWU).
Third-year communication, journalism honours students and reporters from Wapad, the student newspaper on the Potchefstroom campus, learnt about online tools to check whether pictures are real or AI-generated, used visual clues in pictures to identify their locations and gained insight into how the process of fact-checking works.
The workshop was facilitated by Carina van Wyk, the head of education and training at Africa
Check, a former journalist, who also holds a master’s degree in journalism and media studies.
Africa Check, the first independent fact-checking organisation in Africa was set up as a non-
profit organisation in 2012 for the promotion of accuracy in the news media, counter fake news and disinformation, and to fasciliate public debate in Africa.
Nsuku Juvenile, a honours journalism student, said, “Before the workshop I had little knowledge about reverse checking of images, especially the extent to which one can use online tools to discover the original sources of images. Knowing the difference between disinformation and misinformation and the impact they have, enhanced my knowledge of fact-checking in general”.
Africa Check provides seminars and training for media workers particularly those in the field of journalism, civil society organisations, high school educators and high school students. It has provided online training to students at the NWU in the past.
Based on Van Wyk’s extensive knowledge of fact-checking, she says it is a sector that requires a lot of critical skills and the basics of the verification process is something that everyone who uses the internet should be able to do to identify fake news, misinformation and disinformation.
Nica-May van Zyl, also an honours student in journalism, said following the workshop she might look into pursuing fact-checking as a career in the years to come and she would love to witness the development of software applications that are able to fact-check AI-generated content.
Michelle Hamman, a third-year student majoring in communication, said fact-checking is vital especially in the digital age whereby it is becoming more difficult to determine whether something is real or not. She would like to learn about even more about tools to verify content such as videos.