“That day, the training session was interrupted: there was a coup d'état unfolding right there and then”

You should try running a programme when everyone present has their eyes glued to their mobile phones following the unfolding mutiny, looking at photos of cars riddled with bullet holes, tracking the demonstrations, etc. Very quickly, one of the participants, Ange Levi J. Meda, suggested putting the news to practical use. And he was the first to “fast check” a false claim regarding the coup d'état by a former president. Then, for almost the entire week, we worked together with O.C. Omar and Amelie Gue to track the misinformation surrounding the events.

You know what? There was no shortage of it. And, fortunately, journalists are allowed to work during a coup d’état here. We are in Burkina... During my first trip to Ouaga in May 2015, my friend and mentor Pierre-Yves Schneider, who passed away a year ago and whose presence I feel everywhere here, told me: Burkina is the ideal country for your first mission.
Ouaga had just rid itself of Blaise Compaoré and the country was buzzing with projects and hopes; the city seemed to be permanently celebrating. The Burkina Faso journalists, who never bowed their heads under the authoritarian regime that the youth had just overthrown, were argumentative, curious, still a little quarrelsome and mocking, but also, during the debates, they showed real democratic maturity.

Over the following years, this ideal, secular, tolerant, and in short intelligent country, gradually withered away, suffering a first attempted coup d’état and terror attacks, dealing with more than a million domestic refugees and seeming incapable of escaping a spiral of massacres. This explains everything. The youths who had risen up against Compaoré took to the streets once again, this time in support of a junta wearing the red berets of Captain Sankara.

After all, what’s one more paradox? The junta’s first decision was to restore mobile internet, which the previous democratically elected regime had cut off. A blessing for the news... but also for misinformation... and those who hunt for it!
Putting the usefulness of fact checking into perspective has become something of a trend of late. When it is carried out on the spot, as was the case in Ouaga this week, to curb the worst of the rumours circulating on Facebook or WhatsApp, we don’t put too much thought into it. Instead, we try to respond quickly to misinformation by means of “fast checking”, with the aim of disproving Brandolini law.

All being well, my next session on misinformation will be in Bayonne with Isabelle Martin. This is in the other country with red berets, but this time we shouldn’t have to interrupt the session to watch those wearing them on the TV...

Witness account by Eric Le Braz, during a training session for journalists as part of the Désinfox Afrique [Misinformation in Africa] project, which provides support to the media in six French-speaking African countries to consolidate their journalists’ knowledge of fact checking.