Born during the COVID-19 "infodemic," this project asked a practical question: what actually works to counter health misinformation on WhatsApp — the platform where many people in Sub-Saharan Africa encounter and share news? It focused on two understudied, linguistically distinct contexts, Kenya and Senegal, where empirical research, especially in Francophone settings, has been scarce.

The study paired qualitative interviews with journalists, fact-checkers, regulators and social-media users with a multilingual WhatsApp field experiment that delivered fact-checked information and news-literacy prompts in English, French, Swahili and Wolof. Findings were designed to be usable: results were shared with fact-checking and free-expression organisations to help ground their interventions in evidence. The work was co-led with Melissa Tully.