Vera Abena Addo, Programs Officer at the Center for Democratic Development Ghana (CDD Ghana), has revealed ways for Ghanaians to protect free speech while preventing hate speech and misinformation.
Speaking on an Xspaces session organized by YFM Ghana on Sunday, September 15, 2024, to celebrate International Day of Democracy, she emphasized that free speech is an important part of democracy and should be respected.
“Knowing that you can actually express yourself, say whatever is on your mind is important. We’ve also seen that there are a lot of misinformation and disinformation especially during elections. These are engineered by some people who cause a lot confusion and chaos and sometimes it’s just for them to win some political points against their opponents”, she said.
She explained that while there is the need to guard free speech, there is also the need to combat misinformation and disinformation, a task that several civil society organizations are already engaged in.
“Like Media Foundation for West Africa, Fourth Estate, they are doing more on fact checking such that when there’s some information out there, they’ll bring in some information to say this is false this is not true so it’s also more of an education”.
She added that some organizations are also currently verifying information given to them before sharing which she believes is one of the ways to protect free speech.
“Don’t be quick to share that information it could be leading to spreading misinformation. I know it’s difficult to draw the line but again, we also see where due to checking misinformation and disinformation government machinery usually would want to silence activists and people from speaking especially the media and censor” she said.
She highlighted that currently, a lot of media platforms are censoring some communication online.
“Especially in an election year, it’s quite difficult to control some aspects of misinformation and disinformation. We have to find the sources of information we’ll be sharing and I really think that it would be a difficult conversation to have but if we’re looking at freeing democracy and freedom of speech”.
To help prevent the spread of misinformation and disinformation, she stated that everyone should be guaranteed, whether old or young, activist, media civil society the freedom to express themselves and contribute to whichever platform they choose.
“They should be able to share their own opinion. I think it is important for this to happen especially seeing how recently Ghana has gone low on that because of some actions by state agencies and the government” she emphasized.
