**4. Fake news and people's perspectives on COVID-19**

The impact of COVID-19 has been huge globally as the illness affected millions of people with numerous deaths, which made the world to live in fear. As noted earlier on in this chapter, countries and governments across the globe immediately put in measures such as restricting local and international travel as local and international borders were closed in most cases. Additionally, most countries resort to various levels of regional and national lockdown by ordering their citizens to stay indoors to reduce the spread and impact of the pandemic [18, 19]. There were fears, frustrations, and speculations among South Africans just like in other parts of the world, more so as there was a growing level of mistrust around the source of the virus, the likelihood of a cure and the rising death toll globally. This made people around the world to initiate their own communication to alert and update each other about the realities of the pandemic and also suggestion a likely cure too, even though they are not tested. It was interesting to see how people embraced the digital media platforms to source for information on COVID-19 and content producers also took advantage of this to increase the content production and uploading thousands of texts, images, audio and visuals [1, 20].

There are various reasons attributed to the spread of fake news and misleading information during a pandemic. Some scholarly views note that some individuals decide to spread fake news in an attempt to fill in information gaps about an issue while some do it for mischievous or malicious purposes [21–24]. Also, during a

#### *People's Perspectives on Covid 19, Fake News and the Vaccination Drive in South Africa DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.108933*

pandemic, individuals or citizens may not be well informed to be able to distinguish between misleading or fake information and the truth, which would be helpful to them. This is usually the case considering that it is always a time of great uncertainties and fear for everyone. It is even worse nowadays with the use and effect of various forms of social media, which gives people the platform and opportunity to create and upload contents for public consumption. This made the world to witness the creation and circulation of huge amount of fake and misleading information on COVID-19 [25, 26].

Various digital platforms and online sources have therefore witnessed a great explosion of true and false information about COVID-19, its origin, possible effect on humans and possible cures available or that could be tried. While some information noted that COVID-19 was a biological weapon with a patented vaccine, other information noted that it aimed at wiping out a considerable size of the human race as a form of world population control mechanism [27]. There was also misleading information about African genetics being resistant to the COVID-19 virus and likewise various misleading information from Africa and some other parts of the world on untested cures and treatments for the virus [28, 29]. Various digital platforms like YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram among others were buzzing with texts, images, audio-visual recordings that were being uploaded continuously as people around the world were very active with issues around the virus and possibilities of stopping its spread.

Even though the digital media has served as a platform for disseminating a lot of fake and misleading information on COVID-19, one can still enumerate many personal and professional benefits of using digital media. There is a high usage of Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets for accessing news and all forms of information and this was the case even during the pandemic as people try to get every necessary information that could assist them to keep safe and healthy. This attests to the benefits of using social media and the gratification gleaned from it by the users as South African were also very active digital media users during the pandemic [1]. As noted by Malinga [30], the growth in internet access in South Africa has brought about an increase in social media usage as the number of social media users grew from 25 million (41.9%) in 2020, to almost 30 million in 2021. Presently, there is an estimated 48.8% (30 million) of South Africans being active on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and TikTok [30].
