Fake news lurks in agri, but it can be stopped

At the Africa Agri Tech 2025 conference held in Pretoria in March, Alan Hardacre, co-founder of Advocacy Academy, spoke about how disinformation campaigns wreak havoc on agribusinesses. He highlighted the challenges and opportunities in using artificial intelligence in the fight for truth. Lindi Botha reports.

- Lindi Botha

Disinformation and misinformation seem like far-removed concepts that do not concern farmers. But everyone in the agri food chain has a ticket in what can be called the disinformation lottery. If you're lucky, your ticket number will never come up. If not, you'll need to learn very quickly how to navigate a disinformation storm.

There are three legs of this stool: misinformation, disinformation, and activism. Misinformation is when information is shared that is false but which the sender did not necessarily realise was false since they did not fact check. Everyone is susceptible to spreading misinformation, since social media is a hotbed of passing on such information.

Disinformation is when someone actively decides to upset, disrupt, or destroy something by publishing information that is known to be false.

Activism is on the far end of this spectrum and is general engagement from different types of civil society organisations for or against different things.

These are all interconnected, as misinformation feeds disinformation, which feeds activism.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently being used in the communication space to effect some very undesirable impacts on agriculture. It can create content, spread it, disseminate it, and respond to it faster than we could ever hope to correct it. But we can use the same tools to distribute truth.

Working out how to do this is going to become critical, especially if we want new technologies and innovations to survive. Governments used to take decisions based on scientific facts and evidence, but today they also look at a whole host of different factors, which can include disinformation.

EVERYONE IS VULNERABLE

New technologies require thorough communication strategies from the outset to prevent misinformation from halting commercialisation.