9 August 2021, Daily Maverick, Thandi Smith & William Bird William Bird is director of Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) and Thandi Smith heads the Policy & Quality Programme at MMA, a partner in the 411 platform to counter disinformation. Read full article...

2 August 2021, Daily Maverick, William & Thandi Smith William Bird is director of Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) and Thandi Smith heads the Policy & Quality Programme at MMA, a partner in the 411 platform to counter disinformation.  Read full article...

27 June 2021, Daily Maverick, William Bird and Thandi Smith William Bird is director of Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) and Thandi Smith heads the Policy & Quality Programme at MMA, a partner in the 411 platform to counter disinformation.  Real411 therefore routinely shares outcomes on Covid-19 w...

25 June 2021, Jacaranda FM, Nokukhanya N Mntambo Director of Media Monitoring Africa William Bird says it’s only getting worse. “Mis- and disinformation are like the pandemic itself, these are things that are evils that are with us and are not going away anytime soon,” says Bird. “What we ar...

06 June 2021, Daily Maverick, Thandi Smith and William Bird This week we look at some of the anti-vaccine complaints recently received. A common approach for anti-vaxxers is to stress how vaccines won’t work or how they have deadly side effects. This week, two of these examples were on show. Read ...

01 June 2021, William Bird and Thandi Smith The Real411 platform has been receiving complaints related to disinformation, hate speech, incitement to violence and harassment of journalists since March 2020. Over the past week or two, we have received a number of questions about how Real411 works, wha...

26 May 2021, EWN More than one year into the pandemic and pockets of fake news and disinformation continue to hamper efforts to effectively deal with COVID-19. Organisations such as Media Monitoring Africa and the Real411 have been used to mitigate the spread of disinformation. MMA director Will...

23 May 2021, Daily Maverick, Thandi Smith and William Bird The Real411 platform has been receiving complaints related to disinformation, hate speech, incitement to violence and harassment of journalists, since March 2020. Since then, the platform has received just under 1,400 complaints, the majorit...

16 May 2021, Daily Maverick, Thandi Smith and William Bird All in all, while we have a few dominant parties, we have many factions and hundreds of reasons why they will try to push their interests, meaning the potential for disinformation is likely from multiple sources, without even considering pos...