Reporting Elections, Safety and Security of Journalists falsehoods or doubting verifiable facts. It is disinformation that is presented as, or is likely to be perceived as, news. Ethical Journalism Network The phrase ‘fake news’ is also broadly used to describe untruths that are frequently (deliberately or unwittingly) shared on various social media platforms, especially Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter as well as widely used messaging applications such as WhatsApp. Information Disorder According to UNESCO, these untruths can be broken down into the following: • Disinformation: Information that is false and deliberately created to harm a person, social group, organisation or country. • Misinformation: Information that is false but not created with the intention of causing harm • Mal-information: Information that is based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, socialgroup, organisation or country. • This could take the form of satire and parody, click-bait headlines, misleading captions, visuals or statistics, as well as the genuine content that is shared out of context, imposter content (when a journalist’s name or a newsroom logo is used by people with no connections to them), and manipulated and fabricated content. Fake news is harmful Fake news undermines democracy and freedom: • Democracy thrives when people can express 64 https://zimbabwe.misa.org