If you depend largely on news notifications from online news portals, or, like many, easily lend credibility to any information you read from websites owned by some of the mainstream media organizations in Ghana, then this is for you: pay attention!
There is no doubt that there will be information explosion from now till after the December 7 elections when the president-elect is officially sworn into power, so it will be crucial to pay attention and not be deceived by news reports online.
In the past months and even weeks, for instance, clone websites that mirror credible news portals, sometimes presenting the same information you would regularly find on the original trustworthy websites, have been popping up.
It is worth mentioning that for the list presented below, we have not independently flagged any reports from these websites. But there is no denying the fact that these websites appear to be riding on the credibility of already established names or brands.
Pay attention
For instance, GhanaFactcheck.com is a pro-National Democratic Congress (NDC) platform riding on the credibility of Ghana’s independent fact-checking organization signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), GhanaFact.com.
After closely studying the content of the about five-month-old platform, [set up on 09-07-2020], all eleven reports published on there have targeted the opposition party the NPP, something non-partisan fact-checkers do not encourage since it falls short of the IFCN code of principles.
Another clone website is graphicgh.com, which seeks to mirror the official website of the Graphic Communications Group Limited’s graphic.com.gh. A careful look of the URLs of the two websites reveals how similar and confusing the wordings of the websites are.
Here are a few of such websites:
| CREDIBLE PORTALS | CLONES |
| ghanafact.com
|
ghanafactcheck.com |
| bbc.com/news
|
thebbcghana.com |
| myjoyonline.com
|
joynewsroom.com |
| graphic.com.gh
|
graphicgh.com |
| citinewsroom.com
|
citynewsonlinegh.com |
By Etsey Atisu
