In the closing weeks of Ghana’s 2024 election campaign, a video began to move through the country the way the most dangerous things do: fast, shared, impossible to ignore. Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh, then the New Patriotic Party’s running mate, stood in front of a crowd of small-scale miners and promised that seized excavators would be returned to them, so they could go back to work undisturbed. In a country that had watched the Pra and the Ankobra rivers turn the colour of wet clay, that had argued about galamsey, the unregulated small-scale gold mining tearing at its land and…

Misinformation has become one of the defining paradoxes of the digital age: humanity has never had more information at its fingertips, and yet we have rarely felt so uncertain about what is true. In a sweeping study published in Science, Allen, Watts, and Rand quantified the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook, showing that this kind of content is not just a minor nuisance in the corner of our feeds. It is a substantial, measurable force that shapes public health debates and undermines trust in science. The researchers found that vaccine-skeptical material circulates widely, capturing attention and driving…