the majority of efforts made in sub-Saharan Africa to study and understand information disorder are by individuals and organizations in the media space. Another interesting finding is that from our pool of articles, seventy-one were authored between 2020 and 2021, a period which coincides with the Covid-19 pandemic and during which information disorder reached a peak. It comes as no surprise that the field of media, communication, and journalism has the most publications in terms of information disorder. This is because of the elevated role that the media have had to assume in dispensing accurate and timely information at a time when much of the world was uninformed. 1.3 DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES While sub-Saharan Africa faces a variety of challenges in terms of digital illiteracy, poor infrastructure, the high cost of installing ICT infrastructure, volatile political environments, and limited electricity supply (Bakibinga-Gaswaga et al. 2020), the use of digital technologies has contributed to the reconfiguration of communicaThe use of digital tion tools. Indeed, even through traditechnologies has tional communication tools (radio, telecontributed to the vision, etc.) remain popular, a growing number of communities in sub-Saharan reconfiguration of Africa are increasingly using digital communication tools in technologies, notably through applisub-Saharan Africa. cations such as WhatsApp or social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Nevertheless, while digital technologies play an important role for communities in terms of access to useful information or goods and services, they also have negative effects. Most of the reviewed papers acknowledge the influence of the media in general in the proliferation of false information; social media platforms in particular have been identified as a key vehicle for information disorder (Chenzi 2020). 1.4 COVID-19 AND INFORMATION DISORDER A large number of the studies on information disorder in sub-Saharan Africa focus on either the impact of digital technologies or the context of Covid-19. Almost all of these researchers argue that information disorder has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, as many people have turned to social media as their primary source of updates about the virus, these media have become known as platforms for the dissemination of both I N FO R M ATI O N D I SO R D ER IN THE GLOBA L SOUTH false and true information (Durodolu, Chisita, and Dube 2021). In terms of mis- and disinformation related to Covid-19, some well-known examples of false information that have been spread include claims that the virus is a secret attempt by the global elite to reduce overpopulation, that the virus is a bioweapon manufactured by the Chinese state to control the world, and that the virus is a plan by greedy “big pharma” firms to make money from vaccines (Nguyen and Catalan 2020). 2. RESEARCH APPROACHES The majority of the studies reviewed adopted qualitative research methods, collecting data via interviews, through surveys, or by reviewing literature. These studies were interested in the epistemology of mis- or disinformation. Quantitative methods were less well represented; however, studies such as that of Seo et al. (2021) tested correlations and applied network and regression analyses to examine the relationship between a country’s position in the global internet network and the impact of media, information, and digital education programs. Wasserman and Madrid-Morales (2018) also used statistical analysis to explore the relationship between “fake news” and media trust. As mentioned above under “Fields of Study,” phenomenological approaches related to public health, specifically Covid-19, also feature heavily in the literature. In terms of the general policy and legislative environment, there are studies that present a comparative legal analysis and others where authors have produced commentaries that make a theoretical contribution to the discourse (Offer-Westort, Rosenzweig, and Athey 2021; Pierre 2018; Pomeranz and Schwid 2021; Radu 2020). The mixed-methods approach is often used to analyze social media. This includes the use of data-driven technologies to scrape data from the internet for analysis with descriptive statistical tools such as R-Stats (Islam et al. 2020). Studies carried out from a communication point of view often develop conceptual frameworks to understand the data they have collected. A study by ​​Barua et al. (2020) combined the stimulus–response theory and resilience theory to examine individual responses towards Covid-19 misinformation on social media and the resilience of these individuals to the misinformation. The framework considered general misinformation as the stimuli and used the individual’s ability to evaluate information Sub -Saharan Africa – 1 6 8