Interdisciplinary Studies

E-literary creativity on the dark web: Covid-19 Whatsapp bot's interactive storytelling in WhatsApperature

Y. J. Waliya

Explore how social media affordances enabled an automatic, multilingual WhatsApp/SMS chatbot—launched by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control with UNICEF on the U-Report platform—to counter COVID-19 misinformation in Nigeria. The essay describes a five-language SMS-Chatbot (English, Pidgin, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo) and presents a techno-discursive analysis of the extracted English version as a digital literary practice, “WhatsApperature.” Research conducted by Yohanna Joseph Waliya (University of Calabar, Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria).... show more

Abstract

Social media affordances prioritize automatic interactive digital narrative about the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic to counteract misinformation and fake news in Nigeria. To engage the public about their health risk, WhatsApp chatbot was launched by Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) in collaboration with UNICEF on the U-Report platform. It is the first Nigerian multilingual SMS-based interactive chatbot to run on all mobile telecommunication networks (the dark web), WhatsApp and Facebook Messengers to address health issues. This essay describes SMS-Chatbot which offers narratives to counter health misinformation in five languages-English, Pidgin, Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo. A techno-discursive analysis is presented to explain the relationship between the technotext and the wreader by employing Pedro Barbosa's theory of wreader¹ on the extracted English version which is perceived as the digital literary practice on WhatsApp, that is, "WhatsApperature".

Publisher

Texto Digital

Published On

Authors

Yohanna Joseph Waliya

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5007/1807-9288.2022.e86373

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