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The topic of fake news is not new but its rise is fueled by the digital age era. The increased proliferation of fake news has been observed since the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) started, thus introducing controversy regarding its origin, conspiracies about 5G causing COVID-19 and COVID-19 home remedies or prevention methods. This information may be harmless, or could potentially pose a threat by misleading the population to depend on unjustified and unsubstantiated claims. Several studies worldwide are investing towards this topic, however, very little has been done in the South African context. Therefore, this study aims at analysing fake news about COVID-19 spread during the South African national lockdown on social media platforms and news outlets; together with the measures put in place by the government i.e. social relief funds and food parcels. This study took place between March 2020 and October 2020 whereby a Google form was used to collect data. The collected data was verified using fact-checking websites like Africa Check and techniques such as Google reverse image for image verification. Thereafter, the data was coded according to these categories, namely; misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, propaganda and scams, and annotated according to 11 annotation classes. The analysis showed that Twitter was the leading source of fake news at 59% followed by WhatsApp at 22%. In addition, most discussions were in reference to COVID-19 cures and treatments. Overtime, a correlation was observed between events (e.g., change in regulations) that occurred and the spread of fake news. To dispel and delegitimise the sources, a publicly accessible dashboard was created where all verified fake news were shared for easier access. This study has established an understanding of the nature of fake news and draws insights that offer practical guidance on how fake news may be combated in the future.

Even with the ability to produce documents digitally, the paperless environment has yet to become a reality in South Africa. Hardcopy documents are still printed daily which makes them susceptible to document fraud. In South Africa, a case was reported recently, where someone who was creating fake documents was exposed. This introduces the challenge when using hardcopy documents which is loss of integrity. Thus, it is vital to have systems in place to verify document integrity and be able to determine when a document has been tampered with. Various techniques have been used to secure documents, yet the challenge persists. The combination of 2D barcodes, digital signatures, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), cryptographic hashing has proved the potential to achieve good results when combined. Recently, blockchain has been added as one of the techniques to be employed for document verification. This paper presents a proposed solution that incorporates the combination of 2D barcodes, OCR, cryptographic hashing and blockchain. As this is still on-going work, experiments are still required to demonstrate the viability of the solution.

The issue of hardcopy document forgery is still prevalent. In South Africa, a series of cases have been reported where academic documents are forged. This poses a problem of integrity, trust and authentication of hardcopy documents. Therefore, it is vital to have a system that could verify a hardcopy document and ensure that the integrity is maintained at all times. Various techniques have been introduced to eliminate the issue of document forgery, namely; cryptographic hashing, 2D barcodes, Digital Signatures and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). In this paper, we present our proposed solution which comprises the 4 techniques. The first part of the implementation included the use of OCR and the experimental results yielded an accuracy of 100%. While this is on-going work, the experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution.