Paper long abstract:

The study «Fakes’ on Social Media in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan» is a part of a project “Development of New Media and Digital Journalism in Central Asia.” The study focused on COVID-19 'fakes' and has a goal of identifying peculiarities of 'fakes' as compared to other news reports, as well as their format and channels of dissemination. The second goal of the study is strengthening Central Asian media capacity to produce impartial, objective and gender-sensitive content through training-in-action of students and faculty of journalism. As the research on Tajikistan shows, most fakes were related to health care, prevention, treatment, self-treatment, including traditional and non-traditional medicine. Such focus is explained by the lack of official data and guidelines. As to the policy related information, fakes predominately covered mortality rates, measures adopted by the government and immigration. Most fakes are shared internationally and do not necessarily relate to a specific country. Vast majority of studied fakes are categorised as lies and manipulation disseminated via online media sources and social networks. On a more professional development level, participation of students and faculty in this study helped them to enhance their web-journalism skills.