Beyond distrust: Rumour, verification and political trust among university students in Côte d'Ivoire after the 2025 presidential election
- 1Universitat de Barcelona
- 2Université Pelefero Gon Coulibaly
Abstract
This exploratory mixed-methods study examines how 44 Ivorian university students describe disinformation, verification, the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and political trust after the 2025 presidential election. Open-ended responses were coded in ATLAS.ti with a 52-code hierarchical codebook, quantitised into a binary code–document matrix and analysed with Fisher exact tests, Cramér's V and correspondence analysis. The rumour of President Ouattara's death works as a shared cognitive anchor, cited spontaneously by 17 of 44 respondents, while 24 cite death rumours about public figures. Verification is stratified into single-source (25/44), contrastive (13/44) and composite multi-source (5/44) practices tied to distinct source ecologies, and two students already use generative AI to verify. Distrust of political information on social media is near-universal (40/44) and largely independent of AI-mechanism awareness. Calibrated trust appears with multi-source verification and political explanations of falsehood. The study argues that media literacy in francophone West Africa should work with national rumour-events and equip students to resolve doubt, since doubt itself is already widespread.
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BibTeX
@misc{botevericad2026beyond,
title = {{Beyond distrust: Rumour, verification and political trust among university students in Côte d'Ivoire after the 2025 presidential election}},
author = {Juan-José Boté-Vericad and Sirabana Coulibaly},
howpublished = {Zenodo},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.23441327},
url = {https://zenodo.org/records/23441327},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Beyond distrust: Rumour, verification and political trust among university students in Côte d'Ivoire after the 2025 presidential election
AU - Juan-José Boté-Vericad
AU - Sirabana Coulibaly
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/17
PB - Zenodo
DO - 10.5281/zenodo.23441327
UR - https://zenodo.org/records/23441327
AB - This exploratory mixed-methods study examines how 44 Ivorian university students describe disinformation, verification, the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and political trust after the 2025 presidential election. Open-ended responses were coded in ATLAS.ti with a 52-code hierarchical codebook, quantitised into a binary code–document matrix and analysed with Fisher exact tests, Cramér's V and correspondence analysis. The rumour of President Ouattara's death works as a shared cognitive anchor, cited spontaneously by 17 of 44 respondents, while 24 cite death rumours about public figures. Verification is stratified into single-source (25/44), contrastive (13/44) and composite multi-source (5/44) practices tied to distinct source ecologies, and two students already use generative AI to verify. Distrust of political information on social media is near-universal (40/44) and largely independent of AI-mechanism awareness. Calibrated trust appears with multi-source verification and political explanations of falsehood. The study argues that media literacy in francophone West Africa should work with national rumour-events and equip students to resolve doubt, since doubt itself is already widespread.
ER -