Beyond distrust: Rumour, verification and political trust among university students in Côte d'Ivoire after the 2025 presidential election

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.