Line fights disinformation & women in news media in 2021
This week Meedan turned 15! In the last fifteen years we've grown and expanded our work around designing fact-checking tools for encrypted networks, providing health resources through our Digital Health Lab, supporting the work of newsrooms and civil society groups in emerging economies and providing world class research outputs. We're thankful to all the people who have helped us along the way.
In this issue of The Checklist we take a look at how Line is fighting disinformation in Taiwan while balancing user privacy. We have included the latest factsheet from Reuters Institute that analyses the gender breakdown of top editors as the world observes International Women's Day. Finally, a grim reminder about racism from The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media (7amleh) that released its Racism and Incitement Index 2020 report, showing an increase in violent discourse toward Arabs on Israeli social networks.
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How Line is fighting disinformation without sacrificing privacy (Rest of World)
In the build-up to the Taiwanese presidential election in 2020, Line partnered with local fact-checking organizations like Taiwan Fact Check Center and Cofacts to launch a Fact Checker program to tackle mis/disinformation campaigns in the country. Used by around 90% of Taiwan's population, the chat-app has become a primary platform where misinformation spreads in the country. With the fact-checking program, Line allows users to report suspicious messages and receive and receive real-time answers. The success of the program lies in how it has managed to fight misinformation while balancing user privacy.
"When users flag a message to the Fact Checker account, it automatically analyzes the contents for specific keywords and phrases. Line then searches a database of previously identified misinformation for matches. In cases where there’s no corresponding material, Line will ask the user if they want their message fact-checked. If they say yes, Line sends the content to researchers at its partner fact-checking groups."
Racism and Incitement Index 2020: The Increase in Racism and Incitement against Palestinians and Arabs During the Pandemic (7amleh)
The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media (7amleh) released its Racism and Incitement Index 2020 report, showing an increase in violent discourse toward Arabs on Israeli social networks. The results indicated the spread of about 574,000 conversations that included violent speech towards Palestinians and Arabs, with 1 out of every 10 posts about Palestinians and Arabs containing violent speech. With 495,000 violent posts published in 2020, an increase of 79,000 posts was visible in comparison to the previous year.
The results this year showed that, due to the Corona pandemic, racist discourse towards Palestinians and Arabs increased by 21%, with hate speech constituting 29%, and incitement 7% of these posts. The most prominent platforms used to spread racism and incitement during the previous year was Twitter with 61% of all violent posts. This is an increase by more than double compared to 2019.
Women and leadership in the news media 2021: evidence from 12 markets (Reuters Institute)
In their latest factsheet, Reuters Institute analyses the gender breakdown of top editors in a strategic sample of 240 major online and offline news outlets in 12 different markets across four continents. The findings:
Only 22% of the 180 top editors across the 240 brands covered are women.
The percentage of women among the top editors has changed from 22% in 2020 to 24% in 2021.
In 11 out of 12 markets, the majority of top editors are men, including countries like Brazil and Finland where women outnumber men among working journalists.
In 10 out of 12 markets, there are considerably more women working as journalists than there are women among the top editors.
Countries like Germany and South Korea that score well on the UN Gender Inequality Index have very few top female editors.
"Several important news brands will be appointing new top editors in the year ahead, many journalists are pushing for more diverse leadership, and some news media are publicly recognising how they have fallen short on diversity for a long time. We will know more about how this might change the overall profile when we repeat this analysis in 2022 to track developments in gender equality among top editors across the world." — Reuters Institute
Black and Hispanic Communities Grapple With Vaccine Misinformation (The New York Times)
Black and Hispanic communities, which were hit harder by the pandemic and whose vaccination rates are lagging that for white people, are confronting vaccine conspiracy theories, rumors and misleading news reports on social media outlets like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter and in private online messaging, health authorities and misinformation researchers said.
Misinformation has complicated efforts by some states to reach out to Black and Hispanic residents, particularly when health officials have provided special registration codes for vaccine appointments. Instead of a benefit, in some cases the codes have become the basis for new false narratives.
"The thing about misinformation is that it works best when it is built around a kernel of truth. In this case, many communities of color don’t trust the medical establishment because they don’t have the best history with it." — Shireen Mitchell, founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women, a group that supports women of color who are harassed online
Meedan Updates
What to expect in year two of COVID-19? We asked our public health team for their forecasts
In 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic Meedan’s Digital Health Lab galvanized a team of public health experts to produce critical context for journalists and fact-checkers reporting on emerging science. Now, through the resource that has come to be named Health Desk, our team has written more than 250 explainers for fact-checking and newsroom partners in 25 countries. Year two of this public health crisis is sure to bring its own set of challenges and expose more inequities in the way we’ve designed supply chains, transportation systems, the internet and more. Our team of scientists envision a 2021 in which vaccines and treatments allow for restrictions on public life to ease for some more than others, and for digital connectivity to continue to be both an equalizer and a divider.