Understanding vaccine hesitancy & social network giants pledge to protect women online
This week Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube made their first joint commitment to curb the harassment women face on their platforms. The social media giants pledged to give users more granular control over who interacts with their posts and improve their reporting processes. This was much needed.
In other updates, we take a look at the reasons for vaccine hesitancy among the marginalized in India. Do read our blogpost that looks at how fact-checkers can potentially collaborate with grassroots newsrooms to address some of the challenges related to vaccine hesitancy.
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The latest top stories
Misinformation Alone Can’t Explain Vaccine Hesitancy Among India’s Marginalised (The Wire)
Misinformation on vaccine is not the only reason for vaccine hesitancy among the marginalized in India. There is more to it. Rumors which claim that vaccines are toxic and harmful is also an expression of fear that the “system” is against them.
In this context, simply calling out misinformation and rumours can work only up to a point. For many who resist vaccination, attitudes towards the vaccine are related to their survival and safety. And attitude theories suggest that these attitudes are strongly held, and thus hard to change. If state agencies don’t become less hostile and less alienating, and whose schemes don’t become more inclusive, campaigns centered on facts and rationality will find poor traction on the ground.
"The more we spoke with people, the clearer it became that an aversion to vaccines is driven by bits of misinformation only in a superficial sense. The truth is deeper: for those marginalised in socio-economic terms, these bits reinforce an already existing worldview full of despair and anger at a state and society that is indifferent, or even hostile, to their travails."
Bolsonaro's COVID-19 'early treatment' recommendations infringe social media rules but remain on air (Aos Fatos)
A survey by Aos Fatos in Brazil, demonstrates how the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro managed to circumvent punishments provided by social media platforms and maintain his defense of the use of drugs without proven efficacy against the new coronavirus. Last week, the COVID-19 Congressional Investigation (CPI da Covid-19), approved the summoning of representatives from Facebook, Twitter and Google to explain why Bolsonaro´s content that contained disinformation about the pandemic remains on air.
Questioned by Aos Fatos , Facebook responded that its "community standards apply to everyone, and they have been applied to elected politicians around the world, including Brazil. Although definitive claims of cure for Covid-19 are prohibited, we allow discussions about medications and impacts of public policies such as lockdowns."
The World Needs Deepfake Experts to Stem This Chaos (Wired)
Recently the military coup government in Myanmar added serious allegations of corruption to a set of existing spurious cases against Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi. These new charges build on the statements of a prominent detained politician that were first released in a March video that many in Myanmar suspected of being a deepfake.
In the video, the political prisoner’s voice and face appear distorted and unnatural as he makes a detailed claim about providing gold and cash to Aung San Suu Kyi. Social media users and journalists in Myanmar immediately questioned whether the statement was real. This incident illustrates a problem that will only get worse. As real deepfakes get better, the willingness of people to dismiss real footage as a deepfake increases. What tools and skills will be available to investigate both types of claims, and who will use them?
While the usage of deepfakes to create nonconsensual sexual images currently far outstrips political instances, deepfake and synthetic media technology is rapidly improving, proliferating, and commercializing, expanding the potential for harmful uses. The case in Myanmar demonstrates the growing gap between the capabilities to make deepfakes, the opportunities to claim a real video is a deepfake, and our ability to challenge that.
Social network giants pledge to tackle abuse of women online (The Guardian)
Facebook, Google, Twitter and TikTok have signed up to the pledge, led by the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF), to fix persistent weaknesses in how they tackle online gender-based violence. More than a third of women worldwide have experienced abuse online, rising to almost half for younger women, according to a 2021 study from the Economist Intelligence Unit. The four tech companies have pledged to tackle that abuse by focusing on two major areas of concern across their platforms: women’s inability to control who can reply, comment on and engage with their posts; and the lack of clear and reliable reporting systems for flagging online abuse.
"For too long, women have been routinely harassed, attacked and subsequently silenced in online spaces. This is a huge threat to progress on gender equality. With their resources and reach, these four companies have the power to curb this abuse and improve online experiences for hundreds of millions of women and girls." — WWWF’s senior policy manager, Azmina Dhrodia
What’s new at Meedan
The case for collaborations of fact-checkers and grassroots newsrooms
Fact-checkers face a huge challenge in making fact-checks available to people in rural areas. In a recent effort to address this gap in reach of facts, the Quint an English and Hindi language Indian general news and opinion website, came up with a brilliant initiative. Their fact-check team WebQoof resorted to offline collaborations with grassroots level newsrooms and media organizations in gathering misinformation circulating in rural areas and among underserved communities in India. We spoke to Kritika Goel, Associate Editor with the Quint for insights on how the collaboration works and the responses in the community. Read this blogpost that shares highlights from the conversation with Kritika.