Internet shutdown in Sudan and addressing the president's false claim
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We've always been concerned about internet shutdowns during periods of political and social unrest. As the military seized control of Sudan on October 25, internet access was cut off preventing newsrooms and social media platforms from sharing information about the developments. We urge the authorities in Sudan to immediately restore full access to the internet and all communication services,
The Check Global section on Meedan's website is now live! Read more about the program, our partners and our plans for this decade and next.
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The latest top stories
Sudan shuts down the internet after a military coup (Quartz Africa)
Internet access in Sudan was cut off following a coup on October 25, which saw the country's military overthrow a transitional authority that had been set up following the ouster of previous president Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Several members of the civilian-led interim government were arrested, and local telecom services have also been disrupted following the military takeover.
"Internet and telecommunication services were disconnected for most of the day to prevent dissemination of the violent act on news outlets and social media. We are deeply concerned that the army and its co-perpetrators will resort to more violence." — Hussein Malik, political analyst
Facebook, YouTube take down Bolsonaro video over false vaccine claim (Reuters)
Facebook and YouTube have removed from their platforms a video by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in which the far-right leader made a false claim that COVID-19 vaccines were linked with developing AIDS.
Both Facebook and Alphabet Inc's YouTube said the video, which was recorded on Thursday, violated their policies.
"We removed a video from Jair Bolsonaro's channel for violating our medical disinformation policy regarding COVID-19 for alleging that vaccines don't reduce the risk of contracting the disease and that they cause other infectious diseases." — YouTube in a statement
India: Facebook struggles in its battle against fake news (BBC News)
Facebook's failure to deploy enough resources in India's 22 officially recognised languages and a lack of cultural sensitivity has left it struggling to combat misinformation in the country, reported New York Times. The reality is more complex and multi-layered. This includes Facebook's poor content moderation and the social network's algorithms, organized and carefully mined disinformation campaigns in the country and allegations that Facebook favours the governing party.
"A large part of the misinformation on social media in India is generated by politicians of the ruling party. They have the largest clout, but Facebook doesn't fact-check them...... If these classifiers (a database created by humans which annotates different kinds of speeches -- vet them before selected ones reach human moderators) were good enough they would catch a lot more hate speech, with fewer false positives. But they clearly aren't." — Pratik Sinha, co-founder of Alt News, an independent fact-checking site.
What’s new at Meedan
Check Global is live!
A new look that reflects our work, resonates with our values and those of our partner organisations: here’s introducing the Check Global section on Meedan’s website. This section is a labour of love.
Over the last few months our program team members have discussed and contributed to the story of Check Global. It captures ten years of the program’s history of work with newsrooms, civil society groups and advocacy communities. The section is also updated to reflect our current work and collaborations with partners in the emerging economies of Asia Pacific, North Africa Western Asia, Sub- Saharan Africa and Latin America. You’ll find highlights from our team and groups that we work with and an introduction to people who make Check Global - our partner organisations as well as the program team members.
As we complete ten years of Check Global’s work in 2021, we’ve taken an opportunity to develop our theory of change for this decade and make plans for the next. The website section houses our theory of change and also shares resources in the form of toolkits, articles and research insights.
All the work shared on the website is published under open access licenses and is available for download. Our designers have ensured that the design is simple and there is ease of navigation.
We hope you will find the website section useful and will enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed working on it.