Brazil elections: Newsrooms deliver fact-checks directly to voters via WhatsApp
And efforts to censor freedom of speech worldwide come from legislators and platforms
Hey Checklisters!
We hope you’re staying safe and healthy.
Last week, the world was closely watching the presidential elections in Brazil as right-wing incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and leftist former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva headed into a decisive second round. Meedan, along with a coalition of Brazilian newsrooms, was distributing information and fact-checks to Brazilian voters through WhatsApp lines. In this edition, we share more facts and figures about this partnership with the Superior Electoral Court in Brazil to counter election misinformation.
We also bring you updates from all around the world, including reports on the arrest of Iranian journalists who covered the news around the death of Mahsa Amini, as well as findings from a study commissioned by Meta to review potential censorship linked to Palestinian human rights.
In India, debunking fake news and calling out hate speech go hand in hand as Indian fact-checking organizations try to counter viral posts that inflame sectarian tensions.
New legislations that seek to criminalize ‘misuse of social media’ are increasingly becoming the go-to strategy for many governments to silence dissident voices and independent media. In Uganda, legislators are making a problematic law proposal even worse.
Also, take a look at the Townsquare section where we share opportunities and events.
If there are updates you would like us to share from your country or region, please reach out to us at checklist@meedan.com.
The Check Global Report
By Meedan’s Check Global team in Beirut, Belo Horizonte, Kochi, Bhimtal, and Nairobi
An Iranian journalist broke the news of the death of Mahsa Amini. Now she's in jail (Middle East Eye)
On 16 September, Niloofar Hamedi, who works for the reformist daily newspaper Shargh, managed to gain access to Kasra hospital in Tehran where a 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was being treated following her detention by the morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab inappropriately. The journalist's reporting of the police's apparent brutality sparked nationwide protests, but her voice has largely been forgotten after being arrested for her work. On 22 September, Hamedi was arrested. At the same time, her Twitter account, where she had originally posted the influential photo of Amini's parents, was suspended without explanation.
"Even reformist newspapers are still state-run media. Therefore, they cannot freely cover all political or human rights news [...] Even if they are able to sometimes briefly cover a story, the paper's editor and the reporter pay a heavy price for their coverage of the story - like Niloofar Hamedi." — Yeganeh Rezaian, CPJ senior researcher
Facebook Report Concludes Company Censorship Violated Palestinian Human Rights (The Intercept)
Facebook and Instagram's speech policies harmed fundamental human rights of Palestinian users during a conflagration that saw heavy Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip last May, according to a study commissioned by the social media sites’ parent company Meta.
“Legal designations of terrorist organizations around the world have a disproportionate focus on individuals and organizations that have identified as Muslim, and thus Meta’s DOI policy and the list are more likely to impact Palestinian and Arabic-speaking users, both based upon Meta’s interpretation of legal obligations, and in error.” — From the report commissioned by Meta last year and conducted by the independent consultancy Business for Social Responsibility.
In India, Debunking Fake News and Running Into the Authorities (The New York Times)
Alt News has become a leading fact checker in India, debunking rumors on social media that often spiral onto television news. Calling out hate speech has also become part of the site’s work as it has taken aim at viral posts that inflame sectarian tensions.
“People in power want to shut me up for exposing their propaganda, their lies and their hate campaigns, They want to scare other journalists and activists by targeting me.”
Proposed Ugandan legislation seeks to criminalize ‘misuse of social media’ (Committee to Protect Journalists)
For years, activists and civil society organizations have warned of Facebook’s negligence of non-English speaking regions, and its deeply discriminatory content moderation structure which has served to silence globally marginalized voices, not empower them.
“Ugandan legislators have taken the wrong turn in attempting to make an already problematic law even worse. If this bill becomes law, it will only add to the arsenal that authorities use to target critical commentators and punish independent media” — Muthoki Mumo, sub-Saharan Africa representative at the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster (Rest of World)
For years, activists and civil society organizations have warned of Facebook’s negligence of non-English speaking regions, and its deeply discriminatory content moderation structure which has served to silence globally marginalized voices, not empower them.
Facebook’s algorithms incorrectly deleted Arabic content 77% of the time. Relying on automation makes matters worse. While engineers have cast doubt over AI’s ability to catch and remove hate speech in English, it’s utterly disastrous in other world languages. According to an internal memo from 2020, Facebook does not have enough content or data “to train and maintain the Arabic classifier currently.
Product updates
Meedan software enables WhatsApp bot to fight disinformation during Brazil’s presidential election
The WhatsApp-supported project, called Confirma 2022, breaks new ground in Meedan’s decade-long record of election collaboration. The Confirma 2022 initiative provides Brazil’s non-partisan election authority, the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), with the ability to distribute trusted fact-checks from news partners to the voting public through a WhatsApp bot.
Last week alone, the tipline received 72,000 requests from users on the TSE feed, just before the election weekend. 30,000 fact-checks were also distributed in the last two weeks. More requests and fact-checks are expected ahead of the second round.
“This project marks an important step forward in Meedan’s capacity to support coalitions of fact-checkers through software. Not only is this shared feed helping journalists reach out to and inform a large, new audience, it also helps fact-checkers better understand misinformation trends by collecting queries from their new audiences.” – Pierre Conti, Director of Product, Meedan
Townsquare
OCTOBER 31-November 2
The 18th African Investigative Journalism Conference will take place on October 31-November 2, 2022 at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Panels and sessions will cover a wide variety of topics, including Metaverse for journalism, health and climate data, investigating health and environmental crimes, and disinformation during elections. You can find the #AIJC2022 program here.
DECEMBER 2-4
Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) 15th Forum: This year’s ARIJ annual forum will be held on December 2-4, 2022, under the theme “Defending Independent Media”, and will focus on achieving more accountability, and promoting people’s right to access verified information wherever they are. You can find more information here.
Funding opportunity for Women Human Rights Defenders: Are you a woman human rights defender? Are you working in a conflict or crisis-affected environment? Apply for the wphfund Safety Net funding.
What else we’re reading
This article discusses what bots can do beyond the regular misinformation social media bots, and how bot diversity makes the internet great, weird and delightful. (Wired)
Joshua Benton argues that most people on Twitter don’t live in political echo chambers (He also uses a MidJourney AI-generated image as a cover for the article) (Nieman Lab)
Egyptian editor Lina Attalah talks about Mada Masr’s future with Pesha Magid in this Q&A from CJR. (Columbia Journalism Review)
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