Honoring International Mother Language Day and exploring USAID
Check is evolving to support more languages. Plus, we look at how the U.S. Agency for International Development’s funding freeze impacts journalism.
Hey Checklisters,
This month, we are reflecting on our roots as facilitators of information exchange across linguistic and political borders. That mission feels as important as ever, especially as we celebrate International Mother Language Day.
If you’re short on time, here’s your TL;DR Checklist:
✅ ICYMI: Feb. 21 was International Mother Language Day, when communities around the world honor and promote linguistic diversity.
✅ In 2024, we launched Check language capabilities in Macedonian, Mongolian, and Ukrainian.
✅ The Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle USAID are having a profound impact on journalism worldwide — and our community is feeling it.
Top Comment
What role does technology play in the use of language across cultures? Due in part to the influence of major tech companies headquartered in the U.S., English has become the dominant language of our shared online landscape, rendering a distorted digital picture of the languages in which people around the world really speak, write, and live their lives.
These issues are always top of mind at Meedan, but they have special importance this month, since Feb. 21 marked the 25th anniversary of International Mother Language Day, a U.N. holiday that honors linguistic diversity and promotes the importance of preserving mother tongues as essential repositories for living culture. In recent years, the total number of actively used languages across the globe has gone down. According to UNESCO’s World Atlas of Languages, out of 8,324 documented languages around the world, just 7,000 are in active use today. Technology isn’t the only factor driving these changes, but we know it’s part of the equation.
And we also know that technology can be a powerful force for embracing a language and engaging a broader community in its use. Efforts to digitize Indigenous and other less commonly spoken languages — like the projects run by our friends at Rising Voices — can help a community preserve and enrich their language and the cultural heritage that it embodies.
Meedan’s expanding language capabilities — from tiplines to AI chatbots
Our teams are always working to see where we might expand our services to communities that need them, regardless of what language they speak. This often happens through our flagship software tool, Check. Today, Check tiplines support 33 languages and dialects.
In 2024, we charted new territory by integrating Cyrillic script into our Check software, allowing us to add tiplines serving communities that speak Macedonian, Mongolian, and Ukrainian. For Mongolia’s June 2024 parliamentary elections, we worked with the Nest Center to launch a fact-checking chatbot called Asuu, which powered the first-ever fact-checking tipline in the Mongolian language.
This kind of thinking is also a key element of our research, touching everything from the development of our multilingual internal classification tool, ClassyCat, to our plans for custom-built, AI-fueled public health chatbots for crisis settings. This spring, our research team is working with partners in Lebanon to figure out what kinds of things a health information chatbot must do — and must not do — when it is deployed to help people in crisis. Language, alongside considerations like legal restrictions and cultural norms, is an essential component of this work. The ultimate goal of the project is to develop an AI benchmark for public health chatbots that will help us — and anyone else in the field — make sure our technology takes into account the cultural, linguistic, and contextual needs of the people it aims to serve.
How the freeze on foreign aid hurts global journalism
Amid the blitzkrieg of radical cuts that President Donald Trump’s new administration is making to U.S. government programs — many of them spearheaded by tech billionaire Elon Musk — foreign aid is currently undergoing a 90-day funding freeze. And insiders say much of it may go away altogether. Although food- and health-focused aid programs have been the focal point of coverage about the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), media workers are affected too.
USAID grantees, including independent journalists, newsrooms, and civil society groups focused on access to information, are now facing existential crises as a result of the changes. Journalists in high-risk environments like Colombia, Myanmar, Cameroon, and Ukraine, just to name a few, are losing the financial support they need to continue their work. Many of our current and former partners are directly affected by the cuts, including the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Known for coordinating in-depth transnational corruption investigations such as those that brought the Panama Papers to light, the OCCRP has had 29% of its funds frozen due to the changes.
“The real issue is there simply isn’t enough funding for global investigative journalism in general,” a spokesperson for OCCRP told The Guardian. “Without investigative journalism, people don’t know what is really going on in the hidden underworld of crime and corruption.”
Reporters Without Borders condemned the cuts and urged independent donors to bridge the funding gaps that independent media organizations are suddenly facing, warning that in the absence of trustworthy public interest journalism, political propaganda might soon have even more visibility.
Contact us to explore collaboration opportunities today.
Define_low-resource language
“Languages under-studied by the NLP community are usually referred to as ‘low-resource’, while those well-studied are referred to as ‘high-resource.’ ...
... The lack of consensus in what qualifies a language as ‘low-resource’ makes it challenging to (1) track progress in research and development for ‘low-resource languages’ in general, (2) determine what interventions are effected towards a language, (3) pinpoint when a language stops being ‘low-resource’, and (4) discern if technologies built for these languages truly address the needs of the communities who speak them or if they are built simply on the premise that the same technology exists for a ‘higher resourced language.’”
— Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Benjamin Rosman, Thamar Solorio, and Monojit Choudhury, “The Zeno’s Paradox of ‘Low-Resource’ Languages”
Townsquare
Feb. 28
The Open Technology Fund’s Information Controls Fellowship Program cultivates research, outputs, and creative collaboration on topics related to repressive internet censorship and surveillance. Fellowship applications will be accepted through Feb. 28.
March 14
From the International Women’s Media Foundation, the Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award honors women photojournalists who inspire action and compel viewers to better understand the world. Applications are due March 14.
March 31
The Global Investigative Journalism Network is currently holding an open call for academic papers. Selected papers will be presented at the 2025 Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, this November. Submit abstracts by March 31.
What we’re reading
“When asked about the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, a politically taboo subject that is censored on the internet in mainland China, DeepSeek replied: ‘Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.’”
(Hong Kong Free Press)
“[Fact-checking] is not about being neutral or passive, but about being relentlessly committed to uncovering what’s true and accurate. When democracy is under threat, this disciplined approach to truth-seeking becomes more crucial than ever. It’s what distinguishes journalism from content production or social media commentary. We follow the evidence wherever it leads, even when it challenges our own assumptions.”
(Angie Drobnic Holan, Nieman Reports)
“BIRN investigations found that online stores Slusalica, Prisluskivaci, Spijunska oprema info and SpyTech, which specialise in selling spy equipment such as conversation recorders, GPS trackers, spy cameras concealed in everyday objects, bugs, detectors and jammers, also offer advanced digital espionage tools, particularly stalkerware programs. This stalkerware requires only brief physical access to the target phone, often just a few minutes, to install the software directly onto the target’s device.”
(Filip Mirilovic, Balkan Investigative Reporting Network)
“Anthropic, Cohere, Scale AI, and OpenAI were there to promote AI safety and trustworthy AI. But how is AI safety defined exactly? Why must we trust AI? The thread through much of the Summit was to make AI safe for companies and nation states. Not for the public.”
(Ana Brandusescu and Renée Sieber, Montreal AI Ethics Institute)
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Read through the Checklist archive. We’ve explored a diverse range of subjects, including women’s and gender issues, crisis-response strategies, media literacy, elections, AI, and big data.
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