‘Soon, trust will be the most valuable currency’
We’re sharing insights from our partners in India and Argentina on rigorous journalism and the patterns that foster digital hate.
Q&A with The Quint
What does it mean to “question everything”? This month, we caught up with our friends at The Quint, an India-based English and Hindi news organization and long-time Meedan partner. Editor Abhilash Mallick shared his thoughts about slowing journalism down in the AI era while working hard to grow his organization’s subscriber base.
Here’s just a taste of some of the topics we covered.
How does it feel to produce slower, more rigorous journalism in an environment that prioritizes volume and speed?
It feels defiant. We believe that speed, volume, and virality often come at the cost of accuracy or nuance. At The Quint, slowing down was a conscious editorial choice. Firstly, a small team of journalists could never compete with the legacy media organizations. Secondly, in order to succeed with a membership-based model, we needed to stand out and deliver stories that were unique to us. While this sometimes means losing the race to be first, we believe it strengthens our credibility over time. It is also reassuring to know that our work is built to last beyond a single news cycle.
Where do you think Indian and global journalism will be in five years?
Five years from now, journalism is likely to be leaner, more specialized, and more trust-centric. Large-scale, general-interest newsrooms may shrink, while niche, expertise-driven outlets grow. AI will be embedded in workflows, but credibility will be driven by humans.
In India, as people seek news that reflects their lived realities rather than generic national narratives, linguistic diversity and regionalization will be key to reaching new, loyal audience bases. Revenue models will continue to evolve, but trust will be the most valuable currency.
Dispatches from Argentina’s online culture war
We’re grateful for the in-depth research produced by our friends at Ecofeminita over the past 18 months. Through the Ecofemibot project, which leveraged a WhatsApp tipline powered by our tool Check, Ecofeminita monitored sexist, misogynistic, and anti-feminist narratives circulating online in 2024 following the election of President Javier Milei.
A full report of the group’s findings is now available in Spanish and English. As its authors write, “[Milei’s] victory marked a turning point in public discourse: many of the hate and disinformation narratives that had previously circulated at the margins began to gain institutional legitimacy from within the State.”
With a trove of user-submitted data, Ecofemibot’s team analyzed the discourse to uncover patterns and devise strategies. Ultimately, their research has led them to conclude that digital hate in Argentina is not simply a matter of individual trolls acting in bad faith — rather, hateful cultural narratives that were previously championed on the fringe are now being advanced by national institutions in an apparent effort to manipulate public sentiment, often by passing off religiously motivated opinions as factual science.
We need your input
Meedan’s community impact team wants to hear from our partners and like-minded organizations about current concerns related to security and sustainability. We’ve prepared a short survey to gather inputs.
Contact us to explore collaboration opportunities.
Townsquare
March 20
Through Exposing the Invisible, Tactical Tech is looking for experienced investigators and media professionals to collaboratively produce learning resources — such as investigation guides, method tutorials, and workshop curricula — and to conduct training for journalists and media on a range of investigation methods and topics. Apply by March 20.
March 22
The 2026 Digital Rights in the Asia-Pacific (DRAPAC26) Assembly is now accepting fellowship and session applications. The event will take place in Manila, Philippines, from June 8-10, bringing together over 500 activists, policymakers, technologists, academics, and others for discussions, workshops, showcases, and more. Submit by March 22.
March 30-31
The Palestine Digital Activism Forum will be held in a hybrid format that combines virtual sessions with in-person workshops organized in collaboration with academic institutions and local partners in various Palestinian cities. Meedan Executive Director Dr. Dima Saber will moderate a session on Palestinian representation in global AI frameworks. Register today.
April 20-22
The Reporting on AI Intensive is designed for reporters who grasp AI, spend a significant amount of their time covering technology, and want to go deeper. This Pulitzer Center event is an interactive, virtual workshop supported by Project Multatuli and the Alliance of Independent Journalists, and it’s geared toward journalists in Asia’s time zones.
What we’re reading
“In courting U.S. tech capital, India’s own aspirations of digital sovereignty do not find utterance in the summit’s documentation, even as Big Tech itself has cashed in, offering sovereignty-as-a-service to governments. As we’ve learned, in the tussle between states and Big Tech, it is always regional, community-oriented, bottom-up notions of sovereignty that lose out.”
(Amba Kak and Astha Kapoor, Rest of World)
“Researchers say this emotional numbing — followed by delayed psychological fallout — is a defining feature of content moderation work. ‘There may be moderators who escape psychological harm, but I’ve yet to see evidence of that,’ says Milagros Miceli, a sociologist leading the Data Workers’ Inquiry, a project investigating the roles of workers in AI.”
(Anuj Behal, The Guardian)
“As part of its mission to preserve the web, the Internet Archive operates crawlers that capture webpage snapshots. Many of these snapshots are accessible through its public-facing tool, the Wayback Machine. But as AI bots scavenge the web for training data to feed their models, the Internet Archive’s commitment to free information access has turned its digital library into a potential liability for some news publishers.”
(Andrew Deck and Hanaa' Tameez, Nieman Lab)
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