Media and women’s rights: Highlights from global gatherings
Meedan team members spoke at two international forums about challenges facing journalists and women’s rights workers.
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✅ At the International Journalism Festival, we talked climate coverage and charges of “censorship.”
✅ Dialogue from the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women promoted survivor-centric approaches.
Top Comment
Earlier this month, Meedanis old and new came together at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, where we experienced a striking mix of spectacular scenery and justifiably grim talk about the future of journalism and democracy. But visiting with colleagues dedicated to exposing and understanding the disheartening realities of our current moment was nourishing for the soul.
Groundbreaking reporting from friends throughout the Larger World
At the festival, we heard accounts of post-Assad Syria from our colleagues at the Syrian Archive. We squeezed into a packed auditorium for a presentation on Forensic Architecture’s interactive geospatial mapping project, “A Cartography of Genocide,” a mixed-methods analysis of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. On the final day, we applauded colleagues as they shared new ways of collaborating with their readers through cocreational news media.
For our own part, Meedan Editorial and Policy Lead Ellery Roberts Biddle moderated a discussion on tackling human rights issues in climate coverage. Panelists spoke about reporting on human rights abuses in China’s solar panel supply chains, allegations of green colonialism imposed by Sweden’s clean steel industry, and the intersection between climate-driven displacement and the armed conflict in Sudan.
The fate of fact-checking in 2025
Meedan CEO Ed Bice participated in a featured panel on threats facing fact-checkers. Front and center in the discussion was the specious idea — peddled by a growing chorus of political critics and corporate titans — that fact-checking somehow causes censorship.
“The predictable and hypocritical censorship narrative surfaced circa 2016,” Bice told the audience. “We [received] letters from the U.S. House Judiciary Committee accusing us of violating Americans’ First Amendment rights for putting out on our platform fact-checks that urged people not to drink bleach.” Tai Nalon, the founder and editor of Brazil’s Aos Fatos, a steadfast Meedan partner, described similar narratives that surfaced in the ongoing legal threats swirling around her organization.
It bears repeating: By definition, fact-checkers are not censors. Fact-checkers seek to help people understand what is and isn’t true, typically by providing important contextual information. Yet politicians and corporate leaders like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg say otherwise. Their claims are not only false, but they are also dangerous. Fellow panelist Ana Brakus, who leads Faktograf.hr in Croatia, reported that she’d recently received a piece of used toilet paper in the mail. A few weeks back, we learned that our partners at Tempo in Jakarta, Indonesia, had found a severed pig’s head at the front door of their office.
As legal and physical threats mount across the world, intrepid journalists like Brakus and Nalon persist in their work — and they inspire us to continue ours.
Meedan at the UN Commission on the Status of Women
In March, Meedan Program Director Shalini Joshi attended the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW69) in New York. During two panels, Joshi shared our community-driven work on gendered disinformation in South Asia and discussed how homogenous and nonrepresentative datasets are currently being used to train prominent AI models while Indigenous knowledge and underserved languages are either excluded or unethically incorporated. This disconnect underscores the need for local, comprehensive datasets, which are essential for the creation of technology-powered solutions that prioritize communities over corporations.
The dialogue: Where do we go next?
With Meedan were panelists from the World Health Organization, the World Bank, UNICEF, and the Sexual Violence Research Initiative. Together, these speakers discussed the collective progress we’ve made toward understanding the scale, causes, and consequences of violence against women — and importantly, what techniques are most effective at preventing it. Engaging directly with survivors to center their experiences has resulted in research and policy initiatives that are more nuanced, grounded, and impactful. The panelists agreed on the importance of building a robust ecosystem for responding to gender-based violence by directly funding feminist organizations, fostering robust global partnerships, and pursuing multisectoral solutions.
Contact us to explore collaboration opportunities today.
Define_manosphere
“Male supremacist groups congregate primarily online, operating within the so-called manosphere — a collection of websites, blogs and online forums characterized by their virulent misogyny and users’ belief that modern-day society victimizes men. Several key influential figures use mainstream platforms to promote their hateful messages and recruit and radicalize others.”
— Southern Poverty Law Center, “Male Supremacy”
Townsquare
May 4
Climate Tracker is organizing a training series in Spanish on disinformation surrounding the energy transition in Latin America and the Caribbean. Intended for journalists, researchers, and activists, you can register for in-person or virtual attendance until May 4.
May 25
Through Exposing the Invisible, Tactical Tech is accepting applications from Europe-based journalists and media professionals for travel and subsistence support to attend an in-person training on AI for nonprofit newsrooms to be held in Berlin this July. Apply by May 25.
June 25-27
GlobalFact 12, described as the world’s largest and most impactful summit for professional fact-checking, will be held in Rio de Janeiro. Attendees address industrywide challenges, exchange best practices, and build collaborative solutions to improve our shared information ecosystem. Register today.
Aug. 26-27
The 2025 Digital Rights in the Asia-Pacific (DRAPAC25) Assembly will take place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, bringing together diverse stakeholders to combat rising digital authoritarianism in the region by collaboratively shaping rights-based digital governance, bolstering the resilience of at-risk human rights defenders, and pioneering innovative strategies through cross-sector alliances. The assembly takes place Aug. 26-27, and fellowship applications, as well as session and activity proposals, are open now.
What we’re reading
“Decolonizing AI is a multilayered endeavor, requiring a reaction against the philosophy of ‘universal computing’—an approach that is broad, universalistic, and often overrides the local. We must counteract this with varied and localized approaches, focusing on labor, ecological impact, bodies and embodiment, feminist frameworks of consent, and the inherent violence of the digital divide.”
(Ameera Kawash as interviewed by Donatella Della Ratta, Untold Magazine)
“Tech firm Cyabra analyzed more than 1,800 profiles discussing former president Rodrigo Duterte on the social media platform X on the days after he was arrested and sent to the International Criminal Court. About a third were fake.”
(Poppy McPherson, Reuters)
“Nearly 80% of fact-checkers said they faced threats or online abuse in 2024. Respondents cited threats to both individuals and their organizations as a whole.”
(Maria Ramirez Uribe, Poynter Institute)
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