Navigating innovation in elections, internet equity and crisis response
Wrapping up the year with Meedan's highlights and our 2024 mission to work in service of an open, healthy, resilient Internet and the well-informed democracy it should enable.
Hey Checklisters!
We hope you’re staying safe and healthy, and that during this holiday season you are able to find moments of peace and happiness with loved ones.
The Checklist team
If you’re running late, here’s your TL;DR Checklist
✅ Meedan’s CEO wraps the year with remarks on our activities.
✅ We’ve had a busy year, with big announcements.
✅ If you’ve missed an issue of the newsletter, no fear! We have you covered!
Top Comment
By Meedan’s CEO, Ed Bice
“Information wants to be free.”
It is a phrase often credited to Stewart Brand and is used in both as a description of the agency of information and the imperative of an open, uncensored internet.
These are quite remarkable days in the history of the Internet. Against the backdrop of AIs that promise to replace the human work of constructing and sharing visual and textual meaning, activists organizing under a free-speech banner are sharing tea with the cultural forces that have sought to restrict language, burn books, norm patriotic behaviors, and limit various fundamental aspects of human agency and expression. Meedan has been named as one of the organizations intent to censor the Internet and at this year’s end I find myself wanting to express the distance between our work and this imagined frame.
Meedan’s work from the outset has been premised on the idea that we - the citizens of the Internet - deserve better, and should be empowered to effectively collaborate to add context in the form of a translation, an annotation, or a fact-check. The Internet should help the humans who use it make better choices for themselves and their communities and their countries and their planet. We do this by developing algorithms that help journalists see patterns in questions and respond to claims at scale on messaging platforms. It is one-to-one journalism, but our chatbots can serve that content automatically to the next user who happens to ask the same question or submit the same image. Last year our technology powered projects that distributed almost 150,000 fact-checks to voters in Brazil, and allowed hundreds of partners in the Philippines to collaboratively address rampant misinformation.
As we prepare for the ‘World Cup Year’ of global election, in which an estimated 2.6 billion people are expected to cast ballots in elections scheduled for 81 countries, Meedan is gearing up for coalition efforts in the US, Mexico, India, Indonesia, and Brazil. In all these projects we have the singular goal of providing timely information to voters who have questions about the content they are encountering. Our media and civil society partners do tireless work to try to make sense of a chaotic media landscape, often in messaging spaces where they regularly face harassment.
Doing journalism in these settings is heroic work in itself, but 2024 will be the year that AI is woven into the fabric of our information environments. And it will arrive to a setting optimized for chaos: platforms have dramatically cut or totally abandoned their civic integrity teams; fact-checking programs and research efforts facing funding and operational pressures due to political attacks; cultural and political polarization is at a boiling point; and a horrible unfolding war in Israel/Palestine fueling historic levels of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
Those who seek to sew chaos could not ask for a riper convergence of factors and tooling. Against this our small but mightily-well-intentioned organization will work in the year ahead to design and deploy AIs and assemble and align coalitions to work in service of an open, healthy, resilient Internet and the well-informed democracy it should enable.
Peace,
Ed A. Bice
Woodacre, CA
20 December, 2023
Collaborations for a more equitable and informed Internet
Meedan is happy to announce that the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation’s Board of Trustees will support our work toward building a better Internet. With this funding Meedan will work on major feature updates for Check in the new year.
Our partner Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) received a grant from The Rockefeller Foundation that will enable SJN and Meedan to build a first-of-its-kind tool, which leverages new generative large language models (LLMs) to rapidly evaluate and classify news stories using SJN’s criteria for rigorous solutions journalism. Although the tool will first be used to identify climate solutions stories, it will be architected so that it can ultimately be deployed for any issue area.
In 2024 Meedan will continue to be actively involved in the Partnership on AI (PAI), where our CEO, Ed Bice, contributes to the AI and Media Integrity Steering Committee. The committee's focus is on shaping responsible AI practices, specifically addressing challenges associated with AI-generated content. Meedan recently collaborated with PAI on the "Responsible Practices for Synthetic Media: A Framework for Collective Action." In this collaborative effort, we advocate for responsible practices in AI-generated media.
Cross-regional collaborations in the Larger World to counter gender disinformation and better respond to crisis
The Africa Women Journalism Project with TogoCheck (Togo), Ecofeminita (Argentina), and the Digital Rights Foundation (Pakistan) are collaborating to track instances of gender disinformation being circulated across their individual Check tiplines during national elections in 2023 and 2024. This will result in a report on gendered disinformation trends across the three countries.
Following the earthquake in Turkey and Syria at the beginning of the year, Meedan partner Fatabyyano in Jordan launched an emergency tipline using Meedan's Check, introducing a smart fact-checking assistant named Kinan. Powered by AI, Kinan enables Fatabyyano's audience to request fact-checks through Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Twitter. With over one million followers, Fatabyyano aims to provide trusted information directly to social media users, marking the first Check tipline tailored for an Arabic-speaking audience.
Unified efforts in the Israel-Gaza war: Meedan, SMEX, WITNESS, and 7amleh rally for information integrity and human rights
In response to the Israel-Gaza war, Meedan, SMEX, WITNESS and 7amleh, have joined efforts to address the urgent need for information integrity and contribute to the documentation of human rights violations. The coalition launched an open-access resource library in Arabic and English, aimed at fact-checkers, OSINT investigators, journalists and human rights defenders involved in documentation efforts around the ongoing war. Additionally, Meedan's open-source investigations team has been working since October 7 on a number of investigations that document specific incidents of human rights violations in Gaza, these include, for instance, attacks on schools, refugee convoys, hospitals, and bakeries. The series will be published over the next few weeks in collaboration with two media partners based in Beirut, The Legal Agenda and The Public Source. The coalition is also enlisting the support of global fact-checkers, including The Quint and BOOM in India, as well as Teyit in Turkey, to help counter the spread of misinformation in English, Hindi and in Turkish.
Finally, a joint tech fund established with WITNESS is providing crucial support for technology infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank. Through this fund, Meedan and WITNESS continue to supply eSims, VPNs and other tech support to individuals and organizations operating in Palestine. These 50GB eSims work in 35 countries and have been tested and used by people in Gaza, the West Bank and Jordan. These efforts are ongoing, and while calls for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire remain the priority, please reach out to us if you would like to know more and/or contribute to the fund, or if you know organizations who could benefit from these resources.
“Shouting into the Void: Why Reporting Abuse to Social Media Platforms is So Hard and How to Fix It”
A recent report by Meedan and PEN America revealed that numerous social media users confront detrimental harassment, intimidation, and threats to their online free expression. The report exposes significant flaws in the reporting systems of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other social platforms, emphasizing a need for comprehensive product design solutions to enhance the transparency, efficiency, fairness, and effectiveness of reporting online abuse.
Titled "Shouting into the Void: Why Reporting Abuse to Social Media Platforms is So Hard and How to Fix It," the report underscores the dangerous repercussions of such abuse, particularly for women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, journalists, writers, and creators, who experience heightened levels of online harassment.
The study draws on the extensive experience of Meedan and PEN America in training and supporting thousands of individuals, including writers, journalists, artists, and creators, who have encountered online harassment. Interviews with nearly two dozen professionals, mainly in the United States, were conducted from 2021 to 2023.
Did you miss an issue of the Checklist?
Read 2023 Checklist newsletter issues here. We've explored a diverse range of subjects, including women and gender issues, crisis response, media literacy, and elections, as well as AI and big data.
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