Civic Tech Field Guide
Sharing knowledge and productively growing the fieldThe Tech > Media > Fight disinformation - (396)
Disinformation campaigns by states, economic opportunists, and the misinformed themselves threaten to erode the common understandings, shared identities, and empirical bedrock that underlies our collective decisionmaking. While disinformation campaigns have used mass media to spread for many years, social media platforms have proven an exceptionally hospitable environment for the proliferation of falsehoods. Those looking to limit disinformation’s effect on society and bolster truth in media have likewise turned to technology to help keep up with the volume and precision of constantly evolving disinformation campaigns.
Suggested reading:
- Matt Stempeck's research into how the Code for All network has advanced its strategies for fighting disinformation in different contexts around the world (2022)
- Digital Disinformation and Vote Suppression, The Brennan Center for Justice (2020)
- Virus Experts Aren’t Getting the Message Out Renée DiResta in The Atlantic (2020)
- Safeguarding Democracy Against Disinformation Report by the German Marshall Fund of the United States (2020)
- Browser Plug-ins That Spot Fake News Show The Difficulty Of Tackling The ‘Information Apocalypse’ Can software that spots Photoshopped images help stem the tide of misinformation? The Verge (2018)
- Can an AI Fact-Checker Solve India’s Fake News Problem? An Indian startup is using an AI tool to curb misinformation. But India poses unique challenges for the technology. Undark (2019)
- Factchecking, a Quartz Daily Obsession media collage (2019)
- Fake news and fact-checking: 7 studies you should know about, a roundup from Journalist’s Resource (2020)
- The children’s storyteller helping Taiwan sort fact from fiction, a helpful deep dive into disinfo-fighting tech (and misappropriation through national ‘fake news laws’) in Asia. Al Jazeera (2020).
- CivicSpace.tech guide to Disinformation, including its relevance to civic space, opportunities, risks, and case studies (2020)
Showing 396 Results
The WhatsApp archiver consolidates chat files exported from different WhatsApp conversations into one database. The scraper relies on WhatsApp's export chat feature which allows 40,000 messages to be exported without media and 10,000 to be exported with media. If a media item has not been downloaded to your phone, it cannot be exported through the export chat feature. The archiver removes overlaps in different files exported from a chat; and anonymizes sender and group names.
Viral Spiral
IndiaViral Spiral is an adaptive digital card game about sharing news on the Internet. The game reflects the ways and reasons misinformation is shared, letting players experience first hand the temptation to share fake news for their own gain and face the consequences of the harm it causes around them.
One of Tattle's goals is to make stories fact-checking content circulated on chat apps and social media more accessible to mobile first users. To make the content accessible, Tattle wants the content to be discoverable through image search and video search. To implement search, Tattle needs the multi-media content inside the stories from fact-checking sites, linked with the sites that it is coming from.
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Media Matters for Democracy Courses
PakistanTwo courses - Understanding Citizen Journalism and Digital Disinformation and Journalistic Responsibilities
Es una plataforma abierta para verificar contenidos a pedido de la comunidad.
El Chequeador es una plataforma educativa diseñada por el equipo de Chequeado para el desarrollo de cursos virtuales sobre Alfabetización Mediática e Informacional, desinformación, fact checking y otros temas relacionados.
Digital democracy: analysis of the disinformation ecosystems on Telegram during the 2022 Brazilian electoral process
Brazil (Brasil)Understand the role of the Telegram app in the dissemination of disinformation among Brazilian far-right groups and Analyse (online) radicalization process and (offline) political violence against democratic institutions, especially the Brazilian presidential election in October 2022
WhatsApp Third Party Fact-Checkers
San FranciscoEnd-to-end fact-checking on the WhatsApp Business API organized by Meedan
Logically
LondonLogically works to tackle the individual, institutional, and societal harms caused by misleading and deceptive online discourse.
To contribute to countering disinformation on COVID-19 and promoting healthy behaviours, UNESCO has produced a series of audio messages that can be freely used by radio stations from around the world.
Wikirumours
CanadaWikiRumours is a web-based database which enables geographically distributed teams to collaborate asynchronously on monitoring, verifying, and countering the spread of harmful rumours and misinformation.
Profiles 82 tools for fighting disinfo
Chequeado's WhatsApp bot
Latin AmericaLatin American fact-checking organization's Whatsapp bot to make it easier for people to ask for fact-checks
Disinfo Database
EuropeEU vs Disinfo's database of over 12,000 samples of pro-Kremlin disinformation
InfoActivismo
South AmericaA collection of tactics, cases, and guides to using information for activism
SocialTIC
South AmericaSocialTIC es una organización sin fines de lucro dedicada a la investigación, formación, acompañamiento y promoción de la tecnología digital e información para fines sociales.Conoce nuestros proyectos, reflexiones y recomendaciones sobre infoactivismo, datos abiertos y seguridad digital
A guide by InterAction written for civil society organizations
A chart of thousands of media sources based on source reliability and surveys of perceived political biases
The Propagandists' Playbook
United States of America (the)How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy, by Francesca Bolla Tripodi
Ellinika Hoaxes
GreeceΤα «ellinikahoaxes.gr» είναι ο μοναδικός ελληνικός ιστότοπος κατά της παραπληροφόρησης και η μοναδική συντονισμένη προσπάθεια κατάρριψης αναληθών δημοσιευμάτων στο ελληνικό διαδίκτυο. Εργαλεία μας, η έρευνα, η συλλογή στοιχείων και πληροφοριών από αξιόπιστες πηγές και σωστή αξιολόγηση τους.
Cazadores de Fake News
Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of)Somos una comunidad crowdsourcing que monitorea la desinformación difundidas en cadenas de WhatsApp y redes sociales entre venezolanos. Nuestro centro de operaciones es un grupo de Telegram abierto en el que analizamos colectivamente la información que recibimos.
IDADI is our flagship data journalism project, in collaboration with The Infographics Studio, to disseminate, visualize and democratize official data on TikTok to allow Kenyans participate in decision making and enhance government accountability.
A February 2021 report by Polaris, The Soufan Group, and Limbik
Brown Information Futures Lab
Brown UniversityOur lab is where technology, innovation, policy and community meet, one pilot at a time.
Global Disinformation Lab at UT Austin
Austin, TXThe Global DisInformation Lab (GDIL) was established in 2020 at the University of Texas at Austin to encourage collaborative interdisciplinary academic research on the global circulation of misinformation, and disinformation.
Information Futures Lab Fellows Program
Brown UniversityThe Information Futures Fellowship is a novel opportunity for practitioners in public health, healthcare, community organizations, media, policy, design and other fields who are actively working on responses to the ongoing information crisis.
Track the trolls & sock-puppets poisoning our democracies
The African Digital Democracy Observatory (ADDO) is offering a series of seed grants and additional technical support for targeted research into how both state-affiliated and other lobbyist groups use influence/information operations and disinformation and targeted propaganda to subvert African democracies. The initial research grants focus on four countries: Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal.
ADDO is a coalition of investigative analysis + forensic research organisations that monitor how digital tools and civic technologies impact on the rights of African citizens. The Medium publication covers disinfo trends, provides micro-grant funding to research fellows, and publishes investigations, as well as tools and resources for fighting disinformation.
A.N.C.I.R. Misinfo
AfricaA project investigating the stories and the data behind fake news in Africa
An ongoing series of reports about ad-funded disinformation
Interviews with 90 respondents
Watchdog
Sri LankaWatchdog is a multidisciplinary team of factcheckers, journalists, researchers and software engineers. We hunt hoaxes and misinformation, investigate matters of public welfare, and build software tools that help operations like ours.
Ethiopia Check
EthiopiaEthiopia Check debunks claims and exposes fake news using its platforms on Facebook (52,000 followers), Twitter (7,000 followers) and Telegram (34,000 followers).
Civic Signal
AfricaCivicSignal is Code for Africa's AI/machine learning initiative, using large-scale media monitoring to map the content/creator landscape and underlying business models for disinformation profiteers. It uses MIT's Media Cloud software.
AFRICMIL
Abuja, NigeriaAFRICMIL is non-government organisation that focuses on media, information, research, advocacy and training. It aims to promote media and information literacy as a key component in the enhancement of democracy and good governance and the promotion of accountability and orderly society.
First Draft News resources
Columbia University, New York, NY, USAThese online courses, toolkits and resources are designed to help both journalists and the public build expertise and stay one step ahead of misinformation.
Internews’ Thwarting Disinformation and Promoting Quality Information in Haitian Media project will limit the impact of inflammatory rhetoric, false news and disinformation.
Social Media Hoax Slayer
Mumbai, Maharashtra, IndiaIn the last few years, the Social Media having a wider reach and faster, started polluting human minds by anti-social elements, wrong doers, pranksters etc.
The Media Manipulation Casebook
Harvard Kennedy School, John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge, MA, USACase studies. The Media Manipulation Casebook is a digital research platform linking together theory, methods, and practice for mapping media manipulation and disinformation campaigns.
Nepal Fact Check
NepalCenter for Media Research – Nepal (CMR Nepal) is an autonomous, research and policy-oriented, not-for-profit non-governmental policy think tank registered with Nepal Government and Social Welfare Council and is based in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal.
Detektor Media
UkraineMedia Detector is a non-governmental organization established by Ukrainian journalists in January 2004.
AFP Fact Check is a global digital verification service that tackles damaging misinformation on topics such as COVID-19 and elections.
Never before has the need for News Literacy been more urgent.
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