Meedan’s Digital Health Lab is pleased to announce a new training collaboration with the Facebook Journalism Project to support fact checkers in fighting health misinformation online. This is part of a growing set of resources that the Digital Health Lab is offering to media partners, health institutions and platforms as they work to verify and debunk critical health information.

Meedan’s Digital Health Lab will facilitate a series of virtual training sessions between its team of doctors, scientists and health experts and Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners. In addition to using best practices from the field of public health communications, the training will apply research that shows that strong, reliable partnerships with experts plays a big role in effectively addressing misinformation. The Lab’s team of scientists will work together with fact-checkers to design the training sessions around the core information needs of fact-checkers. The two fields (public health and journalism) will collaborate together on building solutions for health misinformation issues.

"Our team of scientists are thrilled to offer close support to the Facebook Journalism Project through this collaboration," notes Megan Marrelli, Health Desk Lead. "The series of workshops we’re offering will foster dynamic collaboration between scientists and fact-checkers around the world, who are fighting health misinformation every day. Cross-industry collaboration is key to targeting harmful online health claims. We need information leaders in science, journalism and technology to come together to forge innovative paths forward, and that is what we hope this workshop can offer."

"We’re excited to partner with Meedan to foster collaboration between our independent fact-checking partners and Meedan’s team of health experts, with a shared goal of addressing health misinformation more quickly and effectively," said Keren Goldshlager, News Integrity Partnerships Lead at Facebook.

Health Desk’s content is written by a growing team of experts in infectious diseases, vaccination policy, nutrition, and the environment. They include researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and scientists with experience working around the world and in multiple languages.

"There has never been a more important time for digital, global audiences to have reliable, trusted, locally-relevant and accurate health information," said Nat Gyenes, Director of Meedan’s Digital Health Lab. "Increasingly, research has identified the impact that online health misinformation has on offline health outcomes. The public health community at large has a responsibility to support the incredible work that fact-checking organizations are doing to address the very real and consequential health misinformation affecting their communities. Meedan’s Health Desk team is excited to be part of this effort, which we hope will make it easier for fact checkers to answers to their health science questions, with greater support for fact-checking topics relevant to the the complex and ever-changing public health information ecosystem."

In addition to the training opportunities, Facebook’s fact-checking partners will also have access to Meedan’s Health Desk. This will provide them with timely answers to key public health questions to support their health-related fact-checking efforts. If fact-checkers can’t find answers to what they’re looking for on Health Desk, they can submit questions by email or an online form and Health Desk’s team of scientists will respond quickly.

For more information about this program as well as other Digital Health Lab projects, email press@meedan.com.