Meedan is excited to announce a new collaboration with Facebook Journalism Project that will train the next generation of fact-checkers to verify health misinformation for their global audiences.
The initiative, a year-long global health fellowship facilitated by Facebook, will bring on new team members to 10 participating fact-checking organizations. Fellows selected by the 10 participating fact-checking organizations will take part in virtual training sessions provided by Meedan and Facebook.
Meedan will support these fact-checkers with critical training on the ethics, standards and core practices for debunking health misinformation worldwide.
The COVID-19 pandemic shines a light on the critical need to support the capacity and skills that are necessary to successfully fact-check claims about complex science surrounding treatments, causes, cures, homeopathic remedies and vaccines. Health misinformation is running rampant on online platforms and there is great need for the next generation of journalists to understand how health literacy and health barriers contribute to the spread of disease, and how responsible fact-checking and verification efforts can be foundational pillars in the equalization of access to high quality health news.
Meedan will collaborate on the Facebook training by working with our in-house experts on developing a curriculum that helps fact-checkers navigate complex health debunking tasks in ways that are responsible. We’re so excited to be able to contribute to this project and to work with organizations including:
- Tempo, Indonesia
- Vera Files, Phillippines
- Factly, India
- The Quint, India
- ColombiaCheck, Colombia
- La Silla Vacía, Colombia
- Africa Check, South Africa
- Teyit, Turkey
- Pagella Politica, Italy
- Full Fact, UK
This training will be another addition to our suite of COVID-19 resource-building, which already includes our public health information tool, learnaboutcovid19.org. It will also be our second training project this year, preceded by the roll out of Google News Initiative-supported curriculum that is being delivered across nine countries.
More details to come soon! If you’re interested in learning more, contact hello@meedan.com.
Footnotes
- Online conversations are heavily influenced by news coverage, like the 2022 Supreme Court decision on abortion. The relationship is less clear between big breaking news and specific increases in online misinformation.
- The tweets analyzed were a random sample qualitatively coded as “misinformation” or “not misinformation” by two qualitative coders trained in public health and internet studies.
- This method used Twitter’s historical search API
- The peak was a significant outlier compared to days before it using Grubbs' test for outliers for Chemical Abortion (p<0.2 for the decision; p<0.003 for the leak) and Herbal Abortion (p<0.001 for the decision and leak).
- All our searches were case insensitive and could match substrings; so, “revers” matches “reverse”, “reversal”, etc.
