All injustices have at their core an abuse of power. Systemic injustices ingrain these abuses into the structure of our societies, into the mechanics of how power, money, opportunity, and—as the past months have made so brutally apparent—health is accessed and distributed.
As an organization that is ultimately built on the premise that truth and knowledge are contextual, we have an obligation to the truth that exceeds our commitment to non-partisanship. We in the strongest possible terms condemn the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and we criticize US national leadership, whose lack of contrition and unwillingness or inability to empathize with the very clear sentiments of millions of Americans in this moment is a profound and damaging failure.
Meedan, while founded in the US, is a global technology non-profit working with media partners around the world, primarily in the global south. Our partners work to document human rights abuses in Yemen, uncover political corruption in the Philippines, and empower young investigative journalists and fact-checkers in Africa. We have designed our organization in response to the single question: "What can we do as engineers, program managers, researchers and designers to address injustice and inequity in digital spaces?"
This moment of social rage is of profound concern. We must demand more of our institutions and of our leaders, especially with regards to systemic racism against Black communities. Every sector of our society from the institutions of our government, to our corporations, to the media, to our universities, to the technology platforms, to organizations like ours must make an aggressively anti-racist approach core to our business models, our missions and our daily work.
At Meedan we commit to honoring the memory of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and all those whose lives and livelihoods have been harmed by anti-blackness, racism, hatred and disinformation. So much more needs to be done, and we commit to using our work—our tools, our programs, and our research—to helping in this effort.
— Ed Bice, CEO, Meedan
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.
References
Authors
Words by
Ed Bice is the founding CEO of Meedan and in this capacity has since 2005 devoted his professional energies to creating digital tools and programs that promote collaborative verification, annotation, and translation.
