Meedan is happy to announce that the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation’s Board of Trustees has approved $500,000 in grant funding to support our work toward building a more equitable internet. With this funding, Meedan will, among other projects, work on core engineering on our Shared Feeds feature for Check. 

Misinformation is destabilizing elections, slowing pandemic recovery, entrenching climate change denial, and creating civil unrest and violence. Today’s internet has four billion publishers distributing memes and reels through open networks and closed messaging platforms. Much of this content is enriching communities, but the underlying infrastructure and business model that power it make it fertile soil to sow division, discord, and ignorance. 

Meedan’s team is actively countering this challenge by building open-source software that enables local partners to organize and scale collaborative efforts to discover and address that harmful misinformation, particularly in closed messaging spaces during critical public and civic moments. Our community impact programs run in over 35 countries across the Larger World and Check has become the global leader in fact-checking and annotation software for collaborative fact-checking projects, helping journalists respond to misinformation across the open web and in closed messaging services.

Commenting on receiving the grant, Meedan CEO Ed Bice said, “We share in the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation’s vision that AI and data science can be a force for good. Meedan’s track record of fighting misinformation on a global scale has spoken for itself and we are very proud to be working with a like-minded team to collaboratively grow the impact of our programs and technology solutions.”

“We’re delighted to partner with Meedan, a leader in protecting information integrity, to further their use of AI and machine learning to help news organizations identify and respond to mis/disinformation on a global scale, which is particularly critical to empowering an informed electorate as much of the world heads to the polls in 2024,” said Vilas S. Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.

The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation (PJMF) is a philanthropic organization dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence and data science solutions to create a thriving, equitable, and sustainable future for all. PJMF works in partnership with public, private and social institutions to drive progress on our most pressing challenges, including digital health, climate change, broad digital access, and data maturity in the social sector.