We are excited to announce our new climate misinformation fund, an initiative designed to respond to the hyperlocal needs of communities and media practitioners in North-Africa Western-Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Asia-Pacific region. Through the Check Global Independent Media Response Fund, individuals and groups may apply for micro-grants of up to $15,000 to fund projects contributing to the fight against climate misinformation, whether by producing evidence-based stories, campaigns, knowledge and resources, or by fact-checking content being published online about climate change.
Why are we focusing on Climate Misinformation?
Climate change is one of the most pressing concerns of the 21st century. Despite its urgency, governments will not deal productively with this issue. We consider that journalists, media practitioners, local journalism initiatives, and independent media organizations have an important role, a multifaceted one; while raising awareness about climate change and its causes, they should also enable and amplify the voices of the communities who are directly impacted by climate change.
Local communities are the most affected by inadequate policies and agreements, especially when they are under-represented in mainstream media. Independent media workers often lack the resources and tools to support their work and provide them with optimal conditions for growth and sustainability. This in turn negatively affects their reach, impact and most importantly, the communities they serve, at a time when the need for accountability journalism, archiving, open-source investigations, and verification is more important than ever.
The fund will therefore support independent media workers and grassroots media initiatives that will aim to address climate misinformation and their impact on the local level through the lens of hyperlocal journalism, innovative technologies, trainings, media literacy programs, fact-checking initiatives, media monitoring, among others.
By focusing our 2022-2023 call on this issue, we would also be contributing to setting the agenda in terms of what should be seen as an immediate call for action. Our aim is to contribute to solving global challenges, through engaging those who are the most impacted, at a hyperlocal level.
Interested in applying? Visit the Fund's page here.
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.
