MFCC, which is operated by the Nest Center for Journalism Innovation and Development, launched Mongolia’s first fact-checking tipline on Messenger in May. The tipline features MFCC chatbot Asuu, and it is powered by Check. Asuu’s goal is to collect questions about misinformation from members of the public while also distributing verified content back to them.

As part of the group’s efforts to head off misinformation in the run-up to the June 28 elections, several media organizations have joined together to form the Facts First Mongolia coalition.

MFCC will directly operate the sole tipline in the coalition while all partner organizations participating in Facts First Mongolia will gain access to incoming submissions from the tipline and share their own fact-checks, explainers, articles, and other forms of verified content with one another — and with the MFCC tipline audience. 

Building a network to uncover misinformation and promote the truth

Facts First Mongolia is a network of media, civil society, and legal groups working together to distribute verified information to the Mongolian public through the Asuu chatbot and various social media platforms. As part of these efforts, several leading newsrooms in Mongolia — such as unnu.news, Lemon Press, Zuunii Medee, GoGo Mongolia, and iToim — have partnered with MFCC under the FactsFirstMN banner.

A pyramid graphic illustrates that fact-checking groups, media outlets, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and law firms work together to form Facts First Mongolia.

Participating groups will use the Check platform to share election-related content with each other, allowing them to create a vast pool of articles that can be disseminated to tipline users by Asuu or shared on social media. Partners will also be able to monitor misinformation queries shared by tipline users to find out which topics are circulating in the public.

This collaboration model is inspired by #FactsFirstPH, a successful partnership launched by Rappler, Meedan, and the Google News Initiative in the Philippines during the May 2022 presidential elections.

Meedan is excited to be able to support the coalition and to set up infrastructure for collaboration among these fact-checkers and newsrooms as they work to address election-related misinformation. This kind of teamwork is crucial for providing verified information to voters and the public — during and beyond elections.  

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Tags
Elections
Misinformation
Disinformation
Election integrity
Mongolia

Footnotes

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. This method used Twitter’s historical search API
  4. 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).
  5. All our searches were case insensitive and could match substrings; so, “revers” matches “reverse”, “reversal”, etc.

References

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Published on

June 26, 2024