Thanks to renewed funding from Omidyar Network, two of Meedan’s major verticals are expanding efforts to combat false and misleading claims. Meedan’s Digital Health Lab is expanding its health misinformation response efforts in support of journalists and fact-checkers, and Meedan’s research team is digging further into the dynamics of misinformation on closed and encrypted messaging platforms and building tools to help fact-checkers.
This continued support is critical for our partners. The volume and breadth of COVID-19 misinformation is straining reporting resources and contributing to poor health outcomes globally. We are excited to continue working with an esteemed team of misinformation researchers, epidemiologists, disaster management specialists and infectious disease doctors on both investigating health misinformation solutions and responding to science questions from newsrooms and fact-checkers around the world.
Health Desk, Meedan’s information service for journalists and fact-checkers, is powered by a wide roster of global health scientists. Thanks to our partners and funders, the service reached 2.5 million users in over 70 countries in its first two years. Health Desk delivers on-demand, on-deadline explainers on public health topics like COVID-19, vaccines, reproductive health and climate. Through continued support from funders like Omidyar Network, and consistent positive feedback from our users, we are able to continue Health Desk’s services during the third year of the global pandemic.
Funding from Omidyar Network has also expanded our research efforts into misinformation on messaging platforms. Omidyar Network’s support of the Cryptochat research project in 2019–2020 enabled the team to build new machine learning models for claim matching and analyse how tiplines can uncover potential misinformation on encrypted platforms.
"We are impressed by Meedan’s ability to respond rapidly to these critical needs and provide accurate information, top-notch tools, and exceptional support to a wide range of communities," said Wafa Ben-Hassine, principal of Responsible Technology at Omidyar Network. "Their innovative approaches are helping to make private messaging services, the Internet, and information ecosystem at large trustworthy and safe."
This further support will enable us to strengthen our efforts to deepen collaboration between fact-checkers and academics, to improve claim matching across video, audio, image, and text, and to build machine learning models to help prioritize content for fact-checkers such as by evaluating the risk of health claims.
In 2022, Meedan’s Digital Health Lab is excited to pursue even more research initiatives in service of better understanding health misinformation on online platforms, and to offer an extension of our applied services, including Health Desk, to our millions of users around the world.
