Building Civil Society Capacity to Mitigate and Counter Disinformation

Even if you don’t care about being chased by the latest sneaker or flight destination that you’ve recently searched for, the ongoing Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal has shed light on a common and disturbing practice undertaken by the world’s largest social network: the vast amount of personal data gathered about us is progressively used to shape our behavior, wishes and needs.

For many — especially women and non-binary people — this approach can be even more aggressive, reinforcing gender roles, heteronormativity and, therefore, discrimination against diversity.

Full Fact is a UK-based independent factchecking charity. They are a registered charity, actively seeking a diverse range of funding and are transparent about all our sources of income.

They provide free tools, information and advice so that anyone can check the claims heard from politicians and the media.

Fiskkit was created to provide a better place for people to discuss important news topics and to find what information is accurate in every article on the Internet. Fiskkit’s founder, John Pettus, wanted to build a site that promoted logic and civility from commenters and that would use instantaneous reader feedback to help people identify was was true, false, well-reasoned or logically unsound in every news article or opinion piece. Fisking is a blogging word for a line-by-line critique of a news or opinion article and the core of site functionality.

Today, we need access to the truth more than ever before. But in this polluted information environment, it’s never been harder to know what to trust, and never easier to be misled. Misinformation is targeting and damaging our communities, all around the world.

At First Draft, our mission is to protect communities from harmful misinformation. We work to empower society with the knowledge, understanding, and tools needed to outsmart false and misleading information.

This game aims to teach media literacy and study how people interact with misinformation. You will see a simulated news feed with articles like the one below. Some coming from legitimate news sources. And some from sites that typically publish false or misleading reports, clickbait headlines, conspiracy theories, junk science, and other types of misinformation. Your goal is to support a healthy social media experience by promoting information from reliable sources and not from low credibility sources.
(Copied from website)

FakerFact is an Artificial Intelligence tool built to help us understand more about what we read.

A plug-in that flags fake news directly on social media to prevent you from clicking or sharing articles that intentionally mislead and disinform. Fakeblok calls your attention when links from websites that tend to post fake news appear on your Facebook newsfeed. This list of links is curated, fact-checked and monitored by a group of independent media professionals. The Fakeblok project is a collaboration between the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, and the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility.

Fake news is a real problem. Recently, the Pew Research Center found that about two thirds of U.S. adults say completely made-up news causes a great deal of confusion about current events. So we built Fake News!, a simple game to test our collective ability to distinguish between what's true, and what's just been tweeted.

(Copied from website)

In 2005, India legislated one of the best ‘Right to Information’ laws in the world which changed the public information landscape and accessibility in the country. It was the first step towards transparency and accountability of governance. In 2012, India came up with the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP), popularly known as the ‘Open Data policy’ of the Government of India. In Spite of these systems in place, data and information remain in complex and overwhelming formats in the country.

Facticious is a game that allows users to read clips from articles and determine if they are real or fake. Some of the articles are political while others or not. The game allows users to play on different difficulty levels in judging for themselves whether the information is accurate or not.

(Independently written)