Meedan

Check - Received substantial enhancements, amplifying its functionality and user experience. The introduction of multimedia newsletters revolutionized content delivery, offering users dynamic and engaging updates across various formats. Integrating multimedia resources has also improved communication between organizations and their audience by offering new formats of content. Advanced metrics provided valuable insights into the impact of these new features on user engagement, facilitating informed decision-making and strategy refinement. The incorporation of conversation history functionality and custom/manual message replies also allowed partners to better understand demands and have deeper engagement within the community. Initiated the implementation of foundational versions of new significant features, which are expected to evolve in 2024, aimed at enhancing content sharing and user experience on tiplines. This includes the introduction of sharing features and Natural Language Understanding capabilities. Sharing features will facilitate seamless content distribution among users, fostering collaboration and information dissemination. Meanwhile, Natural Language Understanding will elevate user interactions by enabling more intuitive and efficient communication between partners and their audience. Migrated all WhatsApp tiplines from a third-party service to the WhatsApp Cloud API, managed directly by Meedan. This move offers partners greater control, security, and customization options, reducing dependency on third-party platforms. Direct management ensures seamless stability, integration, scalability and access to the latest features. Implemented a new solution for automatically importing partners' content into the Check platform by supporting their integrations with the Check API, which is more stable and scalable.

Digital Health Lab - In collaboration with PEN America, published a report detailing limitations and improvements to user reporting systems for harmful content on social media, to reduce the impacts of hate speech and harassment. Health Desk, providing explainers written by scientists, now has 449 published articles with accessible health content for journalists and fact-checkers covering urgent health topics, altogether serving 40+ newsrooms, large and small, around the world. Strengthening UNICEF?s Laaha platform, we have published a report detailing content moderation infrastructure for 2 user forums they developed in support of women and girls facing gender-based violence. Conducted qualitative interviews in collaboration with Birmingham City University detailing the impacts of vicarious trauma among fact-checkers as well as mitigation approaches, analysis of data and research publication forthcoming. We are now active members technology policy groups, the Coalition Against Online Violence and Steering Committee members of the Partnership on AI?s AI and Media Integrity Initiative, working with other stakeholders at the forefront of digital innovations to ensure they are being developed with equity, and public health harm reduction principles in mind. Completed the data collection and cleaning phases of a research study using text similarity methods to understand discrepancies between the information people need and what is available to them, examining content across languages to serve diverse communities.

Check Global - The Check Global program is to date a proud network of 130 community-led organizations across North Africa Western Asia, SubSaharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and South-Asia. Launched the Syria-Turkey earthquake response partnerships to tackle crisis misinformation: Teyit, a fact-checking initiative from Turkey, received core financial support from Meedan, allowing them to continue producing critical fact-checks as well as localizing the content to make it available for Arabic-speaking communities. Fatabyyano, a fact-checking initiative covering over 19 Arabic-speaking countries, disseminated the material translated by Teyit and shared this info with its audience of more than 1 million Arabic speakers. Additionally, Fatabyyano launched Kinan, its emergency tipline, on WhatsApp and Messenger using Meedan's Check software. This is the first Check tipline for an Arabic-speaking audience. Published ?The Future is Ours? zine highlighting our partners? achievements under the Check Global program. These encompass media literacy in journalism, both online and offline, news deserts, content moderation, takedowns and the sustainability of archival records. ?Democracy at risk? is another focus area, encompassing media security and plurality as well as internet shutdowns and election monitoring. The booklet also delves into gender-related concerns, including violence against women, hate speech, LGBTQ+ issues and offline communities. Collaborated with academics at six institutions in Brazil, and with long-time partner Birmingham City University (BCU), on a pilot project titled ?Tabletop Games Against Fake News.? The effort aimed to test the use of analog games ? including board, card and role-playing games, as well as other formats ? in discussing media literacy and critical thinking.