Shalini Joshi
co-founder Khabar Lahariya
Ritu Kapur
co-founder and managing director Quint Digital Media Ltd
Tai Nalon
co-founder and executive director Aos Fatos
What is it like for fact-checkers and journalists to run a WhatsApp tipline in countries where WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app? Newsrooms and fact-checking initiatives in India and Brazil have launched WhatsApp tiplines and helplines to track and address misinformation on the platform, collecting key insights into the balance between engaging with the networks and content on these platforms while respecting end-to-end encryption. How do fact-checkers sift relevant messages from a large number of irrelevant messages, offensive content and spam on WhatsApp? How do these initiatives identify the most viral pieces of misinformation and ensure a relevant focus? What are some of the creative strategies of making fact-checks more effective? Finally, have these initiatives been able to identify patterns of misinformation across issues, regions and languages?
A panel of global fact-checkers will share their experiences and some of the best practices in managing WhatsApp tiplines. Presenters from two different contexts will talk about engaging different audiences, including those with low levels of literacy. The experience of Aos Fatos in Brazil will focus on the role of the organization as an independent, investigative fact checking initiative in Brazil where WhatsApp is the most popular medium of messaging. The Indian experience will shared by Ritu Kapur.
The session will be moderated by Shalini Joshi of Meedan. Meedan has partnered with fact checking initiatives and non profits in India and Mexico to enable them to run WhatsApp tiplines. Meedan supported PROTO, a civic media lab, to implement a verification project called Checkpoint. Using Check Message, this project received some 158,000 messages on its WhatsApp tipline in 6 weeks, including about 82,000 unique requests.
Organised in association with Meedan.