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Notes from Call 2

· 4 min read
Denny George

Attendees : Aurora, Habeeb, Maya, Sneha, Ritash, Duha

Gendered Disinformation

Current help is needed in :

  • Literature review (Ritash is on it as of now but I guess more help doesn't hurt)
  • Identifying cases of online gendered disinformation

Media Literacy

There's a lot of interest in exploring non textual and interactive ways of translating media literacy content for various groups. This interest ties in with the discussion that happened yesterday as part of the Producing Content working group. I think this can bring together the storytellers, developers and media literacy researchers in this group. This is very aligned with the 2 games on media literacy that Tattle is working on. We also have Abhilash's team from Quint who might be interested in this so we can coordinate something on this here.

Habeeb suggested if we can narrow down the scope of these interventions to the upcoming elections. There is scope to pre-bunk things since its known that as the elections come closer, more misinformation related to the elections will come up. Can our interventions tie into training and preventing spread of election related misinfo. Maya suggested partnering with groups who might be already working on election adjacent issues like voter registration.

Habeeb shared that in his personal experience, the first time voter or young UG demographic responds best to these media literacy interventions. They are also likely to teach their skills to others in the family and more likely to be more tech savvy. Provides some food for thought in narrowing down the audience for any inteventions we work on.

We also discussed about how a lot of our media literacy interventions and interactive content might be on a new platform and not on existing social media. Their disemmination itself then becomes a challenge. The conversation about dissemination itself brough strong agreement on how this is itself a topic to tackle. Also aligns with the "Increasing reach of factchecking" working group.

MIA Data

Maya has created a directory of many data sources and has catalogued it. Accessible here The audience is Researchers but also anyone who is interested in fields like data journalism in the Indian context but doesn't know where to start.

Data Void

We were wondering if we should just buy a domain like "datavoid.in" to house a platform around the idea of "missing information" and the misinformation that it causes or can cause. There is an existing body of work around the idea of datavoids that we can draw inspiration from.

Ritash mentioned how the media itself could use access to information on marginalized groups for better reporting. Maybe thats the first target userbase for this platform/publication. We could start off with the work that Ritash and Duha have done to sensitize and train people around their communities. But maybe this platform can serve as our platform against all misinformation that arises or may arise due to missing info about a certain group or identity.

Next Steps :

  • Reach out to Akhil or Factly team and find ways to combine forces with their work. How can maya's directory be of their use? How can our MIA data group help in their work.
  • Come up with proposal(s) on how can we kickstart a focussed effort on experimenting with new forms for content.
  • Identify demographic(s) we want to focus on for the media literacy interventions.
  • Identify ideas within the problem of media disemmination and find ways to solve it.
  • Sneha will organize an open call by Meedan to share current statue of the project for the members of this group who are working on the gendered misinformation working group.
  • Brainstorm what datavoid.in could look like.