KARACHI: Pakistan’s Center of Excellence in Journalism (CEJ), the country’s premier training facility for journalists and journalism students, has launched a new fact-checking initiative which the director of the project said would help identify and combat misinformation ahead of general elections next month.
Launched in Islamabad last week, iVerify Pakistan will use monitoring tools to track misinformation across social and mainstream media. The fact-checking process involves a buddy system, where team members or media partners collaboratively verify news using tools such as artificial intelligence, photo forensics, and journalistic investigation and ensure adherence to global fact-checking standards, and that verified content is published on their website and social media platforms. The platform distinguishes itself by using a diverse set of tools, avoiding reliance on a single method, and prioritizing the depth and variety of data for comprehensive fact-checking.
The initiative, launched in collaboration with UNDP and a private media monitoring company, engages media partners and volunteers from 13 universities trained in digital literacy. It also includes a tip line for content submission and aims to address limited fact-checking resources, low awareness of factual content, and the impact of misinformation, especially among young Pakistanis using social media.
“We’re trying to tackle [the misinformation/disinformation during elections], we’re trying to address the speed of monitoring and checking. We’re also trying to tackle the problem of fact check content, and its deployment and its amplification,” CEJ director Amber Rahim Shamsi told Arab News.
For the upcoming elections, the platform intended to produce insight reports for journalists in media organization as well as for policymakers and social media companies.
“We want to identify what the trends have been, what the techniques have been, and what kind of tools have been used to spread misinformation, disinformation,” said Shamsi.
Asked if the platform had already fact-checked election-related content, Shamsi said elections were currently its main focus.
“There’s been a lot of disinformation campaigns that have centered around opponents, for instance, lots of videos, fake videos and pictures about various rallies. So, we’ve covered some of tjose,” the CEJ director said. “We’re looking to broaden this a little as this [election] exercise gets underway.”
Talal Ahsan, the fact-check supervisor for the project, said his team was using a variety of tools like artificial intelligence and photo manipulation software.
“We decide what the actual status of a particular piece of news is, whether it is true, whether it is false, whether it is misleading, or whether it is unproven,” he said.
“Our particular strength is in the variety and in the depth of the tools that we use. We don’t just remain limited to one.”
