From new Search features to supporting fact-checking communities, Google is helping users in Asia Pacific look for the facts ahead of International Fact-Checking Day.
Back in 2017, Niken Satyawati’s day was filled with the business of running her household — caring for her three daughters, preparing meals, and the many other tasks any stay-at-home mom would know all too well. But in May of that year, Niken traveled from her hometown of Surakarta to Google’s office in Jakarta, where she attended a training session to learn the skills she needed to become a fact-checker.
“I saw many hoaxes on the internet. It affects real life. Friendships are broken, fighting between families,” Satyawati said. “Someone must do something to reduce them.”
So she decided to take matters into her own hands, joining a group of citizen fact-checkers who were gathering in online forums to fight misinformation. They called themselves Masyarakat Anti Fitnah Indonesia, the Indonesian Anti-Slander Society, or Mafindo for short.
A co-founder of Mafindo — Septiaji Eko Nugroho — was recruiting volunteers to join this verification training in Jakarta. Niken joined a motley crew of programmers, journalists, drivers, doctors and housewives to learn about search operators, reverse image search, video metadata, geolocation and other tools used by professional fact-checkers.
“I thought it was a great opportunity to learn about how to find the truth, thanks to tools I didn’t know existed, by hearing from people who used them all the time,” she said.
Since then, Mafindo has grown — building a professional fact-checking team that, along with the citizen fact-checkers, has debunked more than 8,550 hoaxes. They’ve trained more than 1,200 volunteers like Niken, organized anti-hoax festivals and delivered media literacy programs around the country, reaching nearly 1,000,000 Indonesians. To reach housewives, they created a web series about an anti-hoax family.
“I’m not a professional, full-time fact-checker, but I can do simple fact-checking and have gotten used to educating the general public at the family level,” Niken said.
But her modesty belies her role in Mafindo. She is on Mafindo’s presidium, or leadership committee, and is a leading figure for the organization in Central Java. She coordinated a ‘train the trainers’ program for media literacy program Tular Nalar that has reached 1400 lecturers and 6000 teachers over the past two years, and manages a weekly radio broadcast on anti-hoax issues in Surakarta.
To people interested in joining her and becoming a volunteer fact-checker themselves, her message is simple: “Every fact checker must have commitment. Commitment to integrity, and to making a better life for others by reducing the hoaxes around us. Expertise is certainly required, but can be learned. And don’t forget to share your expertise, so there will be many fact checkers in the world.”
For Indonesians who want to learn more about fact-checking — and become volunteers — Mafindo will be offering many more opportunities as it celebrates its fifth anniversary. Late last year, Google.org supported Mafindo and the MAARIF Institute with an $800,000 grant, so the two organizations can reach another 26,000 lecturers, teachers and students.
As we celebrate International Fact-Checking Day this Saturday, all of us can emulate Niken by learning more about how to identify misinformation online. We’ve compiled a list of five tips to help anyone read the news like a fact-checker — and we look forward to supporting many more people like Niken as they tackle misinformation and protect their communities.
Koya, Masataka and Rion are not your typical third-year Japanese law students. When they aren’t attending classes at Sophia University in Tokyo, they spend their time fact-checking online information. And they’re good at it —their team recently came first in the Google News Initiative (GNI) 2021 APAC University Verification Challenge, beating 267 other teams from 13 countries or regions.
"I have had many experiences of believing information on [social media], only to find out later that it was false. So I understand how important fact-checking is,” said Rion. He convinced his friends Koya and Masataka to sign up to the inaugural University Verification Challenge, so they could all test their skills.
The Challenge — a half-year campaign organized by the GNI with local fact-checking organizations — was held to raise awareness and build up basic fact-checking knowledge among university students across Asia. It kicked off on April 2 (International Fact-Checking Day) in seven languages, including Japanese.
The Challenge tested students’ skills but also taught them new ones through live workshops taught by fact-checking experts, introducing them to fact-check tools like reverse image search and social media time stamps. During the live-action verification challenges, students had to solve quizzes with their teammates before the time was up. These challenges required extra attention to detail, and amazing teamwork, with the level of difficulty increasing after each round. Winning teams from each country or region proceeded to the final round to battle each other, with simultaneous translations to ensure all teams were on an equal footing. Teams from Japan took the first two spots, while Korean students took third place.
Ultimately, Rion, Masataka and Koya were surprised at their first place finish. The challenges were difficult, and they didn’t think they could verify that much, that quickly. But the skills they’d learned and practiced paid off, and they are convinced the same skills can help others navigate online information.
As Koya puts it: "People tend to see and believe only the information they want to believe. It is important to look at information from all sides.” Masataka adds: “Newspapers and TV may not always be right, but we should consume a variety of media to ensure we are looking beyond our biases."
Fact-checking has been around for a long time, as part of a journalist’s work to ensure factual and accurate reporting. But in an environment where information is so easily accessible and shareable online, all of us can benefit from adopting a journalistic mindset. Through the GNI University Verification Challenge, we hope to equip the next generation across the region with the tools to approach the internet with confidence. After the success of the 2021 edition, students across the region are ready for the next round in 2022!
Journalists and fact-checkers face huge challenges in sorting accurate information from fast-spreading misinformation. But it’s not just about the words we read. Viral images and memes flood our feeds and chats, and often they’re out-of-context or fake. In Asia, where there are eight times more social media users than in North America, these issues are magnified.
There are existing tools that Asian journalists can use to discover the origins and trustworthiness of news images, but they’re relatively old, inconsistent and for the most part only available on desktop. That’s a barrier for fact-checkers and journalists in countries where most people connect to the internet on their mobile.
For the past two years, the Google News Initiative has worked with journalists to identify manipulated images using technology. At the 2018 Trusted Media Summit in Singapore, a group of experts from Google, Storyful and the broader news industry joined a design sprint to develop a new tool, taking advantage of artificial intelligence and optimized for mobile. With support from the Google News Initiative, the GNI Cloud Program and volunteer Google engineers, the resulting prototype has now been developed into an app called Source, powered by Storyful.
With the app now being used by journalists around the region, we asked Eamonn Kennedy, Storyful’s Chief Product Officer, to tell us a bit more.
What does Storyful see as the challenges facing journalists and fact-checkers around the world and in Asia in particular?
[Eamonn Kennedy] Sharing on social often happens based on impulse rather than full analysis. Anybody can share a story with thousands of people before they even finish reading what is being said. Bad actors know this and bet on people’s emotions. They’re willing to exploit the free reach of social platforms and pollute conversations with false facts and narratives, including extremist content. For fact-checkers, that means any given conversation is vulnerable to lies and manipulation from anywhere in the world, at any time.
Can you tell us a bit about the process for developing Source, and how AI helped solve some of the problems?
[EK] At Storyful, we see old, inaccurate or modified images being reshared to push a misleading narrative in news cycles big and small.
The common way of tackling this for journalists is to use reverse image search to prove that the image is old and has been re-used—but that has a couple of challenges. First, these repurposed images are frequently tampered with and the journalist needs to have the ability to identify manipulation so they get the best chance of finding the original.Second, search results are ordered by the most recent, where journalists tend to be interested in older results, so that means a lot of scrolling to find the original.
Source uses Google's AI technology to give instant access to an image's public history, allowing you to sort, analyze and understand its provenance, including any manipulation. That’s already useful but it goes a step further. Source helps detect and translate text in images too, which is especially useful for journalists cataloguing or analyzing memes online.
The Source app improves journalists’ ability to verify the origins or authenticity of a particular image and source how a meme evolved.
How are newsrooms using Source and what are the plans for it in 2020?
[EK] So far, 130 people from 17 different countries have used the app to check the provenance of images on social media, messaging apps and news sites. It’s been especially good to see that 30 percent of Source users are accessing the site on their mobile, and that our largest base of users is in India, where members of the Digital News Publishers Association—a coalition of leading media companies dedicated to fighting misinformation—have provided important feedback.
Looking forward, we’ve been listening to fact-checkers as we think about how to build version two of the app. We know Source has been used to interrogate frames from a video, for example, which shows there’s potential to take it beyond just text and images. The ultimate aim would be to build a “toolbox” of public fact-checking resources, with Source at the center, using Google’s AI to support journalists around the world.
Indian journalist Bharat Nayak knows misinformation can have dangerous consequences. He’s witnessed it too often in his home state of Jharkhand, India.
According to Bharat, “Indian society has been gravely affected by ‘fake news’, which has contributed to a rise in hatred and violence, and horrific incidences of lynching.” Concern about misinformation was especially pronounced around last year’s Indian general election—where more than 600 million people voted in the biggest democratic exercise in history.
The spread of misinformation is something the Google News Initiative (GNI) India Training Network—a group of 240 senior Indian reporters and journalism educators—has been working to counteract, in their newsrooms and beyond.
In partnership with DataLeads and Internews, the Network has provided in-depth verification training for more than 15,000 journalists and students from more than 875 news organizations, in 10 Indian languages. Using a “train-the-trainer” approach, it’s also helped support nearly all of the fact-checking initiatives launched by Indian media over the past year.
But Network trainers wanted to do more than train their fellow journalists - they wanted to spread the message to their communities. Bharat traveled home to Jharkhand and held workshops, not only with fellow journalists, but with community groups and students—like those in the photo above.
Today, to build on the network’s progress since 2018, we’re announcing a $1 million Google.org grant that will help Internews launch a new initiative promoting news literacy among the Indian public. The funding support is part of Google.org’s broader, $10 million commitment to media literacy, in collaboration with the Google News Initiative.
How will it work? First, Internews will select a team of 250 journalists, fact checkers, academics and NGO workers, who will be trained on a curriculum developed by global and Indian experts, adapted to local needs and available in seven Indian languages. The local leaders will then roll out the training to new internet users in non-metro cities in India, enabling them to better navigate the internet and assess the information they find.
“To make journalism effective again, more than the improvements in media, what is needed is media literacy,” Bharat said. “I want to make the citizens aware of how to consume media, see news and how they can play an active role in changing things for the better.”
This time last year, we launched the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge, part of our $300 million commitment to help journalism thrive in the digital age.
With our first challenge, we funded23 projects focused on diversifying reader revenue in the Asia Pacific region. Since then, we’ve launched challenges in North America, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Turkey, receiving more than 1,300 project submissions from 77 countries--and recently selected 64 more projects for funding.
Today, we’re opening our second challenge in Asia Pacific. This time, we’re calling for projects which aim to increase reader engagement. The more deeply people engage with the stories they read, the more likely they are to return to a news website, visit more pages during a session, sign up for an email newsletter and become subscribers.
We’re interested in hearing about creative ideas around reader engagement, including but not limited to personalization, analytics, audio and loyalty programs. And the Innovation Challenge is open to organizations of every size--startups, NGOs, broadcasters, traditional news publishers and freelancers--so long as they can clearly show the impact of the project from a reader’s perspective, and deliver it within a year.
The application window for project submissions is open until January 7, 2020, and you can read more about the eligibility, rules and criteria and funding at the Google News Initiative website or at a town hall on November 13.
To find out more about the results of the first round of funding, we spoke to Disha Mullick of Khabar Lahariya, who has created a new subscription model around a video series about young people in rural India.
How did you develop this subscription model?
We initially talked about aiming the subscription model at our primary, rural audience. The dream is for this audience to become our strongest, most loyal subscribers. But discussions internally with the Google News Initiative and with our peers in digital media pushed us to test the idea with our urban, English-speaking audience first.
Our vision is to take hyper-local content and voices to a broader audience through immersive video storytelling. Embedded reporters would help link these local stories to global shifts in gender and power, technology, environmental change and financial instability. If this platform works, we’ll adapt it to other audiences who may take longer to come around to the idea of paying for content.
What is the long-term plan for growing your subscriber base?
We plan to create a model that combines the features of a membership model and a digital subscription or paywall--one that’s inclusive of both rural and urban audiences willing to pay for good quality, hyper-local content. We also hope to be able to provide other features, like workshops and fellowships, travel opportunities—perhaps even access to small grants for media or other entrepreneurial projects.
What advice would you offer the next group of reporters looking to increase reader engagement?
I can't over-emphasize the impact of investing in local content. Even if that's not what gets monetized easily, it’s what builds trust and credibility, which have been shaken by the amount of misinformation floating about. I also think the way we engage readers needs to be responsible, to counter the state's imperative to control social media or the flow of information on the internet--which may be knee-jerk reactions to the violence and abuse we see.
Over the past year, the Google News Lab expanded into Asia with a focus on fueling innovation in newsrooms. In that time, we’ve seen how chat apps are quickly becoming the preferred medium for digital communication across the region. According to the 2017 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 23 percent of survey respondents now find, share or discuss news using a chat app—and Asia is at the forefront of this trend.
The flow of information within chat apps is similar to a massive, virtual version of the children’s game of telephone where the quality of information can get worse the more it’s shared. And the proliferation of mis- and disinformation in these private chat room conversations pose difficulties for fact-checkers due to the closed nature of the platform. So, in collaboration with Institute for the Future, we conducted a study to better understand the role chat apps play in the creation and propagation of news and provide newsrooms around the world with learnings from a more advanced chat ecosystem.
Our study was conducted in South Korea because it has the highest smartphone ownership rate, the fastest internet speed, and one of the highest adoption rates of chat apps in the world—making the country a useful indicator of where news media may be headed. We focused primarily on KakaoTalk, the most popular chat app in South Korea, used by 85 percent of people with mobile phones.
Our research (also available in Korean) suggests three key insights for journalists and newsrooms to consider:
Chat apps are changing the way readers, journalists, and newsrooms interact with each other. Though this changing landscape has created challenges for the news industry, this study confirms that there are also opportunities for both newsrooms and journalists to thrive in this environment.
Having spent my pre-Google career as a reporter and editor at legacy media organizations, I can tell you that digital transformation in the news industry is challenging. Even when news organizations have the will, resources and technical expertise, the obstacles to transformation can be daunting.
In Asia, few news organization have plunged headlong into digital transformation like South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s top English-language daily newspaper. With a daily weekday circulation of roughly 105K, SCMP is a midsize paper, but its language and geography give it outsized influence.
For more than a century, SCMP has been documenting Greater China for the English-speaking diaspora across Asia-Pacific. Before the internet, expatriates and visitors would pick up the paper, sometimes days old, on airplanes and in hotels across the region. For those living in mainland China (like I did in the 1990s), the paper offered a window into the place where they lived, from a familiar yet discrete vantage point.
Now, SCMP uses the web to reach the growing global community of readers interested in news about China, and experiment with new methods of storytelling along the way. After its purchase by Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma in 2016, the newspaper suddenly had a mandate to evolve, and was given the runway and resources to experiment.
“Culture and identity are massively important when you are trying to turn around a 114-year-old company … until you have a company that is ready to experiment, willing to fail, and able to move with agility … you can talk all day long about transformation and where you’re heading but you’ll never get there,” said SCMP CEO Gary Liu in an interview with Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Policy.
That entrepreneurial spirit led SCMP to take on an immersive virtual reality project that would trace the history of Hong Kong from British rule to the present day, mining a century’s worth of archival photos and illustrations and presenting them alongside modern-day 360-degree video and drone footage. The project was Google News Lab's first immersive storytelling partnership in the Asia-Pacific region, part of the team’s broader effort to accelerate immersive storytelling across the news industry.
“It had to be big, bold, and beautiful—and leverage new formats, technologies and platforms to tell the story,” according to SCMP online editor Brett McKeehan, who helmed the project and talked about the process at a recent Google News Lab event.
In order to make the project accessible to as many readers as possible, especially in the smartphone-dominant Asian market, the SCMP team built a responsive website that was optimized for mobile, tablet and desktop. Animations of 3D Google Earth imagery helped to tell the story and orient the reader across time and space throughout the piece.
They set a deadline to complete the project within two months—an eternity for a newspaper used to daily deadlines. “What can’t you do in two months? What could possibly go wrong? Two months—I thought, we could do anything in two months,” McKeehan said. Shooting and production schedules were set, everyone was ready to go…
And then it rained. And rained and rained—for six straight weeks—one of Hong Kong’s wettest Junes in history.
While it rained, the Hong Kong government changed its drone restrictions, rendering certain planned shots illegal. Meanwhile, SCMP’s developer team of three learned how to build, for the first time, a responsive HTML webframe that would work for both iOS and Android.
In the end, Brett and his team had to change their project scope and push back their release date to overcome the many unforeseen logistical and development challenges that sprang up throughout the process.
“It’s not a tale of of pixies and rainbows...It is a tale of toil and frustration, and the headaches that come with doing something new.”
Despite the pain, Brett said the experience was worthwhile, because it brought new skills that were now embedded in the newsroom. But for anyone embarking on the journey, he offered the following tips:
“We’re an aspirational publisher. We’re doing something for the first time. So we made it; we’re happy with that,” McKeehan said.
And that is success, Gary Liu, SCMP’s CEO, told me after it was published. “The point was to do it and learn in the process.”
Having spent my pre-Google career as a reporter and editor at legacy media organizations, I can tell you that digital transformation in the news industry is challenging. Even when news organizations have the will, resources and technical expertise, the obstacles to transformation can be daunting.
In Asia, few news organization have plunged headlong into digital transformation like South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s top English-language daily newspaper. With a daily weekday circulation of roughly 105K, SCMP is a midsize paper, but its language and geography give it outsized influence.
For more than a century, SCMP has been documenting Greater China for the English-speaking diaspora across Asia-Pacific. Before the internet, expatriates and visitors would pick up the paper, sometimes days old, on airplanes and in hotels across the region. For those living in mainland China (like I did in the 1990s), the paper offered a window into the place where they lived, from a familiar yet discrete vantage point.
Now, SCMP uses the web to reach the growing global community of readers interested in news about China, and experiment with new methods of storytelling along the way. After its purchase by Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma in 2016, the newspaper suddenly had a mandate to evolve, and was given the runway and resources to experiment.
“Culture and identity are massively important when you are trying to turn around a 114-year-old company … until you have a company that is ready to experiment, willing to fail, and able to move with agility … you can talk all day long about transformation and where you’re heading but you’ll never get there,” said SCMP CEO Gary Liu in an interview with Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Policy.
That entrepreneurial spirit led SCMP to take on an immersive virtual reality project that would trace the history of Hong Kong from British rule to the present day, mining a century’s worth of archival photos and illustrations and presenting them alongside modern-day 360-degree video and drone footage. The project was Google News Lab's first immersive storytelling partnership in the Asia-Pacific region, part of the team’s broader effort to accelerate immersive storytelling across the news industry.
“It had to be big, bold, and beautiful—and leverage new formats, technologies and platforms to tell the story,” according to SCMP online editor Brett McKeehan, who helmed the project and talked about the process at a recent Google News Lab event.
In order to make the project accessible to as many readers as possible, especially in the smartphone-dominant Asian market, the SCMP team built a responsive website that was optimized for mobile, tablet and desktop. Animations of 3D Google Earth imagery helped to tell the story and orient the reader across time and space throughout the piece.
They set a deadline to complete the project within two months—an eternity for a newspaper used to daily deadlines. “What can’t you do in two months? What could possibly go wrong? Two months—I thought, we could do anything in two months,” McKeehan said. Shooting and production schedules were set, everyone was ready to go…
And then it rained. And rained and rained—for six straight weeks—one of Hong Kong’s wettest Junes in history.
While it rained, the Hong Kong government changed its drone restrictions, rendering certain planned shots illegal. Meanwhile, SCMP’s developer team of three learned how to build, for the first time, a responsive HTML webframe that would work for both iOS and Android.
In the end, Brett and his team had to change their project scope and push back their release date to overcome the many unforeseen logistical and development challenges that sprang up throughout the process.
“It’s not a tale of of pixies and rainbows...It is a tale of toil and frustration, and the headaches that come with doing something new.”
Despite the pain, Brett said the experience was worthwhile, because it brought new skills that were now embedded in the newsroom. But for anyone embarking on the journey, he offered the following tips:
“We’re an aspirational publisher. We’re doing something for the first time. So we made it; we’re happy with that,” McKeehan said.
And that is success, Gary Liu, SCMP’s CEO, told me after it was published. “The point was to do it and learn in the process.”
