Google and YouTube are announcing a $13.2 million grant to the International Fact-Checking Network to launch a new Global Fact Check Fund.
Last week marked the UNESCO Global Media and Information Literacy Week— perfect timing for our recently concluded Google News Initiative (GNI) Youth Verification Challenge.
The Challenge is for those aged 15 to 24 across the Asia Pacific region, and presents teams with a series of tutorials and quizzes on identifying online misinformation. This year, over 4,000 participants from 28 countries took part, learning about fact-checking tools used in the real world. Each team had the chance to hone their investigative skills and learn from experts.
We spoke with the winning team from India — made up of students Royal, Amitabh, and Rooka — about their thoughts on fact-checking. Royal attends the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, while Amitabh is a student at the Gaya College of Engineering, and Rooka studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University. Together they became the self-named team “Espionage Experts”, and experts they truly were! They had to solve more than 200 problems in order to win first place.
How can news be more engaging for a younger audience?
By providing a concise explanation of the story, news can definitely be enjoyable for younger audiences. Simple story formats, explainers and background context makes news easier to digest, but to truly engage younger audiences, media organizations need to consider more diverse points of view and experiment with different kinds of story-telling formats. They can give us a call if they want some tips!
How aware do you think Gen Z is when it comes to online misinformation?
We think the younger generation needs to be even more aware, as many people appear to be falling for misinformation online. Events like the Youth Verification Challenge are great initiatives that can be conducted to inform youths about how to discern true stories from misinformation in an engaging manner.
Why do you think fact-checking is important?
Fact-checking is very important in the present world. We believe that true stories should and must prevail. It is important for us to get into a habit of fact-checking, given the cognitive biases that make us (unfortunately) receptive to fake news. Fact-checking can help mitigate the threat that misinformation poses to factual accuracy.
How will the team continue to bring fact-checking skills in their daily routine?
We are really passionate about sharing our experiences and the skills we picked up from the Youth Verification Challenge, and aspire to help our communities get better at fact-checking, too. Beyond encouraging people around us to use fact-checking tools like Google’s Fact Check Explorer, we will also focus on developing new skills to adapt to external trends in today’s digital world. The tools and strategies we use now will change when technology and the world of disinformation inevitably changes. Things are evolving fast and we all have to keep up!
Through the Youth Verification Challenge, we hope to keep encouraging younger internet users to fight misinformation as they equip themselves with the tools to approach the internet with confidence.
Editor’s note from Ludovic Blecher, Head of Google News Initiative Innovation:The GNI Innovation Challengeprogram, is designed to stimulate forward-thinking ideas for the news industry. The story below by Mungo Soggot, CEO of Scrolla, is part of an innovator seriessharing inspiring stories and lessons from funded projects.
The costs associated with paying for mobile phone data in many African countries are often incredibly high, making it prohibitive for lower income readers to access news. As our mission is to bring high quality news on mobile phones to underserved communities, we set out to create a new product for Scrolla.Africa which is light on data use. The new platform is called Scrolla Data Lite.
Our core readers are pay-as-you-go mobile users, who make up about 75% of the market in South Africa. We found that people on these expensive pay-as-you-go data services were extremely cautious about downloading anything or surfing online. So beyond using data for messaging services, the idea of browsing on mobiles for news is regarded as a privilege.
As a mobile-only investigative and political reporting outlet, we were operating on a shoestring budget when we launched, so the data use issue was not something we had the technical capacity to address. We decided it had to wait until we had evolved the prototype and our editorial colleagues — Everson Luhanga and Phillip van Niekerk — had established Scrolla’s editorial ethos.
Our big break came when we were selected for the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa in 2021. We had a rough outline of how we would design a separate “Data Lite” site, which we used as the basis for our application. The Data Lite site doesn’t contain video or audio, and has stripped back features allowing for faster scrolling. The goals were to compress stories and images as much as possible and to automate the process so that our small team didn’t have to learn a new Content Management System (CMS). As a recipient of funding, we could build a Data Lite site far quicker and better than would have otherwise been possible, and bring in external engineering expertise to design the new platform.
The site ended up saving readers 90% on the data costs of our “full fat” site, when we compare the 100 kilobytes on page downloads on Data Lite to our usual 1 megabyte. And this meant the Data Lite site gave us about a sixfold increase in traffic compared with the full data site. We couldn’t use video or audio on the new Data Lite site, which remains its only drawback. When it came to images, we gave the editorial team strict guidelines to minimize data use without compromising user experience. This left room for error, so we then built in additional automated safeguards which ensured that uploaded images didn’t risk leaving readers with a spike in data costs.
Alongside data costs, language is an additional barrier in South Africa, so we publish in Zulu as well as English. Crucially, the GNI funding allowed us to design a system where we could include our Zulu content, together with English (a second language in South Africa), on one platform. The site had to be super easy to navigate and allow users to toggle between English and Zulu.
A screengrab of the Scrolla app featuring the Zulu language.
The biggest lesson we learned is it’s impossible to underestimate what a big deal these data costs are: to the extent that many readers are wary of downloading apps or touching the sort of advertisements which typically require a lot of data such as those with video. The GNI enabled us to build the site, and we're open to sharing the technology with other like-minded publications in Africa and beyond.
The global Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2022 shows that trust in news has declined in almost half the countries surveyed, and more people are actively avoiding the news. Meanwhile, a majority of those surveyed said they worry about identifying the difference between real news and misinformation on the internet.
The Asia Pacific region is no stranger to these trends, and ahead of elections in Malaysia, Thailand, Pakistan, India and Indonesia, the fifth annual APAC Trusted Media Summit, organized by the Google News Initiative (GNI), brought together journalists, fact-checkers, educators, researchers, activists, and policymakers to share best practices for fact-checking and media literacy.
Here are our key takeaways from the event.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge found that short "prebunking" videos, rolled out as ads on social media, are effective at improving people's ability to spot fake information.
Debunks, on the other hand, typically don’t reach as many people as misinformation, and they don’t spread nearly as quickly— which is why pre-bunking is crucial. Research shows the power of the continued influence effect: once someone is exposed to misinformation, it’s significantly more difficult to return their beliefs to a baseline similar to that of someone who was never exposed to it in the first place.
Dr. Michelle Wong, Content Creator at Lab Muffin Beauty Science, has been debunking misinformation around online beauty products for 11 years. She says that with people’s short attention spans, garnering the same level of interest in true stories as misinformation means that social media content has to have two things: a compelling hook, and an easy-to-understand explanation.
Dr. Wong reminded us that misinformation spreads faster online because most of the content taps into powerful emotions like fear— which affect viewers more than complex science does. Using the same tactic for debunking can help reach (and inform!) a much broader audience.
Addressing misinformation requires more resources and skills beyond those of any single organization, industry, sector, or government.
As shared by Maria Ressa, Filipino-American journalist, author, co-founder and CEO of Rappler, #FactsFirstPH created a movement ahead of the recent Philippines elections. A coalition of 16 news organizations and 116 civil society groups and businesses came together and built a collective network that pushed the real facts through the algorithm in an enormous ripple effect.
Most importantly, collaboration needs to come from all sectors— from tech companies like Google, to media, governments, fact-checkers and research. Working together, we can build a sustainable, large-scale approach to fighting misinformation.
This year, in its 5th edition, the Trusted Media Summit gathered 1,960 registrants across the globe from 24 countries, representing over 350 organizations in seven languages Attendees and speakers shared ideas and it was truly impressive how this community continues their work year after year to fight misinformation.
Attendees at this year’s event learned how the community can collaborate, work on pre-bunking and adopt influencers’ successful social media strategies. I’m proud of our work that helps bring people together, and I believe that Asia-Pacific can lead the way in building a better, more informed future for all.
If you missed the APAC Trusted Media Summit 2022, we’ve put together on-demand videos from the event here.
In working with journalists and publishers around the world for many years, the question that I’m continually asked is why Google works with the media? The answer is found in our mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Our mission is inextricably linked with the essence of journalism, aiming to provide citizens around the world with access to the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives. We all need and want a sustainable and diverse news industry that provides us, and our communities, with high-quality news.
In 2018 we created the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenges, with the goal of empowering news organizations to pioneer new thinking in online journalism, develop new business models and better understand their communities. Since then, we’ve worked with and funded 338 projects in 75 countries. And today, I’m thrilled to share that 30 more media organizations from 12 countries in Latin America are the new recipients in our third iteration of the Challenge in the region.
This Innovation Challenge in Latin America was open to the entire ecosystem from news publishers to digital-only outlets, news startups, associations or NGOs, academics and independent journalists. Applications ranged from projects focused on increasing reader engagement and/or revenue from readers, developing and diversifying business models, combating misinformation, increasing trust in journalism, reaching new audiences, improving workflow efficiency and exploring new technologies.
We received 353 applicants from 21 countries in the region. All projects were evaluated by a team of experts and a final jury that were impressed by the diversity and the quality of the proposed projects. We saw creative solutions by regional media focusing on the development of inclusive membership models and content distribution for younger people. Others seek to generate resources through technology and collaboration with readers by developing new subscription platforms, capitalizing on the power of blockchain technology, and betting on artificial intelligence to help fight misinformation or increase engagement.
Of the applications we received, more than 31% percent were from regional and local publishers, while 23% were from online-only publishers.
Some highlights include:
This photo collage shows images of some of the 2022 recipients of the Innovation Challenge in Latin America.
Thanks to all who applied and congratulations to all of the selected projects. We hope media initiatives in the region continue their efforts to maintain a sustainable and diverse news ecosystem in Latin America. Only through collaboration is it possible to build new business models that will benefit us all. Our commitment to the news industry stems from our founding mission to build a better-informed world, and quality journalism is as essential today as it’s ever been to democracies around the world.
More information about all the selected projects can be found on our website.
The WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress returned in 2022, with the promise to deliver “critical conversations about the future of news publishing.” Attendees from all over the world gathered in Zaragoza, Spain to celebrate “the craft of journalism” as Vivian Schiller from the Aspen Institute put so well during the World News Day celebration – and to reflect on how to build on the learnings of the past to work towards a more sustainable future for the industry.
The programme and speakers did not disappoint. Topics ranged from the urgent need to rebuild trust in journalism, to the importance of understanding and tapping into underserved audiences, and innovative strategies for digital revenue growth. The energy and optimism in Zaragoza were palpable.
During the event, the Google News Initiative announced some key developments in Europe, including:
This was my first time at the Congress and I truly enjoyed getting to know more of our publishing partners, as well as hearing directly from industry experts. Here are some of my takeaways from this year:
Lisa MacLeod, Principal Publishing Lead at FT Strategies, is sure that, “necessity is the mother of invention.” From large to small publishers, Lisa used publisher engagement in digital transition programmes such as Table Stakes Europe and Google’s Digital Growth Programme, as proof that innovation is key for the sustainable future of news.
From Pierre Louette, CEO of French publisher Les Echos, we heard that good content, served at the right time to the right audience, along with a focus on diversification of revenue streams, go a long way to build a sustainable business. Les Echos, a 115-year-old business, now sees the majority of its revenue coming from digital.
Katia Murmann, founder of Equal Voice, an advocacy group for women in media, offered her perspective on why diversity is so positive for the future of the news industry: “When Equal Voice started, only 35% of our readers at Ringier were women. Now, it’s 50%. By focusing on adding more female voices to our newsroom, we tapped into a whole new audience and potential revenue source.”
I’m leaving Zaragoza with a renewed perspective on the future of news, and feeling encouraged by the work to come. Thank you to our publisher partners who exhibited their fantastic projects in the Google News Initiative Innovation Corner and everyone who took the time to meet with our team onsite.
We're announcing today the 47 recipients from 21 countries of the first Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge for Europe. Innovation Challenges, which we’ve previously run in other regions of the world, provide funding to help news organizations develop new paths to business sustainability.
This Innovation Challenge was open to publishers with smaller newsrooms that produce original journalism, and whose projects focus on creating a more sustainable and diverse news ecosystem. The recipients will be working on issues ranging from fact-checking to artificial intelligence.
Success: The team at Hromadske Radio will promote online audio consumption among Ukrainian audiences.
With 605 applicants from 38 countries, we were impressed by the diversity and the quality of the proposed projects. There were creative solutions to common business challenges, including news organizations engaging with more diverse audiences, and providing greater transparency into how powerful institutions such as businesses and governmental organizations operate.
Thirty-four percent of the applications came from regional and local publishers, with 25% from online-only publishers. Addressing audience needs (23%) and community building (10%) were the most popular topics, as many applicants in our post-lockdown world put forward projects that brought audiences or communities together.
The team from Voxe in France will create a content management system that works better for advertisers.
Here are some of the projects:
The recipients will be working on their projects this winter, and will share their results with the wider news ecosystem when complete. More information about all the selected projects can be found on our website.
Before joining Google, Alejandra Brambila worked at Reuters helping publishers across Latin America integrate the news agency’s reporting into their publications. Working with newsrooms across the region, she saw first-hand the challenges they faced in building a sustainable news business. Now she applies that insight as a member of Google’s Latin America news partnerships team, working closely with publishers to help them grow and scale their digital operations. We talked to her about the importance of balance and why everything starts with the audience.
What did you do before you came to Google?
I worked with a large news agency that has a subscription service publishers use to supplement their coverage. They have reporters all over the world, so it’s really helpful for publishers who might not have global correspondents. In my time there I worked closely with all kinds of publishers, from very traditional outlets to newer digital natives and startups.
What’s your role now?
I work with a team that provides solutions for a range of publishers across Latin America. We work with partners on growing their businesses and navigating change in the industry, and we also help them get the most out of Google’s advertising and monetization products.
What’s most challenging for publishers in the region?
From a business perspective, some of the biggest challenges are in technology and
digital transformation. Many of the media companies in this region weren’t built with tech at their core. So they’ve been adapting, but they don’t necessarily have technology strategy integrated into the decision-making process at the highest levels. In part, that leads to executional issues, but it’s also about shifting mindset.
What are some of those executional challenges?
There’s a real problem in the region with finding and retaining tech talent. I see it constantly with my partners in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico – that technology talent turns over really fast. So sometimes you have leadership knowing they need to make changes and being really eager to do it, but they don't have the structure in place to make it happen.
We always encourage partners to be realistic and start with changes they know they can execute. It’s also about having that product mindset, where you’re always thinking about improvements you can make on an ongoing basis, rather than just one-off changes.
Can you explain what you mean about transformation in general requiring a mindset shift?
For a lot of these companies, they’ve been through a lot of transition. First they had to adapt to digital advertising. Now many of them are trying to focus more on digital subscriptions, but it feels very disruptive and risky.
How do you address those kinds of concerns?
It’s really about finding that balance between advertising and subscriptions. And the publishers that have been able to do that have built a strong brand in addition to having a technology vision. It’s not enough to have a large audience. You need loyal readers coming back to your site. You also have to have the right technology in place. For example, since in Latin America we don't have the fastest devices or internet connections, content needs to be light and fast loading to maximize your ad revenue. So you need a good CMS that loads faster and indexes better.
But the businesses I see that are thriving have focused on building that audience connection, whether by having high standards for journalism or serving their community in different ways, like with events.
What other encouraging developments do you see in terms of business models?
I see more media finding different ways to reach their audiences, for example, through new verticals like education or cooking or health. There are also startups and entrepreneurs using different platforms like Substack and, of course, podcasts.
We’re also seeing more partners focused on strengthening their technology talent and their product teams. They’re working on applying that product approach and putting structures and frameworks in place to iterate and experiment. All of those things are starting to move in the right direction and that's encouraging to see.
Editor’s note: Maria Ressa’s keynote speech at the APAC Trusted Media Summit 2022 below. Filipino-American journalist and author, Ressa is the co-founder and CEO of Rappler, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.” Excerpts from her speech have been edited for length and clarity. To watch Ressa’s keynote and other talks from 2022 and previous years, go to the APAC Trusted Media Summit website.
Our biggest problem all around the world is this basic question: How can we as journalists on the front lines rebuild trust?
When we created Rappler a decade ago, it was with the idea that we build communities of action, and the food we feed our communities is journalism. How does that food get to our community? Technology.
It's a fact that lies are spreading faster than facts. A 2018 study done by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) showed that lies are spreading at least six times more than these really boring facts that we journalists use. We journalists spend our entire careers learning how to make facts interesting, to tell good stories, but we just can't compete against the lies.
In the Philippines, we did this with the help of Meedan, a San Francisco-based startup, and with the Google News initiative, we collectively formed #FactsFirstPH.
For the first time, 16 news organizations in the Philippines (both national and hyperlocal) in different regional areas began to collaborate - small and large working together! Partly enabled again by the Google News Initiative, every content piece we created was like the Creative Commons license. Each news group called on our communities to send what they wanted to fact check. Then, all of us could see the same data pipeline, regardless of where they were submitted. We worked along with our partners from 116 civil society groups and businesses.
Moving to the second layer, for the very first time, we built a collective network of truth-tellers - a mesh of truth-tellers who shared the fact-checks with emotions. The organizations amplified by our communities created a network effect that helped push the facts - really boring facts - through the algorithms.
The third layer is research - the first time 8 independent research groups accessed the same data and created meaning, found the big picture. Most of the time, everything is atomized. Meaning is atomized on social media, journalism is atomized on social media. We worked with eight universities and research groups, including Rappler, to take the data that we had collectively pulled together and to do weekly reports to the public that we serve.
And then finally, that last layer is the law. Impunity online is impunity offline. So these lawyers, our legal group, filed more than 20 cases that protected the journalists and the fact checkers, and the integrity of our elections. Tactical and strategic litigation.
Elections in the Philippines became emblematic of the role disinformation can play in changing history. Milan Kundera said this, “The struggle of man against power, is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Well, this is how it's changed.
The network produced thousands of fact-checking content across social media platforms. And what we saw was a ripple of facts. Since we started in January 2022, Rappler and the #FFPH coalition have created nearly 11,000 posts on Facebook, but then others took those posts and amplified them. More than 15,000 additional posts came from random users who saw the #FactsFirstPH posts and shared. We’ve had nearly 9 million interactions on Facebook since we started the project in January.
The facts with this system actually rippled.
I wish we had built #FactsFirstPH earlier - years earlier - to be able to collaborate against the onslaught of lies, to win the battle for facts. It's an existential moment for all of us. Journalists are at the front line.
We need to be able to collaborate, to work together. I hope as you walk into elections in your country, that we not only work domestically, but also work together globally.
If you’re interested in setting up a Fact-checking coalition in your country, please reach out to [email protected].
In early 2020, a small team within Grupo AM – the leading news company in the Bajío region of Mexico – set out to build a brand new hyperlocal news product. With CodigoPostal.com they aimed to provide trusted independent local news from a variety of sources in one place.
To do this, the CodigoPostal.com content management system (CMS) was to be different from off-the-shelf products, in that it was centered around geographic location (postal codes) as a way of organizing information. It enabled the creation of what we called CoPos, subsections of the main news website that served specific communities within large urban centers.
CoPos, which was a recipient of the 2019 Google News Initiative Latin America Innovation Challenge, contained not only original content, but also aggregated articles from traditional news sources – including Grupo AM’s brands – combined with useful local information such as COVID-related data, weather, business listings and events.
The culmination of this initial phase of the project’s efforts came in 2021 when our team published 140 original pieces and several daily newsletters each week. This entailed aggregating over 600 local news articles using human-assisted Artificial Intelligence (AI) sorting (i.e. matching content to postal code using machine learning and swipe-based user experience), and creating over 200 machine-generated articles in three different subject matters. The CMS also delivered automated email newsletters based on users’ postal codes.
Thinking back through the CodigoPostal.com journey, it’s surprising how different it all looks today versus when we started. It was both surprisingly manageable to develop this project in a fully-remote setup, and also, incredibly hard to focus and communicate when everyone was working from home. We were able to do a great deal in a very small period of time (and in the middle of a global pandemic), a reflection of the work and dedication of our core team of five developers, a handful of full-time journalists and a bunch of interns.
These are some of the CodigoPostal team.
Many of the things we thought would be difficult and complex – technical product development, algorithms, machine learning – turned out to be fairly straightforward. What we thought was in our wheelhouse – launching a news brand and growing audiences across geographies – became the real challenge. And we learned a few lessons along the way
The legacy of CodigoPostal.com at Grupo AM is that our very first product and editorial laboratory has measurable outcomes: we grew our audience from scratch in July 2020 to more than 400,000 users today, with a peak of nearly 100,000 monthly active users in January 2021.
We were able to apply the tools we developed for this project to our main site, AM.com.mx. The user registration system we built for CodigoPostal.com became the foundation for AM's registration wall, which allowed us to grow our database of known users from about 25,000 (which took two years to grow) to over 50,000 users in just six months, exceeding our expectations.
Ultimately, creating CodigoPostal.com led us to apply some best practices from the product world to our constantly evolving journalistic workflows, and taught us to not be afraid to leverage technology to make it easier and faster to better serve our growing audience.
Our participation in GNI's Innovation Challenge led Grupo AM to flex new tech muscles. We not only built a news brand from scratch, we also created tools that make it easier for local journalists to serve their communities.