AFCN holds its first regional meeting in 2024
41 Fact-checkers from 11 Arab countries have met in the first regional meeting of the Arab Fact-Checkers Network (AFCN) from ARIJ in 2024, on Thursday, March 7th, 2024. The meeting gathered 25 fact-checking initiatives/organisations of the AFCN community to discuss how to improve the quality of fact-checking reports.
Saja Mortada, AFCN Manager, started the meeting by reviewing the regional meetings report of 2022-2023, and the efforts and successes those meetings achieved in order to build a strong fact-checking community.
Following the opening, Ghadeer Hammadi, co-founder of Sawab initiative from Lebanon, presented the topics that merits top priority to fact-check according to Sawab methodology when regarding the misleading and false information.
After that, Dr. Arwa Kooli, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Science and News in Tunisia, presented and discussed the 10 essential principles for developing the quality of fact-checking reports in terms of content, narration, publication and follow-up.
During the 2nd hour of the meeting, AFCN community discussed how to revolutionise the quality of fact-checking reports. Ideas and suggestions diversified through numerous discussions around the 10 principles, and eventually conceptualised in common recommendations that will be further worked on in the future.
The most prominent recommendations that came out of the meeting
- When spotting information to be fact-checked, the impact of this information on people lives in the same geographical area in which it spreaded, must be an essential criteria.
- Highlighting “pre-bunking” against false and misleading information and defining it to the public, by disseminating critical thinking and fact-checking methodologies, and spreading accurate information about any major events, especially during crises and elections.
- Diversifying sources of information (fact-checking evidence) in terms of sources entities, documenting them within the fact-checking report, and linking them directly via hyperlinks.
- Studying the differences in accessibility to the different sources of information in different geographical regions, and deriving a unified methodology for classifying sources of all types in terms of quality and methods of presentation.
- The use of illustrations, graphics, and storytelling that attracts the readers and makes it easier to focus on the important highlights of the report, while maintaining the prominence of sources and the methodology used to verify the information.
- Diversifying the methods of publishing the content of fact-checking reports in the form of videos and infographics and on various social media platforms.
- Sharing fact-checking reports from other fact-checking initiatives/organisations, and establishing collaborative fact-checking reports.
- Communicate directly with media organisations or publishers of misleading or false information in order to correct or delete them.
- Creating a selection criteria for fact-checking reports that necessitates following up, in terms of effective spreading of the correction the fact-checking report concluded, to the majority of the public, and also to prevent its spread in the future.
- Adopting the archiving of all sources of information for each fact-checking report, and storing them in an organised manner using archiving methods or online archiving tools, to help avoid losing access to them, and to protect the fact-checking initiative/organisation and ensure transparency of their work with the public.
Hossam Al-Wakeel from “Tafnied” described the meeting as “one of the most interactive meetings and raised a lot of ideas and discussions, and this is very positive”.
From “Akhbar Meter Iraq” Tamara Imad, said that “sharing different challenges in the meeting that fact-checkers faced enables us to avoid them”.
It is noteworthy that this meeting is the first meeting of the Arab Fact-Checkers Network in 2024 and the ninth in a series of regional meetings that are being held since 2022.
