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Germany’s Fight Against Fake News: Can it Work...
By Niko Efstathiou and Bebe Santa-Wood The fight against misinformation in media continues to ramp up. We are witnessing an explosion of proposed solutions and approaches in how to best filter “fake news.” Many foundations, NGOs, and tech platforms are putting money into media literacy, fact-c... |
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Stoking the flames: Loaded media coverage aggrav...
While China and India prepare for next month’s BRICS summit, tensions continue to build between the two high in the Himalayas. At the disputed border of China, India, and Bhutan, Chinese and Indian forces are closing out their third month of a bitter standoff. As recently as late July, Indian repo... |
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Building Coalitions for Media Reform in Africa
“Attacks on the media are the starting point of aggression, and a clear indicator that lawyers will be next.” These were the ominous words of Henry Maina, Director of Article 19 in East Africa, at a session of the annual Pan-African Lawyers Union (PALU) conference in Durban, South Africa that ex... |
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Censorship in the name of security: PakistanR...
Tensions between press freedom and national security came to a head recently in Pakistan when the nation’s most widely read English newspaper, Dawn, published remarks from a closed-door government meeting last fall that offered a glimpse into the increasingly fractious relationship between elected... |
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Status Code 451: An Internet Governance Standard...
By Corinne Cath and Daniel O’Maley Sometimes a simple paragraph of computer code can help media developers fight online censorship. And this is important because such censorship is increasingly impeding the work of the media development community across the world. For many people from the medi... |
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Cameroon’s Internet Shutdown Cannot Stifle Dis...
By Elie Smith The Internet has been turned off for more than 80 days in parts of the West African country of Cameroon. And while this has garnered international condemnation, what most onlookers have not yet fully grasped is how the shutdown is related to long-simmering regional tensions within the ... |
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Chaining the watchdog: Soft censorship and media...
“New construction seems devoted mostly to four-lane highways – the better to transport government troops into the state and minerals out of it.” – Amitava Kumar The use of economic development as a pretext to displace local communities in resource-rich areas is a familiar story. How ... |
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Five reasons why direct assistance is more vital...
By Chiranuch Premchaiporn In July 2008, I was forced to post an urgent call on our website – one that all independent media outlets dread: “We’re running out of money, we need your support to save Prachatai.” As the director of Prachatai, an independent media outlet in Thailand that I ha... |
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When Hate Goes Viral: The Danger of Social Media...
By Ashif Rabi Last November, a group of Bangladeshi Muslims attacked a Hindu neighborhood in the Eastern part of Bangladesh. Thousands of people ransacked the temples and homes of Hindu families. Attacks such as these on minorities are not a new thing in Bangladesh, but this particular incident ha... |
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In Vietnam, Digital is Democratizing
By Pham Muoi Nguyen and Dr. Quan-Hoang Vuong Vietnam has long been a place where media and newspapers are under strict control both by the government as well as the propaganda departments of the communist party. Although the country has more than 850 newspapers and magazines, the homogeneity in ... |