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The Truth is Out There
Murky political groups are exploiting social media systems to spread disinformation. With important elections taking place around the world this year, who is pushing back? We meet grassroots groups in Africa and beyond who are using AI to tackle disinformation in languages and countries underserved by big tech companies.
Who’s in this episode?
Justin Arenstein is the founder of Code for Africa, an organization that works with newsrooms across 21 countries to fact check and combat the global disinformation industry.
Tarunima Prabhakar builds tools and datasets to respond to online misinformation in India, as co-founder of the open-source technology community, Tattle.
Sahar Massachi was a data engineer at Facebook and now leads the Integrity Institute, a new network for people who work on integrity teams at social media companies.
Raashi Saxena in India was the community coordinator of Hatebase, a crowdsourced repository of online hate speech in 98 languages run by the Sentinel Project.
Further reading
- Code for Africa
- Inside the Shadowy World of Disinformation for Hire in Kenya, Odanga Madung and Brian Obilo, Mozilla 2022
- Hatebase and Citizen Linguist Lab
- Industrialized Disinformation: 2020 Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation, Samantha Bradshaw, Hannah Bailey, Philip N. Howard, Oxford University
About IRL
IRL is an original podcast from Mozilla, the non-profit behind Firefox. In this season that doubles as Mozilla’s 2022 Internet Health Report, our host Bridget Todd, shares stories of people who are building and regulating AI systems in more equitable ways.
Tell us what you think
We’d love to hear what ideas this year’s report sparked for you. Do you build or research AI? Do you work on AI policy? Which podcast episodes inspired you or challenged you? If you send us a comment in this form, we guarantee it will be read by a human.
Co-Founder of Tattle, India