Combating Misinformation in Bangladesh: Roles and Responsibilities as Perceived by Journalists, Fact-checkers, and Users

TL;DR

This paper investigates misinformation spread in Bangladesh, highlighting the roles of journalists, fact-checkers, and the public, and proposes pathways to improve verification efforts through collaboration and infrastructure development.

Contribution

It provides an empirical study of misinformation verification challenges in Bangladesh, focusing on the roles and perceptions of various stakeholders in a Global South context.

Findings

Most people want verified online information

Journalists see fact-checking as beyond their capacity

Lack of infrastructural support for voluntary fact-checkers

Abstract

There has been a growing interest within CSCW community in understanding the characteristics of misinformation propagated through computational media, and the devising techniques to address the associated challenges. However, most work in this area has been concentrated on the cases in the western world leaving a major portion of this problem unaddressed that is situated in the Global South. This paper aims to broaden the scope of this discourse by focusing on this problem in the context of Bangladesh, a country in the Global South. The spread of misinformation on Facebook in Bangladesh, a country with a population over 163 million, has resulted in chaos, hate attacks, and killings. By interviewing journalists, fact-checkers, in addition to surveying the general public, we analyzed the current state of verifying misinformation in Bangladesh. Our findings show that most people in the `news audience' want the news media to verify the authenticity of online information that they see online. However, the newspaper journalists say that fact-checking online information is not a part of their job, and it is also beyond their capacity given the amount of information being published online everyday. We further find that the voluntary fact-checkers in Bangladesh are not equipped with sufficient infrastructural support to fill in this gap. We show how our findings are connected to some of the core concerns of CSCW community around social media, collaboration, infrastructural politics, and information inequality. From our analysis, we also suggest several pathways to increase the impact of fact-checking efforts through collaboration, technology design, and infrastructure development.