AFP and Google News Initiative Launch Digital Course to Counter Election Disinformation
AFP, a global news agency, in a partnership with Google News Initiative, has launched an in-depth digital course for journalists and journalism students. This move is timely, coming ahead of the 2024 global elections, where an estimated 2 billion people will exercise their right to vote. The course’s design aims to address the growing concern of election disinformation.
Comprehensive Course Offering
The course is bifurcated into two segments, aiming to arm participants with crucial skills to counter the proliferation of false information. This includes mastering efficient online searches, tracing the origin of images and videos, ensuring online self-protection, preserving digital evidence, and locating archives. Additionally, the course delves into advanced techniques like verifying climate claims, improving social media searches, geolocation, identifying witnesses to breaking news, vetting images, and pinpointing reliable health sources.
Renowned Institutions and Experts Involved
This initiative draws expertise from lecturers and professors from esteemed journalism institutions like Hong Kong Baptist University, The University of Hong Kong, Journalism & Media Studies Centre (HKU), and Sciences Po Paris Journalism School. In addition, the course introduces participants to tools and case studies from AFP’s global digital investigation team, further enriching the learning experience.
Safeguarding Election Integrity
The course announcement underscores the critical need to equip media professionals with the requisite tools to safeguard information integrity during the election phase. The multilingual course is now open for enrollment, reflecting a commitment to global education and the battle against misinformation.
