by Ifham Nizam

In an era where misinformation spreads at an unprecedented rate, organisations like DataLEADS are taking proactive steps to address this growing challenge, particularly on social media platforms. Sonia Bhaskar, Programme Head at DataLEADS, an organisation based in India, speaks to The Island about the organisation’s initiatives to strengthen the fight against disinformation and empower communities with accurate information.

“At DataLEADS, we are committed to tackling misinformation and disinformation through a combination of technology, training, and grassroots initiatives,” says Bhaskar. “We believe that authentic information is essential for empowering individuals and protecting the integrity of democratic processes.”

Excerpts of the interview:

Q: At DataLeads, what are the most effective tools and strategies you employ to tackle the growing issue of misinformation and disinformation, particularly on social media platforms?

A: DataLEADS is a globally recognised award-winning digital media and tech company, leading conversations on Information, and AI ecosystem globally. At the core of our work lies a profound belief that authentic information is central to human empowerment. In this direction there are numerous programmes and key interventions we have initiated.

1. Building Fact-Checking Capacities in India

In partnership with Google News Initiative, we run one of the world’s biggest fact-checking and training networks the Google News Initiative-India Training Network, which has benefitted hundreds of organisations, local governments, newsrooms, universities and local communities in India. This initiative adopted the Training-of-trainers (ToT) model to initially train about 250 journalists, who in turn trained not only journalists in their newsrooms but also other newsrooms and students of mass communication and journalism all across India. So far as part of this initiative over 70,000 journalists and media students at over 25,000 newsrooms and media schools based in 28 states of India have been trained.

2. Building India’s Largest Media Literacy Network

The problem of misinformation/disinformation is not just a journalism problem but it affects all sections of society and has larger ramifications on democracy and what sources of information people tap into and trust. This prompted us to create Factshala – a network of trainers from different walks of lives, who in turn undertook training in their networks and communities and reached millions of people across the country from Tier-2, Tier-3 cities and villages to build community surveillance and intelligence against misinformation. The initiative has reached more than 66 million people across India in the last five years.

3. Strengthening the fact-checking Ecosystem to tackle online election related misinformation and deepfakes

We are also currently running the Shakti Collective initiative which has brought fact-checkers and publishers from across India together to address election-related misinformation and deepfakes. It is the biggest collaboration between fact-checkers and newsrooms in India to protect elections from misinformation. Together, this consortium between March and June 2024, distributed 6,600+ fact-checks during the world’s biggest elections, the General Election in India. This was a 92% increase in number of fact-checks published, 180% increase in regional language fact-checks, which were amplified in 10+ languages covered. This effort amounted to 4x increase in teams actively engaged in countering election-related misinformation.

As part of the Collective we also had an advisory council for AI and Deepfake detection. It had the best tech minds and academicians in the country, a Supreme Court lawyer and also international tech partners with access to tools to facilitate deepfake detection and also conduct masterclasses and trainings for the Collective members.

Over the years, we have also run specially designed visual workshops and boot camps for media colleagues and newsrooms in India. We are committed to building new competencies, collaborations and networks across the globe to strengthen information resilience and integrity and helping communities unleash their creativity at work. With Asian Dispatch, Global Data Dialogue, and the Shakti Collective we are building new networks and platforms to engage different stakeholders to build new conversations and scale the impact of our work.

AI is often touted as a solution to detecting and combating misinformation. What role do you see AI playing in identifying fake news and deepfakes, and how reliable are these tools in the fight against digital deception?

There are no tools, AI driven or otherwise, where you can feed in information and it can declare it true or false. Tools are to be applied to facilitate investigation and then fact-checkers and journalists need to follow due process to verify the sources, ask the right questions and if need be pick up the phone and make calls. Good old journalism practices are needed more than ever before and the essence of journalism, which is defined by the need to verify everything, needs to be followed. This is irrespective of the advent and rise of AI or any other technology in future.

There are tools that are being developed as deepfake detection tools. But these tools cannot be relied up on completely for accurate results. They have been known to give inaccurate results, and sometimes can falter when parts of real images are mixed with AI generated components. The reason for these errors could range from limited datasets, lack of properly trained data, lack diversity in data in terms of languages, race, ethnicity or just inherent biases. The fact is also that these tools are built by and large by tech companies but detection tools are playing catch up to the advancements in tools to create AI generated content, since more money is being invested by big tech companies to develop AI tools rather than build guardrails and tools to detect misuse of these tools.

Q: What role do you think digital literacy plays in addressing the problem of misinformation? How can organisations, governments, and educational institutions better equip individuals to navigate the digital world responsibly?

A: Misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and false claims and so on cannot be abolished. They have existed in the past and will always be there. What has changed is the ease of creating and disseminating these materials, thanks to social media and its ubiquitous presence in everyone’s hands thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones with internet access. So any effort to combat misinformation will not succeed without a robust media literacy plan for the masses belonging to different age, gender, ethnicity, covering as many languages, regions and socio-economic backgrounds.

The first step to fighting misinformation is the need to assess the content being consumed, apply critical thinking and verify the information. Given the sheer volume of the content being generated online, across so many varied platforms, media literacy assumes greater significance, today everyone with a phone is a content creator but more importantly there is more content available but quality check is missing. The rise of social media has come at a time when traditional sources of credible information are crumbling due to faulty financial models, ownership issues and diminishing freedom of press. The erosion of trust in mainstream media is too real and increasingly proving to be problematic in a world where misinformation and disinformation not only spreads faster but it is getting easier to produce with AI generated tools. As AI tools evolve, it will get increasingly difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is fake.

Awareness among people to not just identify misinformation and disinformation but also verify and stop its spread will assume importance.

Tackling a problem of this magnitude requires a 360° degree approach and effort from all stakeholders – in developing curriculum and in implementing it in a manner that bridges the digital divide to reach all, down to the last mile.

Q: Fact-checking has become a vital part of journalism today. What unique challenges do fact-checkers face when dealing with the sheer volume of content online, and how can AI help or hinder their work?

A: Fact-checkers face a problem of reach. They depend on the same platforms for distribution of fact-check, which are spreaders of misinformation. They also face the issue of scale, and may lack the resources to scale up operations in different languages and establish presence in the various platforms, past and present. There is also the challenge of making fact-checks available in different formats from articles to vertical videos like Youtube shorts or Instagram reels.

The other big challenge is that of ability to cover all the misinformation that is floating and priortising what to fact-check. Currently, most fact-checkers in India, especially the independent ones that are not part of a larger newsroom or organisation, struggle for financial avenues to sustain and grow operations and currently lack the monetary muscle to invest in R&D and even AI to increase their productivity and efficiencies to scale up their fact-checking and verification work.

Q: What do you consider the biggest strengths of AI when it comes to improving the efficiency and accuracy of journalism? Many people still fear the potential of AI to replace human jobs or make unethical decisions. What do you think are the biggest misconceptions people have about AI, and how can we educate the public on its potential benefits and risks?

A: In an era of resource crunch that most newsrooms face, AI can help free up resources by taking over repetitive, mundane tasks that currently need manpower, to reduce time taken for production of news. These could be functions that can be templatised – like stock market reports, weather reports, game scores etc.

AI can also facilitate distribution of news by personalising the dissemination based on preferences of readers (for example, creation of personalised newsletters) or even maximise ad revenues through contextualising ad placements. It can also be used to scrape comments and ease the work of sorting and replying to comments. It can facilitate SEO functionalities, transcriptions, subtitling, translations (dependent on the tool’s language capabilities).

AI tools that can generate images or videos based on text prompts can also be deployed strategically for innovative storytelling. But Newsrooms need to have guidelines specifying dos and don’ts and ethical and responsible use of AI. The most important factor to keep in mind is ensuring that no step in the workflow that involves taking decisions or publishing news to the public domain is taken by the machine, steps where human intervention will be crucial needs to be well defined and critical for responsible deployment of AI. So, in that sense, training and upskilling of newsroom staff needs to be undertaken to ensure that we have a future proof newsroom where staff is ready for the new jobs that are created while some of the old functions get taken over by machines.

We Ordinaries of this wonderful island are living in anticipation and hope. Is it for a good time in the festive season; some merrymaking; and perchance a visit from ‘Ho Ho Man’. No, our hope lives not on these ephemeral benefits. Rather are we winning our hopes for an improvement the way the country is run and the deal we get as citizens. It is wonderful to hope after so very many years of despair with government mismanagement and rife corruption. We have confidence in our new government, entirely opposite to those which preceded it.

Need for outside carers in hospitals

Cass had been mulling over the allocation of jobs in hospital wards since a person she knows is having immense problems organising carers – day and night – for his mother-in-law in a Colombo suburban hospital. Family members are hard pressed to be with the patient and to hire an attendant means Rs. 4,000 per session.

This is what pertains in government hospitals. Cass cannot generalise but she knows this is the practice: carers brought in by the patient’s family to see to all the patient’s needs –washing, toileting et al. About 15 years ago Cass was in the Castle Street Hospital for Women. Doctors were excellent but the nurses and the few scattered attendants spent most of their time chatting and munching and watching TV. This is first hand reporting of how things stood so long ago too. On the day of surgery, the nursing sister in charge announced that each patient undergoing surgery had to have a carer for the night. Mercifully, cell phones were available. That night Cass’ niece who stayed with her, attended to seven other patients, their carers were fast asleep!

Why can’t nurses and attendants do their work of nursing and attending to patients? Why have outsiders to be brought in to care for patients when the hospital pays so many nurses in each ward and attendants to care for the sick?

Nurses in our government hospitals will never touch a bedpan whereas in Britain they do all patient related work from the most menial to the administration of injections, etc. They rarely have time for even short breaks.

Patients are hospitalised because caring for them is not possible in homes. Thus, hospitals must take full charge of patients and have them cared for by trained staff. We do hope the Health Minister will direct his attention to this severe lapse on the part of hospital staff.

Gautam Adani exposed

It has been reported that the US prosecutors have charged Indian billionaire Adani and seven others in an alleged bribery and fraud scheme related to a renewable energy project in India. In the indictment, prosecutors alleged the tycoon and other senior executives had agreed to the payments to Indian officials to win contracts for his renewable energy company, expected to yield more than $2 bn in profits over 20 years. The authorities have said Adani and the other defendants agreed to pay about $265 m in bribes to Indian officials to obtain contracts.

Cass cannot expand on that. What she pounced on was that this Indian company allegedly bribed officials to accept his proposals for installing renewable energy systems. Cass had, like so many others, got suspicious bristling ever since Adani appeared on the local scene with proposals for port development and particularly the Mannar Wind Power Project, phase two. Why the insistence on this project and Adani as supplier in the face of mass protests by local environmentalists against the installation of wind turbines in Mannar posing a hazard to migratory birds and the prized eco-system in that area. The certainty of bribes, corruption and selling of Sri Lanka’s assets for personal gain of some, was firm in mind then. Have Sri Lankans also been bribed? We also realise we Ordinaries were not mistaken in our suspicion of this entrepreneur. We will, eventually, get to know which political VIPs in the two previous governments willingly sold our land with assists for a mere green back pottage slipped into their capacious pockets.

Employment in Korea

After a while, placard-bearing protestors were seen this week near the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE). They were protesting the SLBFE’s move against E-8 visas for employment in South Korea. The SLBFE Chairperson announced the E-8 visa agreement was signed unlawfully by the former subject Minister, without obtaining Cabinet approval or proper government authorisation. The Bureau facilitates the issuance of of E-9 visas, which guarantee employment in South Korea for four years 10 months while the E-8 visa is for much shorter periods of employment. No private employment agencies are permitted to send workers to South Korea under the E-8 visa system, nor to collect any associated fees.

So what rears its Medusa head?

Corruption – so rampant in the recent past, so very vile. People know the name of a VIP who gained from this business of employment in Korea, where each person sent to Korea had to remit a good amount to the collectors of illicit lucre here. If that isn’t selling and living luxuriously on the blood, sweat and tears of the desperate, what is? But now we need not shake our heads and say resigned – What to do, Aney? We no long need to ask that rhetorical question. It is going to be literal. Something will be done. The day of retribution will come to these blood suckers; they will have to pay for their crimes against humanity.

P. S.

Bigger hauls of hidden drugs have been made in the very recent past than during the much touted Yukthiya programme duration of the last government. Whispered among us was the question –was it another ruse to collect bribes? Cass sure felt sprats were caught while the drug sharks were not apprehended. Did they line insatiable pockets – pockets which even ordinary Cassandra knew were in the scheme – advertised to rid the country of the drug menace. Was even a dent made by the Yukthiya Programme?

Our nation stands at a pivotal moment. Despite meaningful strides in governance and efforts to curb corruption and inefficiency, we face significant economic challenges that demand collective action. By coming together, we can forge a path toward recovery and resilience, especially as we approach the looming peak of debt repayments in 2028. This is not just a challenge but an opportunity to unite our skills, expertise, and ideas to drive sustainable economic growth. Together, we can secure a future that is greener and more prosperous for generations to come. This is your chance to contribute ideas and be part of a transformative movement toward increased national productivity.

Why This Matters:

Promoting productivity is a shared responsibility—whether we live within our borders or abroad. Each of us has a role to play, whether by driving reforms, supporting policy changes, or advocating for strategies that channel our collective efforts in the right direction.

Here are just a few powerful steps we can take:

1. Transforming Higher Education

Equip graduates with employable skills through university programs tailored to meet local and global market demands. While free programmes may not be feasible, a deferred repayment loan system can empower students without burdening them upfront. Universities must also have the autonomy to modernise their curricula, enabling quicker adaptation to market needs while adhering to national ethics.

Moreover, allocating 25% of university admissions to international students would generate revenue and elevate our institutions on the global stage. Private universities should contribute by clearly advertising their admission capacities. To ensure accountability, universities—both public and private—must retrain graduates free of charge if they remain unemployed for more than six months post-graduation.

2. Building Iconic National Brands

Our nation boasts globally prized products like tea, cinnamon, pepper, and herbs. Let’s elevate these into world-class brands through rigorous quality standards and producer education. Strict measures—such as banning inferior imports for blending—must be enforced to protect our brand integrity. By safeguarding our exports, we ensure long-term success on the global stage.

3. Job Training & Employment Initiatives

Imagine a network of job centres registering unemployed youth and equipping them with short-term training programmes alongside stipends. These centres can follow an apprenticeship model, where industries take on social responsibility by providing hands-on training. This approach addresses unemployment and creates a workforce ready to meet market demands.

4. Fostering Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Innovation is the key to producing globally competitive products. Establishing a non-profit research institution dedicated to supporting innovators would be a game-changer. Self-funded by taking a small share (e.g., 30%) of profits from patented products, this institution could mentor entrepreneurs while minimising personal financial burdens. Strictly merit-based management and expert mentorship would ensure its effectiveness.

5. Championing Sustainable Energy

Affordable, sustainable energy solutions—hydro, solar, wind, and wave—can make our nation more attractive to investors while preserving the environment. Through national and private partnerships, we can advance such projects with clear policies: no tax holidays and a mandate that 90% of staff in these initiatives must be locals. Sustainable energy boosts income and positions us as a leader in environmental responsibility.

6. National English Proficiency Programmes

To compete globally, English-language proficiency is essential. Building on existing voluntary programmes like the Solar Villages SDG Community initiative, the government can scale this into a nationwide effort. Volunteer teachers and minimal public expenditure could make this achievable in schools and community centres, unlocking new opportunities for our citizens.

These examples are just the beginning. The efficiency of public services and government institutions must also improve—an area requiring further exploration and debate.

Your Voice Matters

Together, we have the strength, knowledge, and determination of the top ranks of global expertise and leadership. Let us unite to achieve a brighter, more prosperous tomorrow.

Your participation is our strength. Let’s lead the way forward.

Chula Goonasekera
, on behalf of LEADS forum
admin@srilankaleads.com