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Tech major Google recently announced a $1 million grant in the name of Google.org to help Internews launch an initiative to promote news literacy among the Indians.
Internews is a non-profit organization that works towards empowering people worldwide with the spread of high-quality, trustworthy news and information.
According to Google, the funding support is a part of Google.org’s broader, in collaboration with the GNI (Google News Initiative). Google has committed $10 million to media literacy. GNI is comprised of 240 Journalism educator and Senior Indian Reporters. The company is working on curbing the spread of fake news in and beyond their newsrooms.
Internews will choose a team of 250 fact-checkers, journalists, academics and NGO workers, they will be trained by global and Indian experts, on a preset curriculum modified as per local needs and will be available in seven different Indian languages.
The training will also be applied to new Internet users living in the non-metro cities in India, to effectively assess the necessary information and navigate the internet.
Internews Inc. is based in California and has already trained around 80,000 people in the department of media skills in 70 countries.
Bharat Nayak, an Indian journalist knows misinformation is dangerous and has negative consequences. He has witnessed such impacts in Jharkhand, India, his home state.
“Indian society has been gravely affected by ‘fake news’, which has contributed to a rise in hatred and violence, and horrific incidences of lynching,” said Nayak.
This Concern about false and misinformation was raised more profoundly around last year during the Indian general election. Around 600 million people came to vote which was the epic democratic exercise ever happened in history.
In partnership with Internews and DataLeads, in-depth verification training is provided by the network for more than 15,000 students and journalist covering almost 875 news organizations, and in 10 different Indian languages. “train-the-trainer” approach will be used, this technique has also helped in supporting nearly all the fact-checking initiatives which have been launched by Indian media during the past years.