Amnesty International Will Use Truly Media To Fight Misinformation
,The Research and Cooperation Projects team at DW is delighted to announce that Amnesty International will be the first external customer of Truly Media, our collaborative verification platform developed together with Athens Technology Center (ATC).
The news was revealed at the STOA Annual Lecture 2017 in Brussels on November 21st by Wilfried Runde (DW) and Yannis Kliafas (ATC).
Truly Media has been tested by Amnesty International for some time now. While the platform was still in beta status, the Crisis Response Team's Digital Verifications Corps (DVC) made numerous suggestions for enhancements of the platform which were subsequently incorporated.
Truly Media now meets the requirements of both media professionals (especially journalists) as well as human rights workers. Both groups are permanently confronted with digital material that needs to be analysed and checked for authenticity. The platform allows for exactly that–and lets users cooperate across time zones and geographic boundaries in real-time, incorporating state-of-the-art technology. This is exactly what Amnesty International had been looking for.
Bringing Amnesty's verification work "to the next level"
Tirana Hassan, Amnesty International's Crisis Response Director, is very pleased that the DVC can now regularly use Truly Media in its day-to-day work. She said: "In partnership with leading universities around the world, our Digital Verifications Corps has already put us at the vanguard of the digital revolution in human rights research. We are confident that our collaboration with Truly Media will take this crucial work to the next level."
"A real demand for Truly Media"
Peter Limbourg, DW's Director General, is also delighted about the cooperation with Amnesty International: "Truly Media supports the detection of misinformation and manipulations online, and does so in an efficient way. Developing Truly Media is proof of DW's capabilities for innovative solutions in this domain, too. The fact that Amnesty International will be using the platform makes us proud, and it proves that there is a real demand for Truly Media."
Praise from the European level
Eva Kaili, Greek MEP and Chairwoman of the STOA Committee, is also full of praise for Truly Media and what ATC and DW are providing for the fact-checking community. Following the STOA lecture in Brussels, she said: "Truly Media is an impressive tool supporting journalists and those working in the human rights sector to fight misinformation. It's great to see that European research funding acted as the trigger for it and helped to create such a promising platform. I also believe politics can benefit, if we use new technologies to prevent reputation crises during elections across the world!"
The user community is growing
It goes without saying that the Truly Media team is very happy about the above statements and the positive feedback obtained so far. This includes comments from early testers such as dpa, Bayerischer Rundfunk, RTL, and others. We are excited to welcome Amnesty International as a regular user and customer of Truly Media–in addition to our editorial teams at Deutsche Welle. We look forward to welcoming more users on board in the near future!
About Amnesty International's Digital Verifications Corps
Amnesty International's DVC was launched in October 2016. It includes research labs based at Cambridge University, University of California-Berkeley, University of Essex, University of Pretoria, and University of Toronto. The inter-disciplinary network brings together more than 100 students with a common goal–to act as the frontline in verifying digital content for human rights research. For more information on the work of DVC, check out the (German language) Tagesschau post Verbrechen per Video entlarven.
About Truly Media
Truly Media was developed with support from Google's Digital News Initiative (funding period June 2016 to September 2017). It is based on work carried out in EU co-funded research projects in which DW participated, especially REVEAL. In November 2017, Truly Media was launched commercially.
Related material
- Amnesty International and Truly Media join forces in fight against 'fake news'
(English language press release by Amnesty International) - Truly Media–Verifikationsplattform von DW und ATC im EU-Parlament vorgestellt. Amnesty International erster Nutzer (German language press release by DW)
