Meedan

Meedan is a non-profit that develops open source tools, programs, and research, for a more effective and ethical digital infrastructure that offers all communities more accurate, truthful information. Meedan helps journalists, fact-checkers, researchers, and human rights activists to analyze and report on misinformation and disinformation. 

Meedan’s core software product is a platform called Check, which enables users to create tiplines and data feeds from social media platforms, annotate them for truth and context, and share them with aligned organizations. Digital Public has helped Meedan design and develop the legal architecture for their global platform, including foundational contracting approaches, increased internal capacity, and a central focus on data governance design

Check is not only in use in a wide range of regional and national jurisdictions, it is typically deployed amid volatile political controversies. Unsurprisingly, Meedan’s work has tripled since 2020. Uses of the Check platform have increased dramatically, as have the number of laws that might regulate it, either through increased protections for open information or increased regulation of certain kinds of speech. Meedan works with institutional fact-checking organizations, global social media platforms, government-sponsored university researchers, and journalists all over the world. They take this responsibility to their users and data subjects seriously and our work has enabled them to establish new technical and legal infrastructures to deliver on that responsibility.

Let’s take one step back: Misinformation and disinformation are volatile and widely contested issues, from science to politics to journalism, and, frankly, there are very few credible approaches to addressing them at scale. The organizations that have the most invested, experimented the most, and failed the most publicly are social media organizations like Facebook or TikTok. At the same time, there are global networks of journalists, civil society organizations, and fact-checkers with personal, political, and professional interests in ensuring the integrity of our information ecosystem. 

Check seeks to address these challenges by enabling distributed networks of fact-checkers to create feeds of high-integrity (or locally contextualized) information, while also documenting and reporting on the ways that disinformation is being used to influence the public. Check also enables fact-checkers to share their findings over social media or with partnered organizations and researchers. Several of the world’s largest social media and communication companies use Check to develop credible feeds of annotated, contextually appropriate information. 

At a time where social media content moderation is the focus of intense political attention and digital services are facing a flood of new data and digital regulations, there is very little that is obvious or apolitical about how to architect or scale a service like Check. We have helped to navigate this uncertainty. For example, Meedan is a registered California non-profit but hosts the Check technology in Ireland, two jurisdictions with very different data protection frameworks, and currently operate without a legal framework for EU-US data transfers. 

Meedan’s work bridges the large trust gap between politically precarious civil society organizations and international social media platforms, by targeting their shared interest in a high-integrity information space. While Check is technical infrastructure for the work of fact-checking, Meedan, as an organization, also maintains an active academic interest in misinformation and disinformation - and thus governs the growing research ecosystem built atop the data they produce. Digital Public works with Meedan to build legal infrastructure and data sharing relationships that can further their goals. 

At its core, our work with Meedan is about trying to identify and implement high-integrity data governance practice in areas of high-impact with an aligned partner. While the complexities international regulatory compliance are not new, the ascendancy of digital information and digital media gives rise to new, unexplored overlaps between commerce, data protection, and political speech. Like Digital Public, Meedan is endeavoring to understand, illuminate and define this new governance space, even as it adapts its own practice to a changing environment. This “teaching hospital” approach that combines practice and practical learning is exactly to which we aspire in our own digital governance efforts.