Argentina launches training project for journalists in the region on fact-checking "socially sensitive" issues

During the COVID-19 pandemic, fact-checkers (people devoted to checking data that circulates without formal verification through the digital world) have worked hard against disinformation, a phenomenon that multiplied, involving varied issues of special relevance for society’s life.

In particular, fact-checkers had to learn to work with "socially sensitive" checking. This usually involves issues that generate social polarization, or that include potentially harmful data, entailing problems of diversity and inclusion. Vaccination is an example of these socially sensitive issues, but so are elections or gender issues, which produce confrontation among the audience.

Commonly, educational resources for checkers on these issues are in English, naturally excluding the official languages of Latin America – Spanish and Portuguese – and thus making it a region more vulnerable to misinformation, bad translations, out-of-context information, or outdated versions. To give journalists and editors in the region more tools to face this challenge and, at the same time, involve audiences in the fact-checking process, UNESCO and Chequeado are launching an initiative offering five practical guides for technical training.

These are: vaccines, environment, choices, gender and seniors. The material regarding each axis will be reviewed by experts from different countries, to guarantee the highest quality, both technical and contextual.

By disseminating these documents and holding online sessions together with different journalists from the region, it will seek to contribute to ongoing training for 2000 journalists from Latin America and the Caribbean, offering tools on how to cover topics, so that later the checkers are better trained to verify these matters, also getting involved with audiences.

Since 2014, Chequeado has coordinated the Latam Chequea checker network, which brings together more than 30 organizations from 17 countries in Latin America, Spain and Portugal. They work to counter disinformation that circulates and transcends borders. This project seeks to strengthen this collective and the region’s different organizations, to enable citizens to access more reliable information, so that they can make informed decisions.

This is one of the 18 initiatives that were presented from Latin America last June to UNESCO’s IPDC, the only United Nations intergovernmental initiative to promote independent media, mainly in developing countries, to encourage free, pluralistic media. On that occasion, 55 projects were approved to strengthen journalists’ work worldwide.