Mumbai: The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) partners have agreed to expand their global representation by establishing a regional Asia-Pacific network.
TNI's new Asia-Pacific network of media organisations has received training funded by the Google News Initiative to help their journalists navigate the disinformation environment.
The TNI is an industry collaboration led by the BBC of major news and global tech organisations working together to stop the spread of disinformation where it poses a real-world risk. The Asia-Pacific network will allow the TNI's regional partners to share their insights on combating disinformation and discuss regional trends. Through the TNI cooperative framework, they will draw on their expertise to share best practices and findings with the larger TNI and alert each other to the most dangerous forms of disinformation.
The TNI is expanding its Asia-Pacific presence with the addition of various groups of independent news organisations, including ABC (Australia), Dawn (Pakistan), Indian Express (India), Kompas (Indonesia), NDTV (India), NHK (Japan), and SBS (Australia).
BBC News International Services senior controller & BBC World Service director Liliane Landor said, "With the creation of TNI’s first regional network, we are bringing together trusted Asia-Pacific news-publishing organisations to further reinforce our collaboration and to make it even more efficient and productive."
Google News Lab head Matt Cooke said, "As part of the Google News Initiative’s ongoing efforts to strengthen journalism and fight misinformation, we’ve worked with a range of academics, news organisations and nonprofits across the globe for several years. Now, we’re supporting the Trusted News Initiative to deliver targeted, expert training workshops on a variety of digital tools to help journalists as they seek to continue day-to-day verification and fact-checking in newsrooms across the region."
AP, AFP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, Information Futures Lab, Meta (Facebook/Instagram), Microsoft, The Nation Media Group, Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, and The Washington Post are current TNI partners.
The TNI partnership works collectively in four main areas:
Fast alert: creating a system so organisations can alert each other rapidly when they discover disinformation that threatens human life or disrupts democracy.
Intelligence sharing: a real-time conversation of equals between news organisations and tech platforms about the evolving nature of harmful disinformation.
Media education: sharing insights and research on how audiences and users react to disinformation, thus informing best practice and supporting better digital literacy.
Engineering solutions: sharing information on engineering solutions for authentication of trusted news sources and improving the information environment.
This is entirely separate from, and does not in any way affect, the editorial stance of any partner organisation.
