PUNE: BBC will be launching ‘Beyond Fake News Project’, a new international anti-disinformation initiative on Monday, November 12 at Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU). 

The release of findings from BBC of how and why disinformation is shared will also be launched. The conference for the same will be held at Sant Dnyaneshwar Sabhagruha on SPPU campus.

While world over, disinformation has been seen to cause social and political harm, with people having less trust in the news, the BBC’s Beyond Fake News project aims to fight back with a major focus on global media literacy, panel debates in India and Kenya, hackathons exploring tech solutions and a special season of programming across the BBC’s networks in Africa, India, Asia Pacific, Europe, the USA and Central America. The project will be bringing together voices from politics, news, entertainment, academia, public policy and all sectors of society to focus on understanding the problem better and looking at potential solutions and future collaborations.

The research to be released publicly on the occasion has come after users gave the BBC unprecedented access to their encrypted messaging apps in India, Kenya, and Nigeria. The Beyond Fake News media literacy programme has already begun delivering workshops in India and Kenya. It draws on the BBC’s pioneering work to tackle disinformation in the UK, where digital literacy workshops have also been delivered to schools across the country.

Jamie Angus, Director of the BBC World Service Group, says, “In 2018, I pledged that the BBC World Service Group would move beyond just talking about the global ‘fake news’ threat, and take concrete steps to address it. Poor standards of global media literacy and the ease with which malicious content can spread unchecked on digital platforms mean there’s never been a greater need for trustworthy news providers to take proactive steps. We have put our money where our mouth is and invested in real action on the ground in India and in Africa.”