Combating Misinformation in Bangladesh

Abstract

There has been a growing interest within CSCW community in understanding the characteristics of misinformation propagated through computational media, and the devising techniques to address the associated challenges. However, most work in this area has been concentrated on the cases in the western world leaving a major portion of this problem unaddressed that is situated in the Global South. This paper aims to broaden the scope of this discourse by focusing on this problem in the context of Bangladesh, a country in the Global South. The spread of misinformation on Facebook in Bangladesh, a country with a population of over 163 million, has resulted in chaos, hate attacks, and killings. By interviewing journalists, fact-checkers, in addition to surveying the general public, we analyzed the current state of verifying misinformation in Bangladesh. Our findings show that most people in the 'news audience' want the news media to verify the authenticity of online information that they see online. However, the newspaper journalists say that fact-checking online information is not a part of their job, and it is also beyond their capacity given the amount of information being published online every day. We further find that the voluntary fact-checkers in Bangladesh are not equipped with sufficient infrastructural support to fill in this gap. We show how our findings are connected to some of the core concerns of CSCW community around social media, collaboration, infrastructural politics, and information inequality. From our analysis, we also suggest several pathways to increase the impact of fact-checking efforts through collaboration, technology design, and infrastructure development.

Healing Anthropocene Syndrome: Planetary Health Requires Remediation of the Toxic Post-Truth Environment

“…In the process it aggravates health inequalities and acts as a threat to the well-being of all species, not only humans. Adapted from References [1,5].…”

“…At the same time, lessons learned from the rapidly expanding research on misinformation may provide valuable insights in the context of positive social contagion; specifically, the aims of misinformation remediation should go beyond toxic cleanup and point toward a greater understanding of the ways in which positive social contagion (the spread of health-promoting information) might be enhanced. At the outset we underscore that most of the literature on misinformation has emerged from and pertains to affluent westernized nations, although emerging research highlights that the spread of misinformation is potentially no less threatening to the health of persons in the Global South [3][4][5][6][7]. Moreover, the rapid spread of unhealthy products (e.g., low-cost ultra-processed foods [8]) to the Global South [9], aided and abetted by manipulative techniques (political, marketing and otherwise) described below, directly compromises health and obscures the upstream social, commercial and ecological determinants of health [10].…”

Health Misinformation on Social Media in Bangladesh: Public Health Impact and Mitigation Strategies

“…Understanding the internet's role in health information consumption and consumers' ability to assess its accuracy is crucial. Bangladesh has witnessed several instances of mob lynching and hate crimes fueled by false and deceptive information on social media platforms (Haque et al, 2020a). Despite the large number of internet users, a significant portion of the population lacks sufficient digital literacy (Z.…”

University Students’ Perceived Self-control and Prosocial Norms for Beneficial Social Media Use

“…In Bangladesh, young people are the most abusers of social media, contributing to many challenges for social sustainability (Haque et al, 2020). While Facebook is the most popular social media platform, it is often irresponsibly used by the country's young population (Ahmed, Sultana, Alam, Griffiths, & Hiramoni, 2022).…”

“…While Facebook is the most popular social media platform, it is often irresponsibly used by the country's young population (Ahmed, Sultana, Alam, Griffiths, & Hiramoni, 2022). Social media abuse in Bangladesh includes online misinformation sharing, pornography, gambling, addiction, political and religious misuse, sexual harassment, and bullying (Ahmed et al, 2022;Haque et al, 2020;Hassan et al, 2020;Islam et al, 2021). However, the social media cyberbullying trend among university students is upscaling and developing significant challenges for harmony in society (Sheikh, Hossan, & Menih, 2023).…”