Fake news can possibly spark riots, lead to frauds and even cost lives. And checking fake news is not just media practitioners’ work but also community volunteers and leaders engaging with society, according to Confederation of Voluntary Associations (COVA) – Peace Network, a national network of associations for communal harmony and development.

Addressing the concern, the network organised a fact-checking skills workshop for its community volunteers.

The one-day training including hands-on sessions was delivered by domain experts and explained the landscape of fake news in the current times, its types and the extent.

In the workshop, community leaders organised into smaller groups learnt handling basic fact-checking tools, image verification techniques and explored solutions.

According to Mazher Hussian, executive director of COVA, the training programme had participants in six teams to understand real-world examples from across domains such politics, faith, legal issues, social concerns, financial frauds, consumer scams and medical misinformation. The team presented their fact-checking strategies and demonstrated the skills they acquired. The groups also engaged in action planning for future engagements by setting up alert systems and for learning to build support networks and community groups.

According to the participants, misinformation flourishes as individuals tend to have a bias towards one ideology and it becomes easy to believe fake news as correct.

The training workshop was led by Bharath Guniganti of Factly, Nabeel K. Adeni of EnLeap XP Canada, Moinuddin Ali Khan of Advipract, cyber crime expert Taher Hussain Sheeraz and Mohd Shadab of Momentum AI.