The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has joined a global collaboration of major international news and technology organisations to stop the spread of disinformation.
Director of News at the ABC, Justin Stevens said the creation of a Trusted News Initiative (TNI) Asia-Pacific network would enable regional partners to share insights and best practices to tackle disinformation, discuss trends in the region and alert each other to the most dangerous forms of disinformation through the TNI cooperative framework.
“The rapidly increasing spread of disinformation – information that is deliberately misleading and dangerous – weakens our society and is a threat that must be addressed,” Mr Stevens said.
“As Australia’s most trusted media organisation the ABC has an important role to play in tackling this problem,” he said.
“We’re pleased to join the Trusted News Initiative and, in the process, provide Australian audiences with a deeper and better-informed view of our region and the world.”
Mr Stevens said the TNI partnership worked collectively in four main areas including ‘Fast Alert’, a system for organisations to alert each other rapidly when they discover disinformation which threatened human life or disrupted democracy.
He said the partnership also worked to share intelligence through real-time conversations between news organisations and tech platforms about the evolving nature of harmful disinformation.
The Director said insights and research on how audiences and users react to disinformation was also shared, along with engineering solutions for authentication of trusted news sources and improving the information environment.
“The partnership is entirely separate from, and does not in any way affect, the editorial independence of any partner organisation,” Mr Stevens said.
“Other Asia-Pacific news organisations joining the partnership are SBS, Indian Express, Dawn (Pakistan), Kompas (Indonesia), NDTV (India) and NHK (Japan),” he said.
