Brazilian Journalism Institute Unveils Open-Source Toolkit to Combat Disinformation
The fight against online disinformation has received a significant boost with the launch of five innovative open-source digital tools by Brazil’s Institute for the Development of Journalism (Projor). These tools, developed by Brazilian media outlets under Projor’s Innovation Fund to Combat Disinformation (Codesinfo), are freely available to any journalistic organization worldwide, marking a collaborative effort to bolster journalistic integrity and public trust in news. Projor is actively promoting these tools internationally by translating its website into English and Spanish and supporting networking initiatives for the participating media outlets. The tools aim to empower civic journalism by enhancing authorship transparency, facilitating fact-checking, providing reliable climate information, simplifying video production, and ensuring up-to-date context within news reports.
Capí: An AI-Powered Chatbot for Climate Clarity
Developed by Ambiental Media, Capí is an artificial intelligence chatbot designed to provide accurate and accessible information on climate change. Leveraging Google’s Gemini large language model and a curated database of scientific reports, including those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Capí addresses user queries with reliable, science-backed answers. While still in beta, Capí utilizes retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to minimize inaccuracies and tailor responses to specific contexts. The chatbot learns from user interactions through prompt tuning while maintaining user privacy. Its infrastructure is hosted on Google Cloud servers optimized for minimal environmental impact. Ambiental Media emphasizes Capí’s role in supporting journalistic research, fact-checking, and brainstorming, acknowledging the ongoing development and potential for refinement inherent in beta AI technology.
Check-up: Scrutinizing Healthcare Advertising for Misinformation
Aos Fatos, a Brazilian fact-checking organization, has introduced Check-up, a tool that analyzes healthcare advertisements on prominent news websites for potentially misleading information. This initiative addresses the growing concern surrounding the exploitation of journalistic credibility by native advertising platforms. Check-up employs a combined automated and manual approach, utilizing scrapers to collect advertisements and a language model to categorize them. Reporters then meticulously assess the ads using Aos Fatos’ established fact-checking methodology, comparing claims with primary sources, data, and expert opinions. The open-source code, available on GitHub, allows other news organizations and researchers to scrutinize advertisements and advocate for improved moderation practices.
Mosaico: Bridging the Gap Between Text and Video
Folha de S.Paulo, a leading Brazilian newspaper, has created Mosaico, a Python library that transforms text-based content into short videos. Built upon the MoviePy library, Mosaico enables the creation of dynamic video narratives from existing written reports, catering to the increasing consumption of video content. Supervised by journalists, Mosaico ensures adherence to journalistic standards and maintains factual accuracy. The open-source nature of the tool encourages community contributions for continuous improvement and adaptation to different newsroom needs. This automated video production process enhances efficiency and facilitates the creation of engaging content for social media platforms.
"Quem Disse?" (Who Said?): Illuminating Authorship and Sources
Folha do Mate, a community-focused news outlet, has developed the "Quem Disse?" (Who Said?) WordPress plugin to promote transparency in journalistic practices. Inspired by LinkedIn, the plugin facilitates the creation of standardized journalist profiles, highlighting their areas of expertise and experience. Furthermore, it incorporates a database of frequently cited sources, offering brief summaries for each. This initiative reinforces the outlet’s commitment to credible journalism and strengthens the connection between journalists and their audience by providing greater insight into the reporting process.
Xarta: Maintaining Contextual Integrity in News Reporting
Núcleo Jornalismo has created Xarta, a system that automates the contextualization of news articles through embeddable cards. This tool addresses the challenge of ensuring up-to-date context in evolving news stories, especially as older articles can be susceptible to misuse and misinterpretation. Xarta eliminates the need for repetitive rewriting of contextual information, automatically updating embedded cards to reflect the latest developments. While newsrooms can create their own Xarta applications, they can also utilize publicly available context cards from other media outlets. This system streamlines news production, enhances accuracy, and combats the spread of misinformation through decontextualized content. Each newsroom can decide on the reproducibility of their context cards under Creative Commons License 4.0. The creation of individual Xarta applications requires technical expertise, but daily usage is designed to be intuitive for reporters and editors.
