Educating through Memes
Instagram analytics showed that this week, one of the memes I posted has performed well. “This post is doing better than 90% of your posts.” It also suggested using it to promote the account to reach a wider audience.
Since the launch of my fact-checking-using-memes project, 29 memes have been published on social media, 24 of which are verified news stories. The majority of these news items address anxiety-provoking rumors that were widely trending. The verification process concluded with evidence that most of them were fabricated. But the meme that attracted the most attention wasn’t like any of the others I published. Indeed, it was an educational one; it included a funny face with an expression that reads: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
I noted this quote while reading “Verification Handbook: A definitive guide to verifying digital content for emergency coverage” in the context of building my knowledge about tools and techniques for how to deal with user-generated content. I wanted to share it with my followers as a sort of educational content I offer along with the service of fact checking news stories. When I noticed that this specific meme managed to attract more likes and comments, I remembered an expression I heard from Professor Jeff Jarvis, Director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, “As journalists, we have to think about changing the way of telling the story.”
At first glance, “educational content” for many people means content that is boring and uninteresting. However, not only did the meme with the educational quote prove the contrary, it also attracted many followers, unlike numerous news stories.
Do you want another piece of evidence? Okay, this is another educational meme that I published, and it has the second highest number of post impressions in the account. This meme included advice from Associated Press standards for dealing with news: “Always and forever, find the original source and do the reporting around it.”
For me as a journalist, it’s just one of the rules of the game, nothing new about this quote. However, people seem to enjoy getting such pieces of advice in the form of visual memes that combine humor with education rather than the traditional way of learning through books and long articles.
The medium is the message
The process then is changing how we tell the story. Journalism students might have heard the Marshall McLuhan quote “The medium is the message.” It is considered one of the classic cliches in journalism, but we tend to forget it as soon as we get immersed in our careers.
“If you had told me that you would fact-check news stories using a traditional approach, this wouldn’t attract my attention. But doing so through memes is something I strongly support you doing,” Marc Pultuskier, one of my mentors and adjunct professor at CUNY, told me while reviewing the developments of Alkunnash project during a weekly coaching session.
The rapid increase of rumors and fabricated news necessitates the development of the next generation of fact-checkers from the Arab Gulf States. As a result, externship opportunities for media students in the Arab Gulf States were announced on the project website. Through this program students will be given the opportunity to learn about fact-checking techniques and how to identify fabricated news stories and then publish the results using memes.
Between Two Universities
I received my undergraduate journalism degree from the University of Bahrain. Attending the journalism program in such a university qualifies you to write reports. I believe that if I had asked my professor about my project in memes, he would have laughed at me.
As a fellow in the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, I am asked to quietly do the contrary. I have to prove that I have an innovative idea to solve a pressing problem; not a problem in my mind but a problem in their minds, the people I am addressing.
Comparing the two programs I came to realize the difference between being prepared to be a traditional journalist and being prepared to find innovative ways to solve a pressing problem in the journalism industry. It is one thing to simply write a report—another to face the challenge of innovation. At this program, fellows are asked repeatedly to prove, with facts, that they are working on providing a solution to a real problem. Fellows have to prepare to defend their project idea before the program mentors and other consultants.
This is one of the main differences between the traditional journalism programs found in many universities and the uniqueness of the “Entrepreneurial Journalism” program. I am learning as a fellow at CUNY that the focus should be on innovation and speed in dealing with the needs of the time.
I have witnessed during my study at CUNY the controversy around fake news in the US, especially in the period that followed the 2016 presidential elections.
“Fake news is nothing new, but it’s still fake,” one of the ads for NPR noted. This commercial, visible in a New York City subway station, expresses the deepness of the problem.
I also witnessed the emerging trend whereby technology companies including Google, Facebook and Snapchat aim to tackle this challenge by investing in fact checking products and organizations.
On April 3, 2017, CUNY announced that it was administering a $14 million fund for the News Integrity Initiative to deal with fake news problem in partnership with Facebook, the Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund, the Ford Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the Knight Foundation, The Tow Foundation, AppNexus, Mozilla and betaworks.
This announcement fades in importance for me after knowing that CUNY started this project in November 2016; few days after the presidential elections. It has quickly captured and diagnosed the failure of media outlets in dealing with the elections in a professional way and undertook this initiative to handle this problem.
Traditional journalism universities in Bahrain don’t encourage such an approach. On the contrary, students are in an environment dedicate in their minds how to separate between the university sphere and public affairs instead of finding solutions to issues that are affecting people and organizations. One of my journalism professors used to use “In dreamland” whenever he wanted to give an example criticizing a local public affair. I can imagine him reciting the same expression to me if I ever told him about the idea of using memes to fact-check rumors and propaganda “in dreamland my son.”
