Meedan in Tunisia: Verifying elections in the Arab world
In September and October 2019, Meedan worked with several media organisations in Tunisia on two election initiatives. Tunisia held its second democratic presidential and legislative elections since the 2010 Arab Spring, which originated in Tunisia. Fourteen journalists used Check during the elections to:
- Live fact-check four presidential debates involving 25 candidates
- Monitor elections news electronically
- Verify information and claims from the campaigns and during election days.
For the first time in Tunisia, political advertising and voter mobilization took place largely on social media and the internet. One sponsored publication falsely claimed that Tunisia’s newly inaugurated president had pulled out from the race, on the eve of the first presidential election.
Long-debated questions surfaced, particularly around difficulties in observing the elections outside Tunisia, as well as difficulties monitoring political content and paid ads on social media groups. Check’s collaborative team verified at least five claims about elections abroad. While Whatsapp was not widely used, due to the loose restrictions regarding the sale of phone numbers several people reported election materials being sent directly through unsolicited calls or text messages; another claim that the project team verified with testimonies of several voters who received the text messages.
Fact-checking live with the Economiste Maghrébin
Meedan partnered with the economy-focused media outlet, L’économiste Maghrébin, to live fact-check four presidential debates held on September 7, 8 and 9, 2019, and again on October 11, 2019. Check allowed the team of seven journalists to simultaneously add different claims from nine competing politicians on the debate stage.
Verification process
L’Economiste Maghrébin identified three types of claims:
- Economic indicators
- Facts, legislation or national plans
- Political statements whose context is incorrect or false.
The validation process was simple: the work is divided between journalists and editors who validate their verification. When a journalist adds a claim to Check, the journalist verifies it by confirming or negating the truthfulness of the statement. In some occasions, the journalists added more contextual information that was missing.
Throughout the debate nights, the team added 68 different statements to the platform for verification. They emphasized claims of public interest that could be verified via original public sources. We also referred to verified reports from reliable media outlets in the country.
- Twenty-one claims verified by the team were true
- Twenty three other claims were found to be false while six were found to be missing context
- We refrained from sharing verification results from 14 items for lack of original sources
(تونس_تنتخب#) Monitoring and verifying elections on the internet
In October 2019, Meedan partnered with a collective of citizen media organisations working remotely across four cities in Tunisia to form a monitoring and fact-checking initiative under the moniker تونس_تنتخب# (Tunisia votes). This collaboration was under the tutelage of the Union Tunisienne des Médias Associatifs (ENG: Tunisian Union of NGO Media). The monitoring effort was split between verifying false information and annotating news-y posts and media content on social media to document hate speech and libel.
In the end, our goal was not only to verify information but also provide a curated flow of verified content to a regional audience who may necessarily tuned to national media, but may be nevertheless subject to misinformation attacks via their personalised networks especially on Facebook.
The work has been divided between four projects over 14 days.
- The legislative election monitoring project
- The presidential election monitoring project
- Election Day — October 6 (Legislative)
- Election Day — October 13 (Presidential)
KPI’s
This project was met with enthusiasm from the members of the citizen media organisations who, for the first time, participated in a hybrid observation mission both on the field and on the web, and who allowed their audiences to send them tips.
“I was able to enhance my overall digital and reporting skills on a computer by weaving together several elements to verifying a piece of information including tracking the original false information, gathering clues and publishing a report entirely from the same platform. I believe these skills supplement my knowledge and skills as a previous field election observer and I am looking forward to continuing working on this project on my own capacity and continue verifying information that is interesting to the radio’s audience,” says Ichrak Gharbi, managing president of Radio Chamal in the North-west city of Beja.
Hayet Sammari, co-founder of the Tunisian Union for Citizen Media and a journalist at Radio VITAA sees more value in collaborating with bigger national media and helping them create a content funnel of verified information in Tunisia to niche and regional audiences.
“This will help stymie at least the sticking effect of misinformation on some demographics who are may be subject such propaganda due to the wildspread of false information and non-contextualised content, but oftentimes lack the media literacy skills to seek correct information on their own,” she said.
The team reached 51% verification rate throughout the 4 projects, collected from 99 different sources across Facebook, Twitter, the web, text statements and multimedia files.
The type of disinformation that was massively shared among citizens was reporting logistical irregularities. An election observer organisation, I-Watch, reported significance uptake in calls from concerned citizens about rumours of stuffed ballot boxes, easily forgeable ballots, voting centre officials engaged in giving wrong counts. The spectre of rigged elections is perhaps still present in the psyche of many Tunisians due to the 56 of single-party rule and dictatorship until 2010. Such content can flare up memories from the past.
Caveats
Few organizations are engaged in monitoring infraction claims on social media which is a crucial part of ensuring the integrity of the elections in Tunisia and can assuage social media users’ angst with regards the procedural integrity of the elections as well as provide further transparency into the process. Election observation groups in Tunisia focus primarily on monitoring the respect of the law by political actors and have fewer resources to track user-generated misinformation content by regular users or user-managed pages. Check has the potential to streamline the electronic monitoring and news verification across several actors such as Election Observations Missions, media organisations and all other organisations interested in the integrity of the elections in Tunisia.
Furthermore, early detection of claims and voting irregularity as documented on social media can stymie the snowball of false information or course-correct an irregularity. An example of this was the wide-spread polemic of barring voters in “shorts” in the September presidential election which was true in one polling centre in the electoral district of Manouba. The elections oversight body, ISIE, intervened to dissuade the implementation of such ad-hoc rule. A proactive coverage of the election and engaged followers shared the verified information widely on traditional media mediums such as radios.
The irregularities and claims from abroad proved to be the hardest to verify due to the small number of physical observers or their testimonies on social media in order to corroborate claims and infractions that may have happened. Most of the claims on social media were with regards to the inability of some voters to vote due to the deletion of their names from the voter registries or last-minute poll centre location changes were never verified.
In the end, a deeper study of misinformation trends in Tunisia will effectively help fact-checkers be on top of false information before they spiral on the internet. The small size and connectedness of Tunisian internet users make it very difficult that some information may only travel in bubbles which may be also an opportunity for independent fact-checkers to create a longer-lasting and wider footprint impact among readers.
