Over the past decade, disinformation has swept across the MENA region, posing a serious threat to social cohesion in an already fragile context. Fact-checkers fighting this tide of false and misleading content face significant human and financial resource constraints, safety and security threats, and severe limitations on access to information. They also have to deal with content moderation and verification tools that are inadequate for the Arabic language.

This brief highlights how technical innovation can help address this challenge and promote a healthier digital media environment in the MENA region. It presents research and observations from the Arab Fact-Checkers Network (AFCN) Innovation & Resilience project, which aims to support fact-checking organizations and radically change how people seek information online.

The project involves the development of DALIL, a cutting-edge digital platform that introduces AI-driven solutions across the fact-checking process. Using automation and machine learning, DALIL scans and processes large volumes of text from the web, grouping them by theme and worthiness. In doing so, it accelerates the otherwise time-consuming process of monitoring and identifying online misleading content.

DALIL also integrates a package of open-source and proprietary verification tools that allow fact-checkers to determine the veracity of images, videos and texts in one centralized space. A user forum is provided to foster collaboration between fact-checkers, and a cross-platform publishing feature makes it easy to design and share fact-checks to different social media sites at once.

Alongside this solution, the brief explores a range of recommendations to broader the degree of meaningful support to MENA-based fact-checkers.