FactCheck Africa Joins Forces with Meta’s Linguistic Technology to Combat Misinformation in Africa

MyAIFactChecker, an African AI fact-checking platform, has teamed up with Meta to improve AI tools that fight false information in the continent’s many languages.

The groundbreaking AI-driven fact-checking platform MyAIFactChecker, created by FactCheck Africa, has formally joined with Meta Language Technology in an effort to counteract misinformation and provide Africans with the skills they need to separate fact from fiction in the digital age.

“The new innovative initiative by Meta is aimed at advancing open-source language technologies and encouraging greater linguistic inclusion globally,” said Mr. Abideen Olasupo, the founder of FactCheck Africa, who spoke to THISDAY in Ilorin over the weekend about the new innovation documented by the organization.

He stated that the Meta Language Technology Partner Program is intended to assist organizations that are creating and implementing language tools to enhance fact-checking, content moderation, and access to trustworthy information, especially in low-resource and underserved languages.

According to Olasupo, this partnership will help the Meta build capabilities like AI-powered speech recognition and translation more quickly.

Olasupo said, “In a continent as rich and diverse in language as Africa, technology must rise to meet the scale and complexity of our communication landscape.” He called the alliance a “milestone moment” for the organization.

“This partnership with Meta enables us to develop and improve the tools that will enable us to accomplish that,” he said.

This important milestone represents a daring step in MyAIFactChecker’s quest to remove language barriers and improve fact-checking throughout Africa, where fighting misinformation and deception may be particularly difficult due to linguistic diversity.

“MyAIFactChecker will provide important linguistic resources to Meta’s open-source endeavors as part of the program,” he continued.

These consist of: a substantial corpus of written content, translated sentence sets (at least 200, ideally in the tens of thousands), and more than ten hours of speech recordings (with or without transcriptions).

With the aid of these tools, language models that represent the distinct linguistic realities of Africa will be trained to be more inclusive and accurate.

This collaboration, according to Olasupo, not only bolsters FactCheckAfrica’s technological prowess but also its overarching dedication to media literacy, critical thinking, and truth-telling.

“It’s not only about fighting misinformation; it’s about giving Africans the skills they need to separate fact from fiction in the digital age.”

“Its acceptance into the Meta Language Technology Partner Program affirms its leadership in using innovation to drive change, making it easier for more Africans to access reliable information in the languages they understand best,” Olasupo remarked as MyAIFactChecker begins this new chapter.