[Paper Review] Combating Misinformation in Bangladesh: Roles and Responsibilities as Perceived by Journalists, Fact-checkers, and Users

Mahfuzul Haque, Mohammad Yousuf+4 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Jul 25, 2020

ICT in Developing Communities92 references6 citations

TL;DR

This study investigates misinformation in Bangladesh through interviews with journalists, fact-checkers, and surveys of users, revealing that while the public expects media to verify online content, newsrooms lack capacity for fact-checking, and volunteer fact-checkers face infrastructural deficits. The paper advocates for collaborative, technology-informed, and infrastructure-driven solutions tailored to non-English, Global South contexts.

ABSTRACT

There has been a growing interest within CSCW community in understanding the characteristics of misinformation propagated through computational media, and the devising techniques to address the associated challenges. However, most work in this area has been concentrated on the cases in the western world leaving a major portion of this problem unaddressed that is situated in the Global South. This paper aims to broaden the scope of this discourse by focusing on this problem in the context of Bangladesh, a country in the Global South. The spread of misinformation on Facebook in Bangladesh, a country with a population over 163 million, has resulted in chaos, hate attacks, and killings. By interviewing journalists, fact-checkers, in addition to surveying the general public, we analyzed the current state of verifying misinformation in Bangladesh. Our findings show that most people in the `news audience' want the news media to verify the authenticity of online information that they see online. However, the newspaper journalists say that fact-checking online information is not a part of their job, and it is also beyond their capacity given the amount of information being published online everyday. We further find that the voluntary fact-checkers in Bangladesh are not equipped with sufficient infrastructural support to fill in this gap. We show how our findings are connected to some of the core concerns of CSCW community around social media, collaboration, infrastructural politics, and information inequality. From our analysis, we also suggest several pathways to increase the impact of fact-checking efforts through collaboration, technology design, and infrastructure development.

Motivation & Objective

• To understand the roles and responsibilities of journalists, fact-checkers, and users in combating misinformation in Bangladesh.
• To examine the structural and infrastructural challenges hindering effective fact-checking in a Global South context.
• To explore how cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic factors shape misinformation dynamics and response mechanisms.
• To identify pathways for improving fact-checking through collaboration, technology design, and infrastructure development in low-resource settings.

Proposed method

• Conducted in-depth interviews with 29 ordinary citizens using convenience sampling to include diverse age and education levels.
• Collected survey data from Facebook users to assess public perceptions of misinformation and media responsibility.
• Interviewed journalists and volunteer fact-checkers from organizations like BDFactCheck, Fact Watch, and Jaachai to understand their operational challenges.
• Analyzed case studies of viral misinformation incidents in Bangladesh, including mob violence linked to false rumors on Facebook.
• Explored the role of linguistic and computational resources in enabling automated fact-checking for Bengali-language content.
• Connected findings to core CSCW themes such as infrastructural politics, collaboration, and information inequality in digital media ecosystems.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 What roles do journalists, fact-checkers, and users perceive themselves as playing in combating online misinformation in Bangladesh?
• RQ2 How do structural and infrastructural limitations affect the capacity of media and volunteer fact-checkers to verify misinformation?
• RQ3 What are the key challenges in scaling fact-checking efforts in a low-resource, non-English digital environment like Bangladesh?
• RQ4 How can technology design and collaborative models improve the effectiveness of fact-checking in Global South contexts?
• RQ5 What policy and design interventions can reduce misinformation while addressing cultural and linguistic specificity in developing democracies?

Key findings

• A majority of the general public expects news media to verify the authenticity of online information, indicating a strong demand for media accountability.
• Print journalists in Bangladesh do not consider fact-checking online content as part of their professional role, citing workload and lack of institutional support.
• Voluntary fact-checkers in Bangladesh operate without adequate technological or financial infrastructure, limiting their reach and sustainability.
• Misinformation in Bangladesh often spreads via Facebook and has led to real-world violence, including mob lynchings linked to false rumors about child abduction and religious blasphemy.
• The lack of Bengali-language computational resources—such as part-of-speech taggers and named entity recognition systems—hinders the development of automated fact-checking tools.
• Religious misinformation is particularly potent in countries with a single dominant religion (e.g., Bangladesh, India, Myanmar), suggesting that collaboration with faith-based institutions could improve response strategies.