Civic Media Observatory

The CMO seeks to address the following problems:

• Social media platforms lack the local and contextual knowledge, subtext, and language capacity required to understand, assess, and respond to emerging events around the world;
• Media environments are vulnerable to the spread of harmful information: a phenomenon that increasingly disrupts democratic processes; and
• News media often neglect marginalised voices and are ill-equipped to build understanding across language, culture, and geographic borders. Key events or trends are often ignored, leaving institutions and communities unprepared to deal with what should have been foreseeable shocks.

The CMO research method of investigation into news items is therefore grounded in:

• Local knowledge: The subtext and context are explained for all media items under investigation. As GV explains, a key premise of their work is that "contextual, local knowledge of the media environments we study can help readers better understand communities and cultures other than their own. When we decide to share a link or write a story, we ask ourselves what information would be helpful for others to evaluate and absorb the given subject matter. Information, after all, does not exist in isolation from cultural, linguistic, and political environments. Learning how to read circumstances, and knowing which contextual and subtextual information to unpack is a key element in any journalistic act that seeks to translate ideas across cultures, languages, and localities."
• Editorial rigour: This helps partners decode the underlying narrative framing of media, and thereby assess their meaning value or threat.
• A civic impact score: All material is evaluated based on potential benefit or harm to civic discourse in accordance with international human rights norms (scores are, for example, given in relation to how false, misinforming, biased, hateful, inciting, or illegal media content is).
• Suggested actions: These include a range of tactics to inform journalistic coverage, support content moderation and platform governance strategies, and help frame research to promote the protection of human rights within the media environment.

The core of CMO is essentially investigation and research by a body of local journalists who speak the dominant languages in the geographic area under investigation. The research process involves the capturing of media items related to a particular investigation - for example, the Northern Macedonia/Albania European Union (EU) accession. Each media item is then described and analysed, which includes assigning it with a theme, a media frame, and a civic impact score. Based on the analysis, a decision can be made on a potential action, such as writing a story, reporting the item to moderators, or conducting more research. All media items and their analyses are stored on a platform model using Airtable to allow for rapid iteration.

The outputs of the project are: a base of knowledge (to be used by partners, editorial teams, and researchers) comprised of records of evidence (including screengrabs of social media posts), stories (reporting on trends and their meaning), newsletters (reporting on monitored media environments), and special reports and investigations on individual media items or media environments.

The Balkans served as the testing ground for a pilot investigation of the CMO. Since 2018, GV has been working with Anti-Disinformation Network for the Balkans (ADN-Balkans) co-founders Metamorphosis Foundation and Istinomer on: covering Hungarian-sponsored disinformation campaigns in Greece, Slovenia, and North Macedonia; mapping the Russian influence on the Serbian media sphere as a gateway to other post-Yugoslav countries; and monitoring the spread of Russian soft power through alternative health magazines in the region, as well as numerous related issues.

The CMO on COVID-19 also investigated the reasons behind the three-month-long confusion and conjecture surrounding the story of mass deaths in Kano State, northwestern Nigeria, that occurred in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, researchers conducted qualitative, ethnographic monitoring of Nigeria's social media space, which revealed several dominant narratives about the Kano deaths on social media, including denial and suppression of news about the deaths, disinformation, ethnically and religiously divisive messages, political rivalry, and the outbreak of similar mysterious deaths in neighbouring states. For more information, click here.

Since 2020, Global Voices has also been working with BBC Media Action to pilot the CMO in the context of the Protecting Independent Media for Effective Development (PRIMED) media development programme, as part of planned media mapping activities under the formative research stage of the programme's co-creation process.

Click here or here for more information on the CMO, including a presentation outlining the process of research and news item classification.

Freedom of Information, Media Development

Founded in 2004, GV is a multifaceted non-profit organisation that provides a widely accessible platform for underreported global stories. The stories are translated and disseminated through numerous partner news outlets. GV supports free online expression by writers and activists from marginalised groups in more than 180 countries and monitors and analyses threats to free expression around the world. As GV explains, "Many of the world's most interesting and important stories aren't in just one place. Sometimes they're scattered in bits and pieces across the Internet, in blog posts and tweets, and in multiple languages. These are the stories we accurately report on Global Voices - and translate into up to 40 languages, including Malagasy, Bangla and Aymara."