Rural India has been increasingly falling victim to the pervasive misinformation disinformation campaigns and influence operations that target people who do not have the skills to fact-check accurately. While several initiatives in India fact-check and expose these coordinated misinformation campaigns, the initiative's beneficiaries remain an educated urban population. Further, the technology-oriented tools for fact-checking and learning often lack an approach grounded in rural realities where majority of the women are systematically excluded from access to technology. In this session, we discuss Digital Empowerment Foundation's program that trained 480 rural women in digital literacy and critical digital literacy in it's first phase. The lightening talk will discuss how this initiative is taking a different approach to tackling online harms which is embedded in the caste-gender realities of rural India. The talk will discuss how in rural India, misinformation and disinformation is a continuation of the existing gender narratives, norms and dogmas. It will also discuss how the internalised gendered perceptions about the self and body often create a local information landscape that act as a foundation to misinformation and disinformation online. The discussion will also demonstrate how creative ways of project implementation addressed these peculiar issues and what were the challenges and learning from the field. Link to the modules: The video case storied from the participants will ensure that the voices from rural India is also represented in the room. A mobile phone will be connected to the Zoom link so that, audience in the room is also connected to some of the online audience. When there is Q&A, the person with the mobile phone will move around and also record it and live stream it simultaneously. We will also distribute a handout (both online and offline) about the issues that are being discussed to clearly communicate the content of the discussion.
Open Zoom
