20 years on: Meedanis in their own words
It’s been two decades since Meedan was officially established. Here are some reflections from team members who shaped the organization over time.
It’s been two decades since Meedan was officially established. Here are some reflections from team members who shaped the organization over time.
Throughout Meedan’s history, a diverse community of participants has molded the organization into what it is today. Now, 20 years after we gained 501(c)(3) status, we’re taking a moment to reflect with a few of the individuals who have contributed to this story.
“Before the global election monitoring projects, before taking on issues of verification and context on the social web, before creating infrastructure for collaborative fact-checking on closed messaging applications, Meedan was a simple idea to promote peace in a post-9/11 world. We believed in a world where linguistic silos, divergent narratives, and disconnected populations were technical challenges. While Facebook was emerging from a dorm room, we imagined social software for collaborative journalism — across languages, cultures, and ideologies. We believed that a global community of translators and curators could collaborate to share a wider, deeper understanding of the world — peace through context. Twenty years into the journey, as we face a world filled with war, hatred, and division, we must continue the creative work of imagining a world that rejects the machinery of war and the hatred, greed, ignorance, and division that drives it. Onward, Meedan.”
“In 2024, I led a partnership with Mexico’s largest electoral institution, the Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE), to implement Meedan’s technology for the facilitation of a coalition against electoral disinformation. This effort brought together three of the country’s leading fact-checking organizations: Animal Político, AFP México, and Telemundo. This is a project that deeply moved me, not only because I led it, but also because, when our values, intentions, and advocacy find resonance in concrete action, our daily work becomes both powerful and impactful. When there is political will, there is a real possibility to restore the central role of journalism and information in safeguarding people’s rights.”
“One of my favorite moments in Meedan’s history was the launch and evolution of Health Desk in 2020. Born at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Health Desk brought together an around-the-clock global network of public health researchers to deliver high-quality, accessible explainers for journalists and fact-checkers, often responding in under 48 hours. What started as pandemic support quickly grew to cover broader public health topics and reached millions around the world, embodying Meedan’s mission to strengthen reliable information where and when people need it most.”
“My favorite moment at Meedan was in 2013, on the first day we had our office in Cairo set up. We — the three local team members there — spent our first day sitting on the floor of an empty office, no desks yet, with our laptops and USB internet sticks. We were fully aware of the challenges ahead but also extremely excited about the new office, Checkdesk, and our fact-checking effort.”
“A few years ago, we organized a series called Women, Media, and the Pandemic. We opened it with a conversation with Maria Ressa, the founder of the Filipino newsroom Rappler, who, not long after, would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. The event didn’t start smoothly. Behind the scenes, we were scrambling through a few tense minutes of technical glitches while people from across the world were logging in. Those joining couldn’t really tell anything was wrong, but internally, we were frantically troubleshooting. What followed was one of the most compelling conversations I’ve heard with a journalist and a visionary. Maria spoke with such clarity and conviction about the need to fight technological harms with technology, about the growing attacks on independent media by governments, and about the responsibility of journalists in this moment. One line has stayed with me ever since: when facts are debatable, when it becomes a war for truth, journalists are activists.”
“Meedan is a deeply welcoming organization. I experienced this firsthand when I was introduced to founding CEO Ed Bice in 2015. I had just finished my Ph.D. on online language boundaries and the roles of bilinguals and had learnt about Meedan through that research. When I expressed a desire to possibly collaborate, Ed invited me to join part of a team gathering, despite having only just been introduced. At the gathering, I was warmly welcomed and felt an openness that was refreshingly different from my experience consulting with private companies. I had a bunch of great technical conversations, and we built some early prototypes for semantic retrieval when sentence and document embeddings were very new.”
“One of my favorite moments in Meedan’s history goes back to when I was working at Almasry Al-Youm and received a request to link to an external app called Checkdesk. A few months later, I was asked to work on that same app, which became a turning point in my career. I later met the team during a retreat in Cairo and eventually joined Meedan full time to work on Check. Over the years, as the platform evolved, so did I. I’m especially grateful for Meedan’s flexibility, which supported me as my family grew from one child to four.”
