Confronting the information crisis
While political leaders are normalizing violence, our partners are documenting its effects.
While political leaders are normalizing violence, our partners are documenting its effects.
Since our February 2026 edition of the Checklist, the U.S. and Israel have launched a war on Iran that has subsumed countries across North Africa and Western Asia, where Meedan has maintained deep roots since its inception in 2006. Members of our current team live in and hail from Lebanon, which is under daily bombardment. As we grapple with the constant uncertainties this brings, we are also stepping back to consider what role information integrity plays in a regional war of this magnitude.
In a recent LinkedIn post, Meedan Executive Director Dima Saber offered this reflection:
What makes this moment different is not only the scale — nearly 20% of the Lebanese population is now displaced — but the openness with which destruction is narrated. [In an essay for Global Voices,] Walid [El Houri] documents how US and Israeli officials are not merely committing atrocities but announcing them in advance: threats to make Iran impossible to rebuild, a senator invoking Hiroshima, a defense secretary declaring that the only Iranians who need to worry are those who think they will survive.
This rhetoric is doing exactly what it is designed to do: normalizing violence and public hate speech in ways that were inconceivable only a few years ago.
This leaves us with what Dima describes as not only a humanitarian crisis but a crisis of information. How do we promote connection and understanding as we confront this paradigm? To answer this question, we look to our partners, who are holding violent actors to account for the harms that they are unleashing.
The Legal Agenda has established that Israel’s mass evacuation orders in southern Lebanon constitute forced displacement that may amount to war crimes. The Public Source and Public Works Studio have mapped what bombs leave behind — not just rubble, but burned woodlands, poisoned soil, and the deliberate destruction of the conditions for life itself. Sifr condemned the use of artificial intelligence as a weapon of mass killing, operating without any legal framework and dissolving accountability into algorithms and legislative silence. SMEX documented the entanglement of civilian and military digital infrastructure, warning that tech companies cannot simultaneously serve as the backbone of a region’s digital economy and as a military enabler, and expect that distinction to hold during a war.
What does this mean for us? At Meedan, we build tools for the people doing this work — the journalists, frontline defenders, and researchers documenting and speaking out against human rights violations — who are targeted precisely because their documentation matters. As the normalization of atrocity continues to permeate media narratives and our daily lives, we walk alongside those partners in solidarity with their commitment to holding power to account.
This blog post was adapted from the March 2026 edition of our monthly newsletter, the Checklist.
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