Connecting communities in the 2026 U.S. midterms
For the first time, Suwali will reach communities across the U.S. as people head to the polls to cast their ballots in the midterm elections.
For the first time, Suwali will reach communities across the U.S. as people head to the polls to cast their ballots in the midterm elections.
Meedan is excited to roll out two election projects with newsrooms across the United States in the coming days. Both initiatives are built on the learnings and adoption of our community dialogue platform, Suwali.
In partnership with URL Media, a national network of independent media organizations and content creators serving diverse communities, and Epicenter NYC, a multiplatform community organization connecting New Yorkers to news, information and each other, we are deploying Suwali to serve voters with critical information about the 2026 midterm elections as they head to the polls on November 3. The tool will be available to answer audience questions about the voting process, voter eligibility, and key policy issues, over both SMS and WhatsApp.
The information powering this project comes from seven URL Media partner newsrooms with Epicenter NYC leading the charge. Suwali will pull verified voter information guides and election coverage from AsAm News, India Currents, The Electorette, The Oklahoma Eagle, Native News, Documented and Epicenter NYC. The partners will invite their audiences across their website, social, video, podcast and newsletters to chat with Suwali over SMS or WhatsApp to receive real-time answers to their questions.
In tandem, our partners at Deep South Today and the Alliance for Trust in Media will roll out Suwali to audiences in Mississippi for a study measuring whether and how Suwali helps improve trust and engagement between newsrooms and the communities they serve. Through this work, we will gain important insights into audience opinions on the usefulness and trustworthiness of our tool and overall attitudes towards the use of chatbots and artificial intelligence in news distribution.
We are also giving free access to Suwali to other individual newsrooms across the country, including the Larchmont Buzz in California and County10 in Wyoming, to test out the tool with their audiences in the lead up to the midterms.
These projects mark a significant milestone in the trajectory of our tool and a valuable experiment in how newsrooms and their audiences use and adopt public-facing artificial intelligence-powered tools. For our partners, ourselves, and the wider field, we are confident that these deployments will help us better understand how AI can best meet community information needs and how technologists can design automated tools that help serve the public interest.
This work is made possible thanks to our partners and our funders. We are particularly grateful to Press Forward and the David and the Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation for their support of these important initiatives.
