Journalist Mehmet Atakan Foça started Teyit (“confirmation” in Turkish) in 2016 to address misinformation propagated by media organizations and social media users. We spoke with him this week to learn more about what his fact-checkers are working on during the Covid-19 crisis.
Teyit founder Atakan Foca, speaking from his home in Istanbul.
Ashoka
Atakan, first, take us back to before the pandemic, what were you working on?
Seems ages ago! Let’s take a look at just 2020… a terrible earthquake hit in eastern Turkey in January that caused a lot of misinformation and confusion on social media. In February, we followed misinformation around the attack of Turkish soldiers in Idlib and a new wave of the refugee crisis sparked by the government’s decision to open the borders. So we started the year working on that. Then we began to hear about Covid-19—we were actually in the midst of fact-checking a bestseller book full of conspiracy theories and false claims about viruses, vaccines, and modern medicine.
When the coronavirus became a credible threat, what did you do?
We set up a dedicated newsletter one week before the virus arrived. Now we send it 3x weekly—Tuesdays, Fridays, and we’ve added a Sunday edition too that brings another angle—last week it was about the history of masks. Subscribers are increasing every day. They are journalists, civil society organizations, employees of healthcare companies, many more. An interesting group is people in corporate marketing and HR roles. They are looking for verified information to keep their employees and clients informed and safe.
Are you collaborating with traditional media organizations?
Initially, they weren’t caring so much. They shared false claims, reporting things like, Turkish genes are not vulnerable to the coronavirus, or drink some soup to get cured. Now some are caring. We have a new partnership with one of the big TV broadcasters in Turkey called Habertürk. We send them three videos every day related to the situation—warning people about false claims and giving tips on how to verify information in WhatsApp groups.
How do false claims travel on social media in Turkey?
According to available data, Twitter is the main source. It’s very toxic. But we can’t see the full picture because WhatsApp, very popular in Turkey, is encrypted—so it’s not easy to understand where misinformation occurs, where it goes, or how big it gets. So in the case of WhatsApp, we rely on users, our followers, to send suspicious claims they run across. In some cases, these claims are falsely recorded in a friend’s voice. This makes the misinformation compelling and very tough to fight.
Do you coordinate with a global network?
Yes, collaboration is essential. We are part of the International Fact-Checking Network and the Coronavirus Facts Alliance. We are in daily contact to understand what’s trending, and where. When a false claim emerges somewhere in the world, it can easily travel to all countries, across language groups. The priority for all of us is to contain potentially viral claims. If we arrive too late, they can spread and cause harm. So we try to figure out and predict the peak point for misinformation—it can look and behave like a virus and can be as dangerous.
What role are social media companies playing?
We’re in contact with Facebook and WhatsApp teams, and we have a partnership with Facebook (which owns WhatsApp). They are trying to figure out how to deal with this problem, and we are helping them. Some of the fixes are technical. For example, last week WhatsApp limited the forward messages to just one person. This is new and it’s helping. As for Facebook, when we see a false claim, we submit it along with our fact-check. This allows the Facebook team to limit the reach of the claim, and even restrict privileges of the page, like the right to advertise. This helps us. When we talk with news websites, we tell them, “If you want to avoid Facebook restrictions, you need to correct your news.”
Beyond the current crisis, what are your goals?
Our main strategy is to invite users and organizations to join us. We are a team of 17 and cannot fact-check all claims made about viruses, earthquakes, much more. So we create tools to help others take on misinformation and practice new online behaviors. For example, insulting people on WhatsApp is less effective than saying or signaling “this is false.” To this end, we created a sticker kit for WhatsApp that allows users to flag claims as false. We want many changemakers working on this problem with us in the future. We are starting an incubator program in June to support new organizations and multiply our impact.
What do you hope we learn from this moment?
Two things are top of mind. One, the pandemic has made the problem of misinformation visible to everyone. It’s suddenly a problem people care about because they see how it directly affects their health, safety, and livelihoods. Two, the conventional model of entrepreneurship hasn’t helped us at this moment. We need new systems, new approaches and mindsets, new leaders. I’m hopeful that investors and policymakers will look more to social entrepreneurs and system change innovations in the future.
Mehmet Atakan Foça is an Ashoka Fellow. You can read more about him and his work here. And you can follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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