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Christina Meetoo

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Launch of proceedings “Countering Disinformation: Ensuring an Open and Transparent Infoscape”

18/10/2023 By christina Leave a Comment

On Thursday 5th October 2023, during the Africa Facts Summit 2023, we launched the proceedings of the workshop “Countering Disinformation: Ensuring an Open and Transparent Infoscape” which was held in May 2023 with the support of the Australian High Commission in Mauritius.

Preparing for the official launch
With Africa Check
With Google News Initiative
With Konrad Adenauer Stiftung

We also presented the key findings from the workshop as well as the Pledge on Countering Disinformation which was signed in May by representatives of the 3 main private media houses and of the national TV station.

Participants in the panel discussions held in May 2023 were professionals from the three main private media groups (namely Bernard Delaitre, Director of Le Mauricien, Iqbal Ahmed Khan from La Sentinelle and Prem Sewpaul from DefiMedia), the national broadcaster (Ashok Beeharry from the MBC), regulatory bodies (namely Drudeisha Madhub, Data Commissioner and Trilok Dabeesing from ICTA) and a media trainer/consultant (Jean-Luc Mootoosamy from Media Expertise).

On Friday 13th October 2023, we officially remitted copies of the publication to the Chargée d’Affaires of the Australian High Commission in Mauritius, Her Excellency Mrs Katie Lalor, and to the Senior Political and Public Diplomacy Officer, Mrs Yasmina Hosanoo, at the University of Mauritius.

Roukaya Kasenally, Christina Chan-Meetoo, H.E. Katie Lalor and Yasmina Hosanoo

The full proceedings can be downloaded from: https://bit.ly/countering-disinfo-ebook

The pledge to counter disinformation which was readily signed by media professionals can also be seen at: https://bit.ly/pledge-countering-disinformation

We thank Africa Check for giving us the opportunity to present the proceedings during the Africa Facts Summit 2023 and the Australia High Commission in Mauritius for supporting us in these initiatives.

Filed Under: Information, Mauritius, Policy, Press Tagged With: disinformation, fact-checking, Mauritius, media, Press, university of mauritius

Telegram nudes scandal in Mauritius: Media people beware!

23/03/2021 By christina Leave a Comment

If you are not already aware, a few days ago feminist activists have started talking about a group on the messaging app Telegram of which more than 1,000 Mauritian men are/were members. The group is/was sharing intimate pictures of both adult women and minors WITHOUT the latter’s consent. Some were asking for pictures of specific women and girls who have social media accounts, whether real pics or doctored ones. Again WITHOUT the consent of the latters. The group has been cloned multiple times and migrated to several other platforms as soon as the admins smelled trouble.
I put special emphasis on the LACK OF CONSENT of the girls and women concerned because some people have been going on their high horses about how the undoctored pics might have landed in the lap of the members of those groups. Some are saying there are lewd girls and women out there willingly sharing their own pics, some for money even (thus engaging in pornographic activity).
So, I want to get a few things right:
  • True, it’s best for anyone not to have shared with anyone else or to have posted any of their intimate pics as it makes them easy to share widely and quickly.
  • But, even if someone did the above willingly, shifting the blame to the victim only serves to exonerate the people who maliciously shared the pics with random dudes.
  • Even if a woman did engage in an illicit transaction (whereby both sender and receiver are guilty according to law BTW), that transaction was one-to-one. So, while she may be guilty of trespassing against Mauritian law by selling porn content, the man who illegally buys it and then reshares is distributing porn on a bigger scale.
  • Those whose pics were sent by mutual consent to a lover or partner, whether in a short-term or a long-term relationship, never intended those to be made available to other random dudes. So, this a breach of trust in a relationship, however short-lived the relationship might have been, and it is a sign of a deranged mind that indulges in the gratuitous exploitation of the image of a partner’s body for vile reasons, possibly for revenge porn.

Clearly, the intention is vile and abject. And we should start flipping the narrative against the perpetrators.

This is why I call upon all media people in my friendlist to report responsibly on the whole affair. As I just told a class of Media and Ethics students yesterday, you will need to tread cautiously when investigating the identities of those vile perpetrators (if you choose to do so). Do your homework, check, cross-check and double check. This is an agreed standard in the profession.
But, please be careful how you choose your angle and on whom you put the spotlight. If indeed there is an extensive porn market which exists within those groups, do not forget to put the spotlight on the clients and their misplaced sense of entitlement whenever they have paid a woman who they then think they own ad infinitum. Because if that dude paid Rs 500 or Rs 1000 or even a million, they cannot own the right to that woman’s image! The same logic applies to pics that were consensually exchanged. No-one can hold the right to a body and its image except for the person in question, whether that person is moral or not according to our society’s standards!
Investigate to find out who are the instigators of the groups instead of trying to find the identity of the girls or women whose pics were circulated, unless you intend to give them a voice that will not further exploit their misery.

[Read more…] about Telegram nudes scandal in Mauritius: Media people beware!

Filed Under: Gender Tagged With: ethics, gender, Mauritius, media

Petit pays mais grande histoire de la presse

03/05/2020 By christina Leave a Comment

Article paru dans l’édition spéciale Business Yearbook 2020 de Business Magazine de mars 2020
Texte écrit à la demande de la journaliste Dooshani Seewoolall


La place du journalisme est centrale dans toute société dite démocratique. Ses objectifs sont multiples: informer les citoyens des décisions politiques et économiques qui peuvent affecter leur vie, agir comme chien de garde contre les abus, sensibiliser aux grands enjeux et participer à l’édification de la population. L’histoire de la presse mauricienne est longue et variée. Notre presse a souvent fait honneur à ces nobles missions et a aussi parfois failli à la tâche.

Elle peut en tout cas se targuer d’avoir un statut de pionnière. Elle a été le lieu de naissance du plus ancien journal de l’hémisphère sud et du continent africain. Le journal Affiches, Annonces et Avis Divers, lancé par Nicolas Lambert en 1773, publie surtout des annonces de l’administration coloniale, y compris pour la vente des esclaves fraîchement débarqués au port.

Ce n’est que sous la période d’occupation anglaise que la presse entame sa marche vers la liberté avec les démarches du controversé Adrien d’Epinay envoyé en 1831 au Royaume Uni pour négocier une compensation financière suivant l’abolition de l’esclavage. D’Epinay fonde d’ailleurs le journal Le Cernéen en 1832 pour défendre les intérêts de l’oligarchie. Le journal Le Mauricien lancé en 1833 par Jules Eugène Leclézio lui emboîte le pas.

La liberté de la presse bénéficie donc d’abord aux élites économique et intellectuelle de l’île. Mais, elle s’élargira par la suite. Berquin est le premier homme de couleur dans la presse avec son journal La Balance qui paraît de 1832 à 1835. En 1843, Rémy Ollier, un métis, fils d’un capitaine français et d’une esclave, créé La Sentinelle pour publier sa réponse à une critique parue dans les deux journaux anti-abolitionnistes contre une pièce d’Alexandre Dumas, un métis tout comme Ollier. La Sentinelle dénonce le racisme et devient une publication régulière en faveur des “gens de couleur”.

Quelques décennies plus tard, d’autres communautés ethniques et linguistiques lancent leurs publications telles que Anjuman Islam Maurice en 1883, The Hindustani, créé en 1909 par Manilall Doctor, et le Chinese Daily, lancé en 1932. L’élargissement de l’espace médiatique s’opère aussi sur le plan politique. Le Parti Travailliste crée Advance en 1940 pour répercuter les revendications des militants pro-indépendance, au grand dam du Cernéen qui redoute le ‘péril hindou’. Le Mauricien, sous la houlette de Raoul Rivet, est d’abord anti-indépendance mais se ravise par la suite. Malgré leurs divergences, les trois journaux principaux de l’île, publient ensemble la Feuille Commune (Le Cernéen, Le Mauricien et Advance) pour surmonter les restrictions imposées par la deuxième guerre mondiale. L’express est, lui, créé en 1963 par Guy Forget, membre du PTr, mais il se démarque comme un produit plus professionnel.

Cette effervescence de la presse sera étouffée pendant une sombre période de répression entre 1971 et 1972 qui voit la censure de l’Etat, l’interdiction des rassemblements, de multiples arrestations politiques et la confiscation du pouvoir. Une multitude de journaux associés aux partis politiques surgissent à la fin de cette répression: Le Populaire pour le PMSD, The Sun pour le Mouvement Socialiste Mauricien (MSM), et Le Militant pour le MMM.

Le Newspaper and Periodicals (Amendment) Bill de 1984 veut enrayer la machine. Les journalistes protestent devant le Parlement et 44 d’entre eux sont mis en cellule policière pendant quelques heures. L’amendement est abandonné et une dizaine d’années plus tard, le Media Trust est créé pour soutenir la formation continue de la presse en guise de compensation. Depuis, les nouvelles publications n’ont cessé de foisonner avec des fortunes diverses. 5Plus Dimanche et Le Défi Plus sont de ceux qui se sont pérennisés en sus de L’express et du Mauricien alors que Le Mag et Le Matinal font partie de ceux qui n’ont pas survécu.

Pour la presse parlée, il faut attendre 2002 pour voir la libéralisation des ondes avec l’arrivée de trois stations privées, soit Radio One, Radio Plus et Top FM, qui viennent concurrencer la station de diffusion publique. Quant à la télévision locale privée, elle n’existe toujours pas même si elle est légalement possible sous le Independent Broadcasting Act. Cette lacune arrange d’ailleurs tous les partis qui se sont succédés au pouvoir. Sur une note positive surprenante, on peut signaler la création de la chaîne parlementaire en 2017 qui couvre les débats parlementaires en direct.

Avec une si longue et riche histoire, on peut se demander alors ce qui empêche donc les médias de bien mener leurs nobles missions d’informer, de prévenir et d’éduquer? Les contraintes sont multiples. On peut citer pêle-mêle les modèles de revenus avec une forte dépendance sur la publicité, les interférences politiques et la création de ‘pseudo-événements’ par le monde du marketing qui sont autant d’interférences. Sans compter les défis posés par le monde technologique avec la fragmentation des audiences et la polarisation accrue.

Enfin, la vieille législation relative aux médias demande une révision profonde concernant la diffamation, la sédition et la publication de fausses nouvelles, entre autres. Il n’y a ni loi sur la liberté d’accès à l’information, ni code d’éthique pour toute la profession, encore moins de système d’auto-régulation par la presse malgré les recommandations des consultants Morgan et Robertson.

Paradoxalement, Maurice affiche une performance honorable dans les classements sur la liberté démocratique et la liberté de la presse. De plus en plus de citoyens participent aux débats dans la sphère publique, même si la qualité n’y est pas toujours. On peut globalement qualifier cette situation de ‘joyeux désordre’ avec aussi une grande pluralité de titres de presse virtuels ou non.

Pour compliquer les choses, Internet et les réseaux sociaux ont tout bouleversé. Tout le monde est un média en puissance. Les médias professionnels doivent alors lutter pour garder leur crédibilité auprès d’une audience de plus en plus ingrate et infidèle.

Mais tout le monde s’accorde à dire que la place du journalisme est centrale dans toute société dite démocratique. Si toute la presse disparaissait demain, s’ouvrirait alors un abîme qui engloutirait la liberté d’information et la démocratie. Il faut donc consolider cette presse pour qu’elle continue de nous permettre de vivre dans une société réellement libre.

Filed Under: Press, Society Tagged With: démocratie, histoire, liberté de la presse, maurice, media

Making sense of complexity during the Covid-19 pandemic

02/05/2020 By christina Leave a Comment

I recently came across this long article on The Atlantic:

Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing. A guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend

It is very long but very worth the read as it gives as exhaustive an overview as possible of all the issues related to communication and policy during the pandemic.

In case you want quick reads (but it is better to read the whole thing), I offer:

A detailed summary with highlights

An ‘extreme’ summary

 

 

 

 
Here’s the summary with highlights:

  1. We must distinguish between the virus and the disease which happens within a social context – Earlier instances of the term coronavirus are readily misconstrued. (…) The disease COVID-19 arises from a combination of the virus SARS-CoV-2 and the person it infects, and the society that person belongs to.
  2. There’s a deluge of publications and we need to spot errors – Scientists have published more than 7,500 papers on COVID-19. But despite this deluge, “we haven’t seen a lot of huge plot twists,”. Epidemiologists (…) have suddenly been thrust into political disputes. (…) “Some people are genuinely trying to help, but there’s also a huge amount of opportunism.” (…) Expertise is not just about knowledge, but also about the capacity to spot errors. (…) We hunger for information, but lack the know-how to evaluate it or the sources that provide it. (…) Bergstrom agrees that experts shouldn’t be dismissive gatekeepers.
  3. False expertise come with extreme overconfidence, mostly from male voices – A lack of expertise becomes problematic when it’s combined with extreme overconfidence, and with society’s tendency to reward projected confidence over humility. (…) Through attention, the media reward voices that are outspoken but not necessarily correct. Those voices are disproportionately male.
  4. Modern expertise tends to be deep but narrow and thus requires collaboration – The idea that there are no experts is overly glib. The issue is that modern expertise tends to be deep, but narrow. (…) In a pandemic, the strongest attractor of trust shouldn’t be confidence, but the recognition of one’s limits, the tendency to point at expertise beyond one’s own, and the willingness to work as part of a whole.
  5. To gain trust, provide full statements and do not hide uncertainties – “The fuller statements take longer to explain, but that’s how it is in outbreaks.” Inglesby says. “There’s a lot of uncertainty, and we shouldn’t try to tidy it up.” (…) The impulse to be reassuring is understandable, but “the most important thing is to be as accurate as possible,” Inglesby says. (…) If officials—and journalists—are clear about uncertainties from the start, the public can better hang new information onto an existing framework, and understand when shifting evidence leads to new policy. Otherwise, updates feel confusing.
  6. For audiences, sharing offers agency but we are drowning in too much information – Sharing offers agency. It allows people to collectively make sense of a situation riddled by anxiety and uncertainty. (…) Historically, people would have struggled to find enough information. Now people struggle because they’re finding too much. (…) It does not help that online information channels are heavily personalized and politicized, governed by algorithms that reward certain and extreme claims over correct but nuanced ones.
  7. The default media staccato rhythm intensifies uncertainty and drives people to misinformation – Rosen also argues that the media’s default rhythm of constant piecemeal updates is ill-suited to covering an event as large as the pandemic. “Journalists still think of their job as producing new content, but if your goal is public understanding of COVID-19, one piece of new content after another doesn’t get you there,” (…) Instead, the staccato pulse of reports merely amplifies the wobbliness of the scientific process, turns incremental bits of evidence into game changers, and intensifies the already-palpable sense of uncertainty that drives people toward misinformation.
  8. The audience needs to change: become more information literate and practise fact-checking – If the media won’t change, its consumers might have to. Starbird recommends slowing down and taking a moment to vet new information before sharing it.
  9. Pay attention to how data is gathered and do not treat models as crystal ball – The means of gathering data always complicate the interpretation of those data. (…) The numbers I see say as much about the tools researchers are using as the quantities they are measuring. (…) If measuring the present is hard, predicting the future is even harder. The mathematical models that have guided the world’s pandemic responses have been often portrayed as crystal balls. That is not their purpose.
  10. Prevention is better though not sexy – “There are two lessons one can learn from an averted disaster,” Tufekci says. “One is: That was exaggerated. The other is: That was close.”
  11. The narrative is more complex than we think: we built a world that is prone to pandemics yet not ready to face them –The coronavirus not only co-opts our cells, but exploits our cognitive biases. (…) We crave simple narratives, but the pandemic offers none. (…) And the desire to name an antagonist, be it the Chinese Communist Party or Donald Trump, disregards the many aspects of 21st-century life that made the pandemic possible: humanity’s relentless expansion into wild spaces; soaring levels of air travel; chronic underfunding of public health; a just-in-time economy that runs on fragile supply chains; health-care systems that yoke medical care to employment; social networks that rapidly spread misinformation; the devaluation of expertise; the marginalization of the elderly; and centuries of structural racism that impoverished the health of minorities and indigenous groups. It may be easier to believe that the coronavirus was deliberately unleashed than to accept the harsher truth that we built a world that was prone to it, but not ready for it.
  12. The end of its journey and the nature of its final transformation will arise from our collective imagination and action. And they, like so much else about this moment, are still uncertain.

 

And here’s an ‘extreme’ summary:

  1. We must distinguish between the virus SARS-CoV-2 and the disease Covid-19 which happens to individuals but within different social contexts.
  2. There has been a deluge of scientific publications and we need to spot errors coming from genuine mistakes or mere opportunism. False expertise comes with extreme overconfidence, specially from male voices.
  3. Modern expertise tends to be deep but narrow and thus requires collaboration.
  4. To gain trust, decision-makers and media need to provide full statements and highlight current uncertainties. The default media staccato, piece-meal, sensationalistic rhythm intensifies uncertainty and mistrust and thus drives people to misinformation.
  5. Sharing offers agency but we are drowning in too much information. The audience needs to change: become more information literate and practise fact-checking.
  6. We must pay attention to how data is gathered and not treat mathematical models as crystal balls. We have no awareness about disasters that were averted such as the Y2K bug because prevention is not sexy but it is still better than cure.
  7. Don’t play the blame game. The narrative is more complex than we think: we all built a world that is prone to pandemics (with onslaughts against nature, health, care, local micro-industry, information, expertise, minorities) yet we’re not ready to tackle their consequences
  8. The end and the nature of the final transformation will be determined by our collective imagination and action which are also still uncertain.

Filed Under: Information, Policy, Society Tagged With: audience, collaboration, complex narrative, coronavirus, covid-19, data, expertise, literacy, media, prevention, trust

Debate idea for media houses for the by-elections of #18

14/12/2017 By christina Leave a Comment

Today, I posted this on Facebook:

I offer this idea to all media houses: please organise a different type of debate with the candidates.

One where a voter of the constituency is randomly selected from the voter roll of each ward to ask questions to the candidates. If people decline, just keep on with the random selection until you find those who are willing to participate.

One where you collect questions from the voters of the constituency and select the ones which get more upvotes and those themes which are more relevant to the constituency.

One where candidates are NOT allowed to talk about their opponents at all and are only allowed to talk about what they intend to do as opposition MP for the constituency:

– how they plan to interact with all those they will represent once in parliament (including partisans and non-partisans – and this should not just be about the weekly meetings which will definitely attract mostly partisans, thus skewing the whole process)

– what type of questions they will raise about the constituency when in parliament (why not ask them what their 3 first PQs would be?)

– how they plan to report back to the inhabitants on the answers they have received and the follow-up they plan to do

Because, we’ve already heard it all about the reasons for their engagement with a particular party as opposed to another one, their current positioning wrt current national issues, their scathing criticism towards their opponents (also known as yesterday’s and tomorrow’s potential friends)…

Please feel free to use my ideas because I am a voter in Quatre-Bornes and I think this would allow me to make, not necessarily the better choice, but at least make up my mind about the one who has the highest probability of being a better MP for QB than the others.

In the comments, I also added:

Since there’s not much time left, why not organise a joint exercise in a neutral venue for once? Maybe at the Media Trust?

(…) the point is that any voice should have the same probability of being heard, not just ‘expert voices’, a category where people tend to think of people of our socioeconomic class only.

Filed Under: Information, Mauritius, New Media, Politics, Press, Society Tagged With: debate, elections, ideas, journalism, Mauritius, media, MP, parliament, quatre-bornes, voters

Transcription of live tweet session on the State of Right to Information in Mauritius

18/10/2017 By christina Leave a Comment

The State of the Right to Information in Mauritius in 2017
Transcription of live tweet session
organised by the African Freedom of Information Centre (AFIC)
with Christina Meetoo (@christinameetoo) and Abdoollah Earally (@AbdEarally)

Hashtag #AccessToInfo
This live tweet session was held on Tuesday 17 October 2017 from 15.00 to 16.30 (Mauritian time)

Tweets have been slightly edited for punctuation and typos.

For more information, read the full report and the Mauritius country report at: https://www.christinameetoo.com/2017/10/17/report-on-the-state-of-access-to-information-in-africa-2017/

Mauritius country report of State of Right to Information 2017

AFIC‏ @AFIC1
Question 1. @christinameetoo Which are the guarantees for ATI in Mauritius, at national and international level?

Christina Meetoo @christinameetoo:

  • There is no law on access to information in #Mauritius, thus no specific guarantee for access to information in Mauritius.
  • There is only a clause on freedom of expression in Constitution to guarantee freedom to receive & impart ideas and information.
  • This freedom is curtailed by restrictions linked to national security, privacy, public morality, public safety, health, etc.
  • And there’s an Official Secrets Act & a Human Resource Manual which prohibit civil servants from sharing information without authorisation.
  • In 2005 and 2015, winning coalitions have promised to introduce legislation on freedom of information (but not in 2010).
  • In 2013, government appointed consultant Geoffrey Robertson proposed FOI legislation, reform of media laws & media self-regulation.
  • In January 2016, Cabinet announced that a bill on FOI was being prepared.
  • In March 2016, the ACHPR country report committed to introduce FOI legislation, suggesting that the State Law Office is working on a draft.
  • But, there is little visibility so far on progress made.

Sarah‏ @sarahfkiw:
How far has this bill been? Why has it not yet been signed? #SDG16 #accesstoinformation #Mauritius #IDUAI @Gilbertsendugwa

Christina Meetoo @christinameetoo:

  • No bill has been presented yet. We are assuming that the State Law Office is working on a draft bill but we have no further information.
  • FOI legislation is very difficult step for political parties as it could result in constant scrutiny & questioning by mass media & citizens.
  • Our political parties are not used full transparency.

[Read more…] about Transcription of live tweet session on the State of Right to Information in Mauritius

Filed Under: Information, Mauritius, Politics, Press, Society Tagged With: access to information, africa freedom of information centre, freedom of information, Mauritius, media, Press, right to information

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