Centralising governmental decrees and communications to enable fact-checking in crisis

Information hub that centralizes all official communication and legislation during a crisis. One of the biggest problems in critical situations is misinformation. Technology can be both the strongest ally in providing support and information and, simultaneously, the most terrifying of enablers for ill intended people and groups. In a world where AI and deep fakes can make it impossible to detect what is real and what isn’t having effective ways of capturing and guiding people towards verified information is essential.

GovInfoHub is a digital platform that brings together all relevant legislation published during a crisis, governmental press releases, press conferences and other information coming in from state actors. For instance, in the Covid-19 pandemic, our local deployment of GovInfoHub in Romania centralized all the official communication issued by the government, daily data bulletins, as well as legislation connected to the fight against the pandemic. Another critical component of this solution is the browser extension. If you install the GovInfoHub browser extension and activate it, when navigating on any website, the extension will identify keywords and expressions, highlight them and recommend you to also read the official communications on those topics to compare and verify if the information is or seems to be real

They said that eating garlic will make you immune to the pandemic

It is very easy to sow the seeds of mistrust among people nowadays. The famous “it is on the internet so it must be true” sentence was never more ironic than in the times we live in right now. In crisis situations it is important to have effective communication channels between authorities, media and citizens. It builds trust, it brings the responsible ministries in the spotlight, increases transparency and accountability. The most valuable asset in situations like a pandemic, a conflict or in a calamity, access to information means that people can make informed decisions and can question miscellaneous info they come across online and offline. Dis- and misinformation  work in many many ways. Either by taking quotes and statements out of context, by editing images and broadcasting videos taken from misleading angles or straight out by lying. It can be very hard for people to navigate the huge amount of information coming their way, to manage to make sense of it and to be able to verify if it is accurate or not. 

This solution addresses the need for guidance to verified and trusted sources of information. The browser extensions that identify keywords, highlight phrases and indicate where to check the information you have just read will help, getting users to double check what they come across. 

It’s super easy to use by anyone. We configured the extension to identify over 600 keywords used in different expressions. So if you have the extension turned on in your browser and you go to let’s say someone’s blog you will immediately see several expressions highlighted if that blog contains any of the keywords. For example: if the extension reads the texts and finds things like “Death Toll”, “Covid” “hospitals”, it will highlight these words and you will have a small pop-up show-up saying: It seems this article presents info about the Covid-19 pandemic”. If you want to check the official stats provided by the Ministry of Health you can visit any of the following links. It’s great because it doesn’t actually give you the answer, it teaches you how to question the information you read

(Andrei, developer for the Mozilla extension)

How it works: 

In case of a crisis the information hub will be setup in just a few minutes and the content management system will be ready to use. Information can be published immediately and accounts for different local and national authorities can be created as well as for other mandated actors. The chrome extension will be updated in a few hours with a numerous database of keywords and published in the browser stores to be accessible for users. The information hub can be accessed at any moment in time via any browser. The extensions are currently available for Chrome and Mozilla with other integrations in plan for the upcoming period.