“We selected Detoxify after looking at a lot of machine learning tools,” says Mark Belinsky, Digital Innovation and Scaling Specialist at UNDP’s Chief Digital Office. “A lot of effort was put into limiting algorithmic bias, which is critical in these sensitive situations and too often overlooked when introducing artificial intelligence systems into programming.” 

These reports are then sent to the team of in-person fact-checkers, composed of individuals linked to one or several national counterparts that have been capacitated and equipped through the iVerify’s initiative. As part of their fact-checking assignment, the team follows up with the people or institutions mentioned in a story to determine the veracity of the claims made. If those in-person verifiers find hate speech, disinformation, or misinformation, they flag it and publish an article on the iVerify website to let the world know. iVerify leverages another open source technology, Check, to help. It uses human-in-the-loop machine learning to match content so that anything already labeled false doesn't have to be reviewed again, improving efficiency. All of these tools and approaches are open and available to anyone to use.

The tool was piloted in Zambia, ahead of the historic August 2021 general elections in which opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema took power from Edgar Lungu, who had led the country since 2015. “Zambia was perfect for a pilot,” says Mathilde Vougny, who works on UNDP’s electoral assistance team in Brussels, “because political mis- and disinformation commonly seen in other countries is in a nascent stage there. It’s not coming from anywhere outside Zambia’s borders.”

Plus, the project found enthusiastic partners, first in the local development group Panos Institute of Southern Africa as well as in the Electoral Commission of Zambia. The Electoral Commission, in particular, was concerned about a rapid increase they saw in online hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation they were seeing in the leadup to the election. “They were happy to work with us,” says Saré Knoope, Electoral Assistance Analyst at UNDP, “because they felt obstructed by the amount of erroneous information that was spreading. They were keen to work together because they thought it was in their interest. That helped us a lot.” The relationship was mutually beneficial: the iVerify team contributed a chapter on misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech to the ECZ’s Media Handbook on Elections, which was used to train journalists in the country’s 10 provinces. 

But the Zambian election turned out to be a lot more tense than anyone was expecting, according to Vusumuzi Sifile, Executive Director at Panos Institute of Southern Africa. Amid accusations of voter registration irregularities, restriction of independent media activity, and violent crackdowns of opposition demonstrations, the iVerify team in Zambia had their work cut out for them. Fact-checkers had barely finished their training when they were thrown into the deep end, asked to verify inflammatory claims with people and entities whose emotions were running high.

“One of our greatest challenges,” says Mwenya Maliseela Serah, an iVerify Zambia fact-checker, “is getting a response from our sources. Say you’re fact-checking an article and a politician is mentioned. You have to talk to the politician to verify the information. Sometimes they won’t answer. Or other times, they won’t understand what we’re trying to do and might feel threatened.”

“Sometimes you get negative language, or even insults,” Serah says. In fact, once a politician she was speaking to even threatened to bomb the Panos offices in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital. Given the tense reality of the situation, and the huge responsibility they shouldered, “we focused most of our efforts on quality of the fact-checking,” says Vougny.