The two training workshops were held on Tuesday June 22, 2021, and Friday September 24, 2021 on major issues like fact-checking for journalists and health, psychology, and media.
The first training under MIL for Women was a fact-check training for journalists across Pakistan, which was a 3-hour long session held on Zoom, where facilitators Amel Ghani, a journalist and regional editor of Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN), provided participants with tools to debunk information, and conducted a live exercise critically analysing a claim from a popular Twitter account about the Women’s Day March, by using different tools such as InVid and Google Reverse Image Search. AFP Fact Check Pakistan representative Masroor Gilani, spoke about how gendered disinformation silences women and threatens their participation in public discourse and policymaking, and he shared tips such as archiving false information using perma.cc, and spoke about the responsibility of accounts with large following to fact-check information before sharing.
The second three-hour training session imparted knowledge on social psychology and social media, digital gender divide, toxic masculinity and misogyny on twitter and tools for digital research. Saeed provided participants a brief background of social psychology, while helping them understand how it shapes behaviors of male and female Internet users. Guest Speaker Niha Dagia, a multimedia journalist covering health, politics and social issues in South Asia, provided participants with a closer look at how gender-based violence plays out in online spaces.