fake news. Thus, it is important that the audience is able to differentiate between fake news and real news. This can be achieved through media literacy, which improves critical thinking and the capacity to scrutinize media messages coming either from mainstream media or from social media (Mekawy 2021, 263). In Arab countries, the first organization aimed at building up a culture of media literacy was founded in 2013 in Beirut by Dr. Jad Melki. The organization has held many workshops about media literacy and digital literacy, and strove to convince Arab universities to include media literacy in its academic curricula. In 2015, twenty universities in the MENA region adopted media literacy as part of their curricula. At school level, Jordan became the first Arab country to include media literacy in its curricula, as the verification and countering of hate speech is taught in Jordanian schools. In addition, large conferences devoted sessions to discussing media literacy. The Alexandria Media Forum, which is held annually in Egypt, titled its seventh conference, held in 2019, “Media Literacy and Sustainable Development.” In Algeria, the Faculty of Social Sciences at Abdelhamid Ben Badis University discussed the general policies of media literacy during its first conference (Atif, Mahdy, and Moustafa 2020, 25). In spite of these efforts, Mutsvairo and Bebawi (2019, 143) concluded that the courses and curricula do not meet the urgent need in Arab countries to counter the increase in fake news, especially in those states where propaganda and disinformation dominate. For instance, a lack of media literacy has a negative impact on countries with societies that are highly fragmented, such as Lebanon, where clerics constitute an unreliable source of information. Therefore, Melki et al. (2021, 2–3) infer that Lebanon should adopt media literacy to enable its citizens to deal with content critically. According to Atif, Mahdy, and Moustafa (2020, 24), a lack of media literacy prevails among professionals too, as only 17 percent of a sample of 229 journalists surveyed by ARIJ believed that media literacy is an effective tool to debunk disinformation. This gap can be attributed to the lack of fact-checking courses in media curricula at universities in Arab countries. Mutsvairo and Bebawi (2019) examined the media curricula at Yarmouk University (Jordan), the Lebanese American University (LAU; Lebanon), Birzeit University (Palestine), and the American University in Cairo (AUC; Egypt). They concluded that the syllabi are insufficient to address the phenomenon of fake news, and they proposed includ- I N FO R M ATI O N D I SO R D ER IN THE GLOBA L SOUTH ing content on the identification and verification of mis- and disinformation, in order to train the next generation of journalists to deal with information disorder (Mutsvairo and Bebawi 2019, 152). As journalists are not sufficiently equipped with verification tools, researchers have outlined the importance of media training to enable journalists to differentiate between fake and real news. A worldwide study shows that only 46 percent of the journalists in the MENA region have received technical training on factchecking tools (ICFJ 2018, 30). This training is organized by international organizations, such as Google, Facebook, Deutsche Welle, and Thomson Reuters. For instance, the Google News Initiative trained about 2,500 journalists between September 2019 and July 2020 on how to use its toolkit for fake news (Atif, Mahdy, and Moustafa 2020, 26). Although these workshops and courses try to keep up with developments in the media landscape, Zamit, Kooli, and Toumi (2020, 14) highlight that journalists rely mainly on manual tools, such as Google Image, YouTube Data Viewer, and TinEye; these scholars thus propose that training should also improve the skills of journalists in utilizing automated tools to detect fake news. Atif, Mahdy, and Moustafa (2020, 43) recommend that verification tools and manuals be translated into Arabic to make them more accessible to journalists and activists in the region. The integration of activists and technologists in training programs is also required because of their significant role in verification initiatives (Atif, Mahdy, and Moustafa 2020, 43). 4.2 RECOMMENDATIONS RELATED TO FACT-CHECKING PLATFORMS Researchers have noted that the majority of conventional media outlets in Arab countries do not have departments that specialize in monitoring fake news. It can be said that the ministries of information of the various countries control the media; the monitoring processes therefore prioritize political interests and marginalize other issues, such as false photos of women, immigrants, and so forth. Civil society has thus taken the initiative to launch projects to monitor fake news (Ben Messaoud 2021, Middle East and North Africa – 69