Kong. He uses edutainment videos to teach high school students about media literacy, as part of the Google News Initiative project. Kajimoto’s initiatives have also been active in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand, where partnerships with local NGOs are used. In the Philippines, media literacy has been made mandatory In the Philippines, media for high school students, but literacy has been made teachers have not received the mandatory for high school proper training. Kajimoto was students, but teachers have not involved in a program where received the proper training. teachers in the Philippines were trained by a local NGO based on video-centered teaching of media literacy. In Thailand, six videos were created (on YouTube) to teach primary school students about digital literacy and the role of journalists. In Indonesia, the target group was housewives. A video series involving a family drama was used to create awareness about which sources to trust and what to consider before forwarding information. Additionally, Kajimoto has a training program on Coursera titled Making Sense of the News (interview, 2021). FACT-CHECKING TRAINING Training programs conducted by fact checkers naturally tend to focus on the practical aspects of fact checking. Fact-checking organizations use such training programs to educate the public and also to create a pool of potential candidates with the skills and knowledge required to become professional fact checkers. For example, Dr. N. Tamilselvi is an academic who ventured into fact checking because of the training she received. This training allowed her to understand the impact of personal biases and the legitimacy of sources (interview, 2021). Umesh Shrestha, who works with Nepal Fact Check via the Center for Media Research, trains selected groups on the ethics of fact checking and on the tools and techniques to use. Most of these training programs make use of practical factchecking exercises (Center for Media Research 2021). Similarly, Media Action Nepal conducts training programs targeted at journalists in South Asia. The three-day virtual training program includes the principles of journalism, codes of ethics, gender disinformation, the process of fact checking, and tools and techniques used in fact checking (Media Action Nepal 2021). 3.3 ACTIONS TAKEN BY PLATFORMS Online platforms play a major role in information disorder. This includes social media platforms such as I N FO R M ATI O N D I SO R D ER IN THE GLOBA L SOUTH Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as direct messaging platforms like WhatsApp, LINE, and Telegram. Critics have accused these platforms of facilitating the spread of mis- and disinformation, either deliberately or through their lack of response in situations where such mis- or disinformation is brought to their attention. While it may be unfair to assign responsibility solely to platforms in these situations, their role in information disorder cannot be ignored. This holds true especially when mis- or disinformation spread online has an impact offline in the form of violence and/or unrest. One fairly recent example from Asia would be Facebook’s role in allowing the spread of hate speech that fueled violence against thousands of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar (Kamdar 2020). Later, Facebook admitted that the platform had been used to “foment division and incite offline violence” in Myanmar and that it had not done enough to prevent said violence (Warofka 2018). A similar case of negligence on the part of Facebook occurred in Sri Lanka in 2018. A report by Article One found that the “proliferation of hate speech (e.g., ‘Kill all Muslims, don’t even save an infant; they are dogs’) and misinformation (e.g., that a Muslim restaurateur was adding sterilization pills to his customers’ food)” on Facebook may have contributed to the 2018 unrest and subsequent anti-Muslim violence in the city of Kandy (Article One 2018, 7). Since 2013, government officials, researchers, and NGOs had repeatedly asked Facebook to take action against the use of the platform to call for violence or to target people for their ethnicity or religion, but to no avail (Rajagopalan and Nazim 2018). Instances where platforms have been used to spread mis- or disinformation and hate speech have only increased in recent years. However, platforms have stepped up and started taking action in various ways as well. These actions include, but are not limited to: • the introduction of various policies and guidelines • the removal or suspension of manipulated content, accounts, pages, and groups spreading misinformation • collaboration with fact checkers, local-language content moderators, and other third parties • the introduction of a forwarding limit and the labelling of repeatedly forwarded messages on direct messaging platforms • funding journalism research and digital literacy • monitoring suspicious activity online. Platforms have also instituted measures to deal with particular situations that tend to lead to an increase in information disorder, such as the Covid-19 Asia – 2 07