As Meedan continues its work throughout the globe to help curb the spread of misinformation related to elections, public health issues and crisis situations, the organization will receive one of four prestigious Skoll Awards for Social Innovation to be presented this year.

Meedan will be celebrated alongside honorees from India, Kenya and the United States later this month at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford.

An opportunity to strive even higher

With this award, the Skoll Foundation recognizes leading individuals and organizations from around the world for their commitment to transformational social change in pursuit of sustainability, peace and prosperity. The award comes with $2 million in unrestricted funding and flexible support to help recipient organizations expand the scale on which they operate and increase their impact on global social innovation.

CEO Ed Bice expressed excitement about the cohort of fellow honorees and a dedication to pushing Meedan even further in its efforts to facilitate informational equity.

“We’re truly honored to share company with IllumiNative, Food for Education and SaveLIFE — all of whom are doing incredible work in their respective fields,” said Bice. “Like them, we share the Skoll Foundation’s vision for social change, and we’re going to use this opportunity as a springboard to elevate the work we do with hundreds of inspiring global partners to build a safer, more equitable internet.”

“We share this award equally with these partners,” added Bice, “the knowledge workers who are doing unsung and heroic work every day, pushing back against the growing tide of intolerant, inauthentic and deceptive digital content.”

The 2024 Skoll Award for Social Innovation cohort

In addition to Meedan, this year’s recipients are:

  • IllumiNative: This group builds power for Native American people through media representation and movement-building. They counter invisibility by ensuring Native stories are authentically told, reeducating Americans and mobilizing support for Native issues.
  • Food for Education: This group designed and manages a scalable system to feed children at schools in Kenya, with aims to expand across Africa, supporting local farmers and parents in the process.
  • SaveLIFE Foundation: This group, based in India, is markedly reducing traffic injuries and deaths with a systems-based approach that both improves road safety and boosts access to lifesaving emergency care.

The Skoll Foundation catalyzes transformational social change by investing in, connecting and championing social entrepreneurs and innovators who, together, advance bold and equitable solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.

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Footnotes
  1. Online conversations are heavily influenced by news coverage, like the 2022 Supreme Court decision on abortion. The relationship is less clear between big breaking news and specific increases in online misinformation.
  2. The tweets analyzed were a random sample qualitatively coded as “misinformation” or “not misinformation” by two qualitative coders trained in public health and internet studies.
  3. This method used Twitter’s historical search API
  4. The peak was a significant outlier compared to days before it using Grubbs' test for outliers for Chemical Abortion (p<0.2 for the decision; p<0.003 for the leak) and Herbal Abortion (p<0.001 for the decision and leak).
  5. All our searches were case insensitive and could match substrings; so, “revers” matches “reverse”, “reversal”, etc.
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Published on
April 1, 2024