Displaying items by tag: activism

When the ruling party, Georgian Dream, backtracked on a promise to transition to a fully proportional parliamentary system before the 2020 elections, thousands of citizens protested, demanding a progressive electoral reform. But such protesters face smear campaigns and accusations of bias - typical of the intimidation tactics used in such situations. This also happened recently in Brazil. Those who denounce corruption and human rights abuses are often the target of disinformation campaigns, with their reports and findings dismissed as ‘fake news’. Anti-corruption activism relies strongly on trust in independent media. The use of social media and the impact of fake news is a real threat for the work of organisations like Transparency International (TI). But fake news is not always easy to detect and spreads rapidly. What can be done? In Georgia, for example, coordinated accusations against TI through anonymous Facebook posts were recently detected, labelled and debunked by another civil society group.