Osmania University Journalism Department to bust myths about vaccination on Saturday

Hyderabad: The Department of Journalism & Mass Communication, Osmania University will host the town hall virtual training on Vax misinformation along with the Google News Initiative India (GNI) Training Network led by Data LEADS on June 5, 2021.

The GNI Training Network was launched by Google in July 2018 with an aim to supporting journalists across India in their fight against misinformation in the country.

The training series is aimed at sensitising media practitioners, media students, public health professionals, policymakers, community organizations, bloggers among others to identify and verify vaccine related misinformation, false claims and hoaxes. The training will further sensitize the participants with the tools and strategies to uncover, understand and address the spread of false information. The modules to be covered are as follows: Understanding Vaccine Misinformation, Vaccine Misinfo Narratives and Data Deficits, How to monitor conversations on Social Media , Keywords and Search Queries

The curriculum for this training series is developed by First Draft (UK) as part of its Vaccine Insights flexible learning course. The GNI India Training Network has translated and adapted the curriculum to include regional examples. Training is free but candidates have to register at : www.bit.ly/TownhallRegistration

The GNI network has so far trained 25,000+ journalists, media educators, fact-checkers and journalism students in more than 10 languages across India, benefiting hundreds of newsrooms and universities. The network's activities have also led to the launch of many key fact-checking initiatives, helped them become a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) and resulted in an exponential surge in the number of fact-checking stories across languages and platforms.