In a bid to help its faculty, students, and alumni fight disinformation and misinformation, the Centre for Excellence in Journalism (CEJ) at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) has signed a memorandum of understanding with venture accelerator Z2C Limited for accessing Lytics.
Popularly used by corporations to track sentiments regarding their brands, industry, policy positions, and more, the primary use case for Lytics has been as a technology-enabled war room for crises and scenario planning. Politicians and lobbyists use the tool as a media cell to track emotive language concerning their causes and extract whitespaces for stakeholder communications.
For the faculty, MSJ students, and alumni of CEJ at the IBA, Lytics will help with deep research and analysis of news generated from various sources, focusing on identifying and addressing misinformation and disinformation trends in the media.
The CEJ-IBA will dedicate a project officer to collect information from over twenty news channels, print publications, videos, and other sources per the Lytics tool’s requirements. The collected data will be processed and analyzed by Lytics’ team, utilizing their information processing tool to generate insights for research purposes.
The CEJ-IBA will provide parameters and guidelines for assessing and analyzing misinformation and disinformation in the news. These parameters will be incorporated into Lytics’ processing and analysis methodologies. The aim is to develop a robust system that can effectively identify and address misinformation trends in the media.
The CEJ-IBA will assist Z2C Limited in calibrating the information processing tool by providing an academic approach. The research expertise of CEJ-IBA will be utilized to fine-tune the tool’s performance, enhance its accuracy, and ensure its relevance in identifying and analyzing news topics. Regular collaboration and feedback sessions will be conducted between crucial representatives of CEJ-IBA and Z2C Limited to improve the tool’s performance.
As a venture accelerator for MarTech companies bringing transparency to the media supply chain, Z2C Limited seeks to increase the quality of technology-enabled data journalists in Pakistan. Among the benefits of gifting access to Lytics for CEJ-IBA faculty, students, and alumni, is enabling the creation of quality data journalism that can create a much more informed and empowered audience that will hold stakeholders accountable.
At the signing ceremony held at the IBA city campus this week in Karachi, a journalist expressed an interest in using the tool to gather evidence of misinformation and disinformation distributed by media owners. She expressed an interest in presenting her findings to advertiser associations representing companies that position themselves as ESG-compliant.
The presentation would show the negative impacts of disinformation & misinformation, directing advertisers to pledge their media expenditures towards media owners that preserved the integrity of truth and transparency instead of chasing ratings at the expense of misinforming the public.
She hopes that Lytics can become the basis for raising the quality of journalism. Media owners will finally feel accountable in what they can and can’t broadcast, lest they lose advertisers for whom factual news and vetting are essential above mass reach. This will also include digital publishers that plagiarise content from original creators without providing due credits.
