Meedan

Meedan is a nonprofit technology and research organization working to make the internet more equitable. Founded in 2006, it develops open-source tools, builds global research collaborations, and supports community-led programs that improve access to reliable information—particularly in historically underserved communities.

At the heart of Meedan’s model is Check, an award-winning open-source verification platform that enables journalists, fact-checkers, and civil society groups to track and debunk misinformation. Citizens can forward content from messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram to tiplines connected to Check, where it is verified by partner organizations and shared back to the public. This infrastructure has powered major election integrity efforts around the world.

As the information landscape evolves, Meedan is integrating AI into its approach, with careful attention to the risks it can pose for underserved communities. Its latest pilot project will leverage an agentic RAG (retrieval augmented generation) model to help local newsrooms and civic organizations deploy chatbots that provide real-time, accurate answers drawn from their own verified reporting and research. Meedan is also advancing research on hate speech and gender-based harassment online by tracking this type of speech in languages like Arabic and Swahili in order to expose harms that commercial systems often miss. The resulting datasets are released openly, allowing other developers and researchers to improve trust and safety infrastructure worldwide.

Meedan’s model reflects a unique combination of technical innovation, academic rigor, and community partnership. Its teams include engineers, journalists, linguists, and social scientists working together to design technologies that center transparency, multilingual access, and data justice. The organization’s open-source philosophy makes its code, data, and learnings freely available so that smaller, local actors can adapt and apply them without dependence on large platforms.

“We have been working in and with the communities we serve for almost two decades. We are not parachuting technological ‘solutions’ into environments that are alien or unknown to us. The countries and languages we operate in are those of our partners, our team members, our families, and our friends. Our work builds on years-old trusted human relationships that precede—and will outlive—hype around any particular technology.” — Dr. Dima Saber, Chief Program Officer

Co-creation is central to Meedan’s philosophy. More than half its globally distributed team is based in the Global South, ensuring that design decisions reflect local realities. The organization never builds “North-made solutions for South problems”; instead, it codesigns with partners, prioritizing local data ownership, linguistic diversity, and context-specific needs. Its partner network comprises more than 85 organizations in 46 countries across 30+ languages.

By merging software engineering, social science, and grassroots collaboration, Meedan provides civic infrastructure for a more inclusive information ecosystem that strengthens journalism, protects democratic participation, and advances digital equity.