Strengthening Community Leaders in Bangladesh to Fight Disinformation and Promote Religious Inclusion 

On September 13 and 14, 2024, The Asia Foundation organized a two-day workshop in Rangpur, Bangladesh as part of our Community-Driven Approach Promoting Religious Equality and Access to Justice project The event focused on empowering community leaders to address growing challenges of misinformation and disinformation targeting religious and ethnic minorities.

Why it Matters

• Increasing Marginalization Among Communities: Ethnic and religious minorities in the country face increasing marginalization and tension, often fueled by disinformation campaigns on social media.
• Addressing the Role of Technology: Increasing prevalence of AI-generated content and deepfakes are misused to spread misinformation.

Our Impact

To address these challenges, we engaged civil society leaders, youth volunteers, and faith leaders to discuss topics like the differences between misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, and advanced search techniques to monitor, analyze, and verify information on social media platforms, websites, videos, and news sources.

One of the civil society representatives remarked on the significance of the workshop in the current context of Bangladesh, stating,

This workshop holds immense importance given the rising challenges of misinformation and disinformation targeting religious and ethnic minorities. It equips us to address present-day issues and prepares us for the future, particularly as AI technologies like deepfakes and AI-generated content become more prevalent in the days ahead.

By training youth and community leaders, we are empowering them to act as community watchdogs—promoting religious equality and dispelling harmful myths spread via social media to build a more inclusive society that resists the divisive influence of misinformation.