Editors, UN partner to counter spread of misleading information

The Kenya Editors Guild (KEG) and the United Nations Information Service (UNIS) have partnered to ensure information integrity is achieved in the country.

The move comes after the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in June this year launched the UN Global Principles on Information Integrity with five principles.

They include societal trust and resilience, independent, free and pluralistic media.

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Others are healthy incentives, transparency and research, and public empowerment.

The principles are based on an overriding vision of a more humane information ecosystem.

They are meant to guide technology companies, artificial intelligence (AI) actors, advertisers and other private sector actors, as well as news media, researchers, civil society, governments and the UN in their efforts to protect information integrity.

“The principles are a framework for international cooperation about addressing misinformation, disinformation and hate speech,” said Sandra Macharia, director of UNIS for Kenya, Seychelles and Uganda.

She added: “And this is because what we have seen is that misinformation, disinformation and hate speech are impacting the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs), agreed upon by UN member states in 2015, and which are really about supporting people to have a peaceful, prosperous life with dignity on a sustainable planet and leaving no one behind.”

Macharia was speaking on Friday during a media breakfast hosted by the two. The discussion majored in principle number four on independent, free and pluralistic media.

She said the impact of this misinformation and disinformation is that they take us back on the gains we have made on these goals.

Macharia said the meeting was just part of the more engagements UNIS plans to have with other stakeholders, including the government, civil society organisations, non-governmental organisations, the private sector including technology companies, and advertisers among others.

She said each of the principles, which are based on human rights are accompanied by recommendations on what each concerned stakeholder has to do to implement them.