While living and working in Asia and Africa, we witnessed global audiences starving for truth. Our mission is to irrigate the world’s information deserts to combat the rise of disinformation and digital authoritarianism.
The lack of quality, credible local reporting creates an opening for the malign influence of propaganda and shapes a landscape where journalists and activists are the targets.
For decades, the harsh impact of disinformation has helped dictatorships flourish and silenced voices creating an oppressive hush over entire regions.
The results have included widespread belief in conspiracy theories, human rights abuse, and loss of life. And 21st-century technologies have given rise to digital authoritarianism.
Our work has only started; Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes every human’s right to truth and the free exchange of information. To deny someone “information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” is a human rights violation. We have decided to confront these threats as a small group of media entrepreneurs and journalists.
Who we are?
We are a community of journalists, producers, media executives, and entrepreneurs. Our experience reporting from the field and leading teams in major newsrooms enable us to leverage emerging technologies to empower an open society.
We are a team of women who worked amidst authoritarianism and propaganda, witnessing how this poisoned lives and communities. Now we are pooling our knowledge and capabilities to create new initiatives to respond to these threats. We believe the best way forward is to equip journalists with the knowledge and technology for self-defense and, in the process, combat acquiescence to authoritarianism and indifference to suffering.
We founded the not-for-profit Open Media Endeavor (OME) to create adaptive responses to the metastasizing threat to the information ecosystem.
OME recognizes that other press freedom organizations engage with these issues. But we believe that our diverse community has unique perspectives and skills to join the struggle against disinformation and digital authoritarianism. We bring proven expertise and technical capabilities to democratize, cross-pollinate, and scale solutions protecting journalists while developing their creative competencies.
Our Mission
Defending freedom of expression.
Main goal:
We protect journalists, activists, bloggers, and citizen journalists from abusive governments and corrupt regimes or entities.
Sub-goals:
Our Vision
To reach freedom and justice for all journalists and media institutions in Asia and Africa.
We are promoting resilience to digital authoritarianism by strengthening indigenous, credible voices through developing capacity and a network of interconnected secure digital ecosystems populated with data-literate journalists and credible sources, enabling free online expression via secure communications and tradecraft hardened against pursued authoritarian interference.
