The South Asia Center for Media in Development (SACMID) is a non-government organization based in Dhaka, Bangladesh who has been working to promote media literacy. SACMID has been entrusted with the responsibilities of implementing a project entitled ‘Combating Mis-/disinformation sparked by digital and social media platforms in Bangladesh’ with support from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The project activities are being implemented in three districts of Bangladesh namely: Dhaka, Mymensingh and Brahmanbaria. Dhaka is the capital city of Bangladesh, Mymensingh is the division with higher illiteracy rate according to the latest population census (2022) while Brahmanbaria frequently comes to the frontline for sparking violence against the religious minority on the basis of mis-and disinformation spread through the digital and social media platforms. One of the key activities of the project is to conduct reviewing of IEC Materials around Combating Mis-and Disinformation Sparked by Digital and Social Media Platforms in Bangladesh.
The overall objective of the review is to supplement and complement the situation analysis on the social and digital media behavior of the cross-sector people in the aforesaid three districts with an informed understanding of what contents/IEC (information, education and communication) materials are available and what are needed further in the areas of social and digital media literacy.
In order to carry out the review of available IEC materials on the captioned subject i.e. combating misinformation and disinformation/rumor, content analysis method has been adopted. Such content analysis has enabled the research team to understand the type, format and nature of messages created and disseminated to create awareness on rumor/mis-/disinformation. The essence of the content analysis lies in the communication model of Harold D. Lasswell (1948). Actually, we get the foundation of content analysis from the model comprising five important components of human communication.