Do you feel exhausted trying to find reliable facts about everything happening around you? As emerging digital platforms increasingly outpace legacy media, it is often frustrating to discover that a seemingly credible story, complete with high-quality video footage, turns out to be fabricated. Such content is frequently designed either to malign individuals or to advance the vested interests of particular groups. While many of these interests are political in nature, they can also serve corporate or business agendas. Rapid technological advancement and the widespread, low-cost accessibility of artificial intelligence (AI) tools have significantly lowered the barriers to content creation. Today, almost anyone with minimal resources can become a content producer. Much of this cheap, low-quality content is now weaponised as propaganda, used by malicious actors to run disinformation and misinformation campaigns. Communication experts have coined the term “slopaganda” to describe this...

On November 2, 2022, as the world observes the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists for the ninth year, it's only proper to remind our readers a sad but glaring fact about how Bangladesh is doing in this regard. Just two days before, a Dhaka court,  for the 93rd time , granted the Rapid Action Battalion's (Rab) request for more time to complete their investigation into the killings of journalist couple Sagar-Runi. Though no one should ever foretell any judicial action, in this case, people's presumption that the investigating official would certainly hit a century in seeking time extensions should be forgiven. It is also the 10th anniversary of the UN Plan of Action on the Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity. Ironically, more than 10 years have passed since those ghastly double murders took place on February 11, 2012. It's not just the murders of Sagar Sarowar and Meherun Runi that remain unsolved; according to the Unesco Observat...