Meedan, dollars for the Toque

San Francisco-based Meedan, founded in 2005, describes itself as “a global nonprofit technology organization that creates software and programmatic initiatives to strengthen journalism, digital literacy and information accessibility online and offline. We develop open source tools for creating and sharing contexts in digital media through annotation, verification, archiving and translation.”

Meedan is one of El Toque’s collaborative and funding partners as stated by them on their website.

According to the article El dólar mediático, un arma para la guerra económica contra Cuba published in 2022 by Rebelión: “MEEDAN is a computer platform dedicated to the management of press content aimed at countries in Africa and the Middle East. It emerged in the late 2000s, during the so-called Arab Spring, as an automated translation service for press articles in English and Arabic.

It was later dedicated to localizing and positioning content on key issues for the social stability of various countries in that region, including health issues during the pandemic. In 2019 she initiated with USAID a public information program through social media in Kenya. She currently maintains monitoring and positioning press content on Twitter targeting countries such as Iraq, Iran and Hong Kong.”

The website of the Learning Lab, a USAID information check-in project, lists Meedan among its lead partners to “explore the Agency’s experimental work to mitigate the adverse effects of disinformation and malign influences, and underpin the power of journalism and information in the public good under the Expanded Media Control Agency’s announcement.”

Likewise, the NGO DAI linked to the implementation of USAID’s anti-disinformation strategy in the digital sphere, points to Meedan as one of its collaborators in the verification projects in social networks.

Meedan’s 2019 tax return appearing on the projects.propublica.org site, points to the spending of more than $180,000 in USAID’s interest in projects in Kenya for the regulation and verification of content in networks.

An article written by Stavroula Pabst, published in 2023 by the Brownstone Institute notes that: “Meedan which ostensibly seeks to address “crises of trust in information” and create a “more equitable internet” through research, collaborations and partnerships with newsrooms, fact-checkers and civil society groups to help it get out in front of new disinformation trends”, is supported by UK intelligence representative Bellingcat, Meta Journalism Project and Omidyar Group, which also has a history of funding CIA cutouts and other organizations pushing regime change.”

The elements associating Meedan with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are abundant and public on the web, therefore elToque keeps collaborating with and receiving funding from an NGO affiliated with a US government agency. The ties that bind elToque to U.S. government dollars are so strong that there is no way to escape them.

It is useless to insist with the lie of “independent journalism”, El Toque has neither financial nor editorial independence, it is an appendix, a mechanism of the US government financed against Cuba.