ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq – Iraq has launched a platform dedicated to combating misinformation by monitoring and verifying circulating news, the government said Monday.

The platform, called Muka’id, meaning confirmed, “is the first government digital platform specializing in monitoring and verifying circulating news, combating rumors and fake news,” the government’s media office said.

“The platform aims to build a proactive national system for monitoring and verifying misinformation and coordinating information exchange among relevant official institutions,” it added.

The initiative comes as part of a broader pish by Baghdad to increase transparency and provide a reference to official sources before sharing information further.

The platform will verify news by cross-checking with official sources from the government. Journalists will still have to verify information based on other sources.

Iraq’s digital information environment has particularly been affected since the breakout of the US-Iran war in February, experiencing “a significant surge in harmful online narratives, hate speech, disinformation campaigns, and targeted harassment across social media platforms,” according to the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

“Given the rise of disinformation and AI-generated content, verification capacity must be scaled and decentralized,” the UN organization said in a September report.

A UNESCO and EU-backed coalition of Iraqi civil society organizations has monitored Iraq’s social media environment since the conflict started. Five of the teams in the coalition monitored thousands of posts in March and analyzed over 700 harmful content online, primarily from Facebook.