Twitter to donate $1M to two media foundations

Twitter announced that it will be donating $1 million to the Committee to Protect Journalists and to the International Women’s Media Foundation, reports Tech Crunch.

The fund amount will be equally divided between the two organizations in an attempt to further their work related to supporting those reporting on COVID-19.

Such organizations are continually playing a crucial role in supporting the work of female journalists and in defending all journalists who are working in complicated environments or with tricky subjects.

In such chaotic times, the importance of these foundations should not go unnoticed. For example, the CPJ is reporting a number of stories which shed light on how journalists covering coronavirus news are under threat.

As Vijaya Gadde noted when announcing the grants, “Right now, every journalist is a COVID-19 journalist. Journalism is core to our service and we have a deep and enduring responsibility to protect that work.”

Twitter is not the first to donate to journalism as just last week Facebook also announced two tranches of $1 million each that it was donating for the same purpose.

“We are grateful for Twitter’s generous support. Our efforts at CPJ are focused on ensuring that journalists around the world have the information and resources they need to cover the COVID-19 pandemic safely. And we are pushing back against governments that are censoring the news, and restricting the work of the press. We need timely, accurate information flowing within countries and across borders so that political leaders, health policy experts, and the public at large can make informed decisions at this critical moment,” said Joel Simon, executive director, Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), in a statement.