Karen Rebelo

Karen Rebelo is a journalist reporting on misinformation and disinformation in India. She has been instrumental in setting up one of India's earliest fact-checking newsrooms. In 2018, she led fact-checking workshops for journalists across six Indian cities as part of the Google News Initiative, in which she also helped develop the curriculum. A few of the participants in her workshops have gone on to set up their own fact-checking newsrooms.

More recently, she spearheaded efforts channeling experts in academia in India and the United States and start-ups to build a detection ecosystem for deepfake content in the 2024 general election in India.

Karen was the first to report about the use of AI-voice clones in the Madhya Pradesh state elections in 2023; how photos of a rape and murder victim in India were edited using AI apps to make reels; and how Meta AI is being weaponised to make harmful anti-Muslim AI images in India. She also authored a report on the use of AI in elections for the Center for Media Engagement - The University of Texas at Austin. Karen works as the deputy editor at BOOM Live, where she leads a small team of fact-checkers spread across India.

Karen's Fellowship at the Reuters Institute is supported by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.