United against online disinformation

A European Commission call for tenders has confirmed a European University Institute-headed consortium as lead of EDMO. During its second mandate, EDMO will intensify its efforts against the rising challenges of online disinformation, including the war in Ukraine. Three new partners join the consortium: the University of Amsterdam with its Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), the Belgian Media & Learning Association (MLA), and Europe MediaLab (Fondation EURACTIV). The consortium also welcomes the Center for Democracy and Resilience at GLOBSEC and the think tank Integrity Institute as subcontractors.

Despite pledges, online platforms are failing in the fight against disinformation. The EDMO Executive Board assesses the reports of the signatories of the Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation and invites for more accuracy, clarity and transparency in the reporting. Particularly concerning is the recent announcement by Twitter to start charging for access to its application programming interface.

EDMO published an overview of the main disinformation topics, narratives and most viral false news detected by the EDMO fact-checking network between June 2021 and November 2022. The main detected topics are the war in Ukraine, COVID-19 and climate change. These topics persist in time and often resurface, adapting to current events in the media. The brief is available in 24 languages.

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, EDMO has been active in detecting and debunking disinformation related to the conflict. Results are published regularly on the dedicated repository of fact-checks, provided by the members of the EDMO fact-checking network. Based on the analysis of these fact-checking articles, 21 periodic insights and early warnings have been published so far to provide an overview of the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the disinformation narratives in circulation.

On 17 February, the Iberian EDMO Hub (IBERIFIER) presented its map of the 5217 digital media available in Spain and Portugal. The map offers data such as geographic location, focus, financing channels and revenue and more. The data can be filtered and downloaded.

What’s the best way to make fact-checking work? And what is the difference between science and practice when it comes to fact-checking? During this interactive webinar, panelists and participants will discuss how to translate scientific research into concrete recommendations for fact-checkers in practice. The webinar will be held in English on 20 April from 15:00 to 16:00 CEST.

DE FACTO published a media literacy podcast in five episodes about parents and teenagers discussing information, false news, social media and screen time. The creators aimed at reproducing the important questions raised during daily conversations occurring in families on the topic of information and the relationship of different generations to media.

The false news circulating around the COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on the work of the fact-checking team of GADMO. Read how the GADMO research team tried to make sense of the +5000 texts that were created by the network by January 2023 and of how the topics of detected disinformation evolved from xenophobia to COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine.