Gong organized a digital visit to DIGIRES, held on September 5th, so that the members from both organizations could get to know each other, and share their experiences of implementing projects within the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), a platform that brings together relevant organizations and individuals to discover and analyze disinformation campaigns, the societal and democratic impact of these campaigns, promote media literacy activities, and follow the policies of online platforms and the digital media ecosystem.
The focus of the meeting was the presentation of the implemented and future activities of the teams, especially in terms of disinformation research and its results, fact-checking, AI tools, and media literacy. During the presentation of the existing activities, of particular interest was the presentation of the disinformation research results, which emphasized the importance of understanding the nature and characteristics of disinformation and its spreaders. While Gong and its partners focused on understanding the nature of disinformation, its spreaders and advocates, DIGIRES prioritized the understanding of the ways in which disinformation operate, so as to strengthen society's resilience to it.
Although the direction and purpose is different, both consortia have a number of similarities in their activities, thus allowing the exchange of experience and activities to open up room for further and deeper cooperation. In the future, further sharing of useful information and examples of successful practices is expected, in order to better implement individual projects and to fight disinformation more successfully together.
The Gong project “Pro-fact: Research, education, fact-check and debunk COVID-19 related disinformation narratives in Croatia“ is carried out in cooperation with our partners, the Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb, University of Dubrovnik, Faktograf.hr, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, and Croatian Journalists Society (HND) and the Croatian Journalists’ Union (SNH). Its goal is to study COVID-19 related disinformation, and to establish strategies for the comprehensive countering of said disinformation at multiple levels, with a multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral approach. As an effective response to challenges for democracy and society, the project uses a combination of different expertise and methods – exposing sources and actors, networks of disinformation narratives from different spheres and combining techniques to combat disinformation about COVID-19.
The DIGIRES project was started as a common initiative between academia, media organizations and independent journalists with an overarching goal to detect, analyze, prevent and curb disinformation activities in Lithuania and beyond. team of highly qualified experts will be closely collaborating with media organizations, independent journalists, the scientific community and the general public to increase the digital resilience of the society.
