Gong organized a digital visit to CEDMO (Central European Digital Media Observatory) on April 8th, with the aim of getting to know each other's organizations and its members, as well as to share their experience of implementing projects within the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), a platform that gathers relevant organizations and individuals to detect and analyze disinformation campaigns, analyze the impact of these campaigns on society and democracy, promote media literacy activities, and monitor the policies of online platforms and the digital media ecosystem. The focus of the meeting was to present the implemented and future activities of the teams, especially in the areas of fact checking, AI tools and media literacy. Of particular relevance was the area of AI tools and identifying the different ways in which they can be used in the fight against disinformation - while Gong and his partners put the focus of AI tools on automatically recognizing disinformation language, CEDMO and its partners focused on developing AI tools that serve to help organizations verify the accuracy of facts in their work.
Given that both organizations implement projects whose activities and methods are similar in nature, the exchange of experience and techniques has opened up space for further cooperation between project members, as well as space for sharing useful information and positive examples of practice, which is planned to continue in the future, in order to successful implementation of the project and a more successful joint fight against disinformation.
Gong’s project “Pro-fact: Research, education, fact-checking and disclosure of disinformation narratives related to COVID-19 in Croatia” is being implemented in cooperation with the partners Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb, University of Dubrovnik and Faktograf. hr. It aims to study disinformation related to COVID-19 and to establish strategies for comprehensively counteracting it at several levels with a multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral approach. As an effective response to the challenges for democracy and society, the project uses a combination of different expertise and methods – uncovering sources and actors, networks of disinformation narratives from different spheres and combining techniques to combat misinformation about COVID-19.
The Central European Digital Media Observatory (CEDMO), as an independent non-partisan multidisciplinary hub, aims to identify, research and prioritise the most critical sources and causes of information disorders in Central Europe (mainly the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland). This international consortium was created to propose a set of short and longer-term actions, as well as recommendations to help civil society, public institutions and the private sector respond to the declining trust in key institutions and help society to resist the effect of increasing exposure to disinformation. The consortium is made of Agence France-Presse (AFP), Athens Technology Center, Czech Technical University in Prague, Charles University in Prague, Demagog.cz, Kempelen institut of Intelligent Technology, University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, and the University SWPS.
