Capacity Building in Newsrooms: Verifying Facts in Times of Deepfakes and Disinformation
- Priority Area Boosting Fact-checking Activities in Europe
- Funding Round / Action Types 6th Funding Round – Scale-up Projects
- Year 2024
- Country Sweden
- Project Status Ongoing
The project “Capacity Building in Newsrooms: Verifying Facts in Times of Deepfakes and Disinformation”, led by Fojo Media Institute at Linnaeus university, Sweden, aims to combat (AI-generated) disinformation by enhancing fact-checking and digital verification skills in European newsrooms. It plans to develop online tools for verification and fact-checking, and foster skills in open-source investigations (OSINT). The project will train participants from different newsrooms across Scandinavia plus Ukraine in content verification technologies and network analysis tools, expecting to establish a solid network of fact-checkers also beyond the duration of the project. Partners Bellingcat, CASM Technology, and Factiverse will provide technology to boost fact-checking abilities. The project includes four workshops over 12 months, encouraging participants to develop joint cases and fact-checking projects. The goal is to recruit 10-20 individuals from Scandinavia and Ukraine, enhancing capacity building and spreading new skills in newsrooms. The project anticipates a significant impact, with Fojo keeping toolboxes available for future fact-checkers. The overarching aim of the project is to contribute to capacity building in what can be called advanced media forensics: collaborative practices to explore open (digital) sources, apply visual forensics for image verification, all in all serving to reconstruct spaces where truthful journalistic narration can be established, and where the epistemic chaos of the contemporary information landscape can be effectively countered in media. We expect that knowledge exchange and introduction of toolboxes will be implemented by independent factcheckers outside and inside newsrooms by the end of the project period and that we will have laid the ground for a solid network for future collaboration among factcheckers in Europe.