• Priority Area Boosting Fact-checking Activities in Europe
• Funding Round / Action Types 7th Funding Round – Urgent Actions
• Year 2024
• Country Portugal
• Project Status Completed

The Project FEED | Fact-Checking Food, Diets, and Eating Behaviour will aim to tackle pressing issues related to disinformation and misinformation by improving the detection and understanding of misinformation narratives in individual and public health.

The activities of this project will be an addition to Viral’s current activities and will focus on fact-checking food, diets, and eating behaviour, with the goal of making populations more resilient to the corrosive effects of disinformation in these matters.
Food and nutrition are part of a complex societal challenge (due to socio-economic and socio-cultural reasons) and are also very popular topics on social media, about which a lot of misinformation and disinformation circulates.

Disinformation about food, nutrition, diets, and eating behaviour shared on social media and uncritically consumed by a population with little scientific literacy and little health literacy has clear risks to health (individual and public) and the economy.
Viral has developed its own methodology that covers the selection process (the processes by which the applicant chooses what claims to evaluate), research methods (the basic techniques and types of sources that the applicant most commonly uses when conducting research on claims, as well as the official rules and editorial policies that govern its approaches), and claim evaluation (the systems and processes by which the applicant establishes the veracity of a claim).

In addition to these criteria, the FEED project will have a stricter selection process, as only topics related to food, nutrition, and prominent individual and global health issues will be considered.