Made for social media: fighting disinformation with fact graphics
- Priority Area Boosting Fact-checking Activities in Europe
- Funding Round / Action Types 3rd Funding Round – Scale-up Projects
- Year 2023, 2024
- Country Bulgaria, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania
- Project Status Completed
This project unites fact checkers from several countries in a multilingual joint production of fact graphics, a new visual format of fact checks made for social media. The project is based on a tool the German Press Agency dpa has developed. It enables the visualization of fact checks as interactive graphics and animated videos for websites and social media networks. We will use this collaborative tool in a cross-border project with a focus on disinformation circulating in the course of the war in Ukraine.
Our attractive and easy to understand format is highly accessible to a broad public, especially for younger media recipients. It thus helps combat the spread of false and misleading information, including attempts to influence public debates. In addition, we aim for a scaling effect by enabling other fact checkers to increase the reach of their fact checks and to address new target groups.
The ten-month project brings together fact-checking partners from countries heavily affected by disinformation campaigns related to the Ukraine war. This includes partners from Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Germany. The production will cover at least nine languages (German, English, Ukrainian, Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian and Bulgarian).
dpa is coordinating the project and will provide the tool as well as technical support for it and mentoring on adapting fact checks in a way that is suitable for social media. All partners will have access to the tool in order to produce new visualized versions of their own fact checks and to create translated versions of fact graphics of the other project partners.
Part of the collaboration will also be a joint monitoring of circulating false claims and a corresponding editorial planning. We will thus use synergies in this multinational project through the exchange of observations and regional expertise of a variety of fact checkers.