IRELAND HAS A new tool in the fight against disinformation: an alliance of academic researchers, tech innovators and factcheckers working together to detect, respond to and raise awareness of bad information campaigns online.
The EDMO Ireland hub is part of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) and its partners work both together and with stakeholders across policy, media, research and civil society sectors.
The Journal FactCheck‘s team is a key partner of EDMO Ireland, and is working with social science and media literacy experts at Dublin City University (DCU), AI technology researchers at the University of Sheffield, and virality and content analysis professionals NewsWhip.
Speaking about the significance of the Irish hub, Dr Eileen Culloty, coordinator of the project, commented:
“The hub aims to maximise the great work already being done to counter disinformation in Ireland while providing a means to collaborate with partners across Europe. The value of that is evident now amid the Russian war on Ukraine. EDMO has published a regularly updated list of fact-checks about the war and established a taskforce to coordinate responses.”
The Journal is among the fact-checking units contributing its work to that resource in order to maximise the reach and efficiency of international efforts to stem the flow of disinformation that has been prevalent from the beginning of the war on the Ukraine.
The objective of the EDMO Ireland hub is to promote a whole-society response to the issue of disinformation. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report Ireland for 2021 showed that 65% of Irish people, when thinking about news, tended to agree or strongly agreed that they were “concerned about what is real and what is fake on the internet”. Deloitte Ireland’s latest Digital Consumer Trends report on digital usage and entertainment found that 57% of people in Ireland struggle to tell the difference between real news and fake news.
The EDMO Ireland Hub is one of eight hubs chosen by the European Commission to help implement and expand the work of the European Digital Media Observatory.
Susan Daly, Managing Editor of Journal Media, said: “The Journal FactCheck has been tracking and tackling misinformation in Ireland for the past six years. We are looking forward to working with our partners at EDMO Ireland to form a robust and holistic approach to the challenge of empowering the public with good quality information.”
Dervilla Mullan, Chief Product Officer of NewsWhip said: “We’re thrilled to be applying our technology and expertise to this great initiative from EDMO, and to be able to bring our experience from working with academia and NGOs around the world to this partnership.”
Kalina Bontcheva, Professor of Text Analysis in The Natural Language Processing Research Group at The University of Sheffield, said: “Working closely with the social scientists and fact-checkers in the Irish EDMO Hub we will be enhancing our AI technologies for disinformation analysis to better handle the cultural, linguistic, and geo-political specificities of disinformation in Ireland.”
The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) welcomed the new hub to tackle disinformation, with CEO Celene Craig noting: “Given the collective knowledge and commitment of the team, I am confident of their ability to contribute to the delivery of EDMO’s objectives, particularly with regard to the analysis of and responses to disinformation campaigns in Ireland.”
You can find The Journal‘s factchecks here and be kept informed by signing up to our FactCheck newsletter here.
Find out more about EDMO Ireland’s work on its new site here; or follow on Twitter.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say