Scientists United in the Fight Against Disinformation
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It is the largest alliance of scientists and fact-checkers in the German-speaking world: On 1 November, the “German-Austrian Digital Media Observatory”, in short GADMO, was launched. Project leader is the Institute of Journalism (IJ) at TU Dortmund University.
The partners involved aim to take a coordinated approach to combating disinformation and misinformation. To this end, the leading fact-checking organizations in the German-speaking world – the German Press Agency (Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa)), Agence France Press (AFP), Austria Presse Agentur (APA) and the independent research network Correctiv – are collaborating for the first time. They are working together within the project with the communication and data scientists from the Institute of Journalism and the Department of Statistics of TU Dortmund University as well as the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology. Athens Technology Center is a technical partner in the project.
In the future, GADMO wants to make fact checks more easily accessible to the public and collect them centrally. In addition, the team plans to identify disinformation campaigns and analyze them from a scientific perspective. Among the project’s objectives are promoting media literacy in Austria and Germany and checking whether digital platforms and social networks are already doing enough in the fight against disinformation.
“Targeted dissemination of fake news is not only toxic for public debates but also undermines serious journalism that wants to inform society in a factual and truthful way. We are very pleased that with GADMO we can now upgrade and explore methods on several levels in order to protect discursive spaces in the digital domain and beyond,” explains Christina Elmer, Professor for Digital and Data Journalism at the IJ, who is in overall charge of GADMO’s research work and coordinates the entire project together with Stephan Mündges. Professor Henrik Müller from the IJ and Professor Carsten Jentsch and Professor Jörg Rahnenführer from the Department of Statistics at TU Dortmund University are also participating in GADMO.
Pan-European collaboration between newsrooms
GADMO will be part of the Europe-wide “European Digital Media Observatory”, in short EDMO. This network comprises nine hubs which are active in 17 European countries. More hubs will join up until the beginning of 2023. This will enable all project partners to work and conduct research together across Europe: The German-language fact-checkers will have access to a secure online platform that enables pan-European collaboration between newsrooms. The communication and data scientists at TU Dortmund University will also profit from this Europe-wide exchange, e.g., through intensive cooperation with the fact-checking community and the whole EDMO network, whose working groups also include representatives from social media platforms.
GADMO will be funded in the first 30 months by the European Commission.
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