Our Mission
The European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) brings together fact-checkers, media literacy experts, and academic researchers to understand and analyse disinformation, in collaboration with media organisations, online platforms and media literacy practitioners.
EDMO will deploy a platform to support the work of a multidisciplinary community with expertise in the field of online disinformation. EDMO will contribute to a deeper understanding of disinformation relevant actors, vectors, tools, methods, dissemination dynamics, targets, and impact on society.
Who leads this effort?
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Under the leadership of the European University Institute in Florence (Italy), which relies on the expertise of its School of Transnational Governance and Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom, EDMO is a partnership that also includes Datalab at Aarhus University, Athens Technology Center, which provides the technological support and is also coordinating the Social Observatory for Disinformation and Social Media Analysis (SOMA); and Pagella Politica. Under the guidance of an independent Advisory Board and the Executive Board, which includes the five
heads responsible for each of the core tasks listed below, the consortium brings together stakeholders in the field of disinformation, while maintaining the independence and impartiality of the partners in the execution of the project. All members of the consortium have a strong experience in analysing the online disinformation phenomenon and are used to working with policymakers, public and private actors (including media organisations, journalists, media literacy experts, and online platforms) with a multi-disciplinary applied approach.
EDMO’s Activities
Tools and services for fact-checking activities able to:
- Facilitate the identification of relevant and trending news content published and shared online and allow joint fact-checking activities
- Facilitate the verification of online content including deepfakes also through the use of machine learning and natural language processing tools
- Expedite fact-checking activities and peer-review of fact-checks, also with the support of real-time translation tools
- Facilitate the production and online distribution of news articles resulting from fact-checking activities
Tools and services for academic research activities enabling data analysis and network-oriented analysis with functionalities such as:
- Extraction of graph representation
- Community detection
- Identification of key-players of an input graph based on relevant indicators
- Tracking and visualisation of the path travelled by a specific news piece through sharing, mentioning, retweeting, and other forms of information forwarding in social media
Access to the public and/or open data repositories
- Training activities on topics related to disinformation, open to all relevant stakeholders, including fact-checking actors, researchers, journalists
- Webinars and face-to-face meetings on the functions and tools of the EDMO secure online platform
- Conferences and events
- Mapping of fact-checking activities in Europe
- Searchable directories aggregating fact-checks and media literacy material from external repositories
- Facilitation of joint fact-checking activities and exchange of best-practices
- Creation of a fact-checking digital community
- Mapping of European academic activities studying the disinformation phenomenon in various disciplines
- Repository with relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature
- Repository of policy papers and media literacy material
- Calls for research proposals to access data of online platforms
- Cooperation with relevant Observatories to report on trends in the online media ecosystem
- Support to public authorities, including ERGA, in the monitoring of the policies, put in place by online platforms to limit the spread and the impact of disinformation
- Report to the European Commission about main trends of the disinformation phenomenon
