As you remember, on May 23rd 2019 we organized a panel dedicated to disinformation, during the 11th NEM Summit in Zargeb!
About the NEM Summit
The 11th edition of the NEM Summit took place in Zagreb, Croatia, on 22 and 23 May 2019. The NEM Summit is an international conference and exhibition, organized since 2008 by the New European Media (NEM) Initiative for all those interested in the broad area of Media, Content, and Creativity. Over the years, the NEM Summit has grown to become an annual not-to-be-missed event, providing attendees with a key opportunity to meet and network with prominent stakeholders, access up-to-date information, discover latest technology and market trends, identify research and business opportunities, and find partners for upcoming EU-funded calls for projects.
About SOMA’s session
Within the parallel sessions, Simona De Rosa from T6 Ecosystems, on behalf of SOMA, The European Observatory on Social Media, organized and chaired a session on “Trusting Media: joint reflections from media industry”.
The aim of the session was to stimulate a high-level discussion on impact of disinformation and effective strategies for tackling it. It brought together different points of view to discuss present and future actions. In particular, the aim was to open the opportunity for the media industry to meet researchers and professionals and to jointly discuss how to integrate different approaches to mitigate the problem. During the panel, technical approaches such as algorithms and technologies for content verification were discussed, together with fact-checker approaches and political science perspectives, leading to a broader perspective and comprehension of the issue.
The panel started with Nikos Sarris, ATC, Coordinator of the SOMA project, presenting the general approach and tools deployed by the SOMA project to fight disinformation. Then, Massimo Magaldi from Engineering (IT), partner of the Fandango project, shown the advanced analytics services developed by the project to detect disinformation. After this, Fabio Saracco from IMT discussed the preliminary results of the Toffee project recently launched by the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. To complement the approaches presented so far, Prof. Tena Perisin, from the Zagreb University, discussed the role of fact-chekers to contrast disinformation reporting the experience of a fact-checker active in Croatia: Eufactcheck . Finally, Prof. Igor Kanizay from Zagreb University, ended the panel with a speech on what we still need to do to fight disinformation taking into account a broader perspective.
The discussion was useful to keep in mind what we still need to do to create a trusting media environment comparing different approaches shared by different scientists and more technical oriented people. In addition, it was also relevant for SOMA the discussion with Eufactcheck, with whom possible collaborations have been envisaged.
You can enjoy some of our session’s key moments here.