The Social Observatory for Disinformation and Social Media Analysis (SOMA) will be participating in the “Disinformation in Cyberspace: Media literacy meets Artificial Intelligence” conference, on November 15th, 2019, during the 3rd Media Literacy Week , which is being organized by the Media Literacy Institute (MLI) and Journalists About Journalism, at the Institute of International Relations in Athens.
In more detail, the Media Literacy Institute and Journalists About Journalism are organizing for the third consecutive year the Greek Week for Media Education, from November 9th to 15th, 2019, culminating in the international conference “Online Disinformation: Media education meets Artificial Intelligence”. Following the pattern of the corresponding UNESCO events, the Media Literacy Week aims to familiarize citizens with the verification of both online & offline content they seek, read, reproduce or create themselves, as well as with information shared to the internet to the media and to social networks. Within this framework, Nikos Sarris, Head of the Innovation Lab of Athens Technology Center (ATC) , and Coordinator of the SOMA project, will introduce the Observatory, its effective strategies on tackling disinformation and the tools exploited by its members to carry out their investigations, in the session ‘Journalism and Disinformation in the AI era: The value of AI disinformation & counter-disinformation tools and the need for journalistic competence in their use’”.
About SOMA
The Social Observatory for Disinformation and Social Media Analysis (SOMA) is a European project launched in November 2018 under H2020, to provide support to a European community that will jointly fight disinformation. Its aim is to support experts in their work against disinformation providing them useful infrastructure and connections to a wide community to collaborate with. The members of the Observatory have the chance to exploit existing verification platforms along with new tools, algorithms and processes that will be gradually integrated and launched during the project’s duration. To initiate the operation of the observatory SOMA is making available a platform for collaborative verification, where all experts will be able to work together for carrying out investigations against disinformation.
This effort is coordinated by Athens Technology Center (ATC), a tech expert on fighting disinformation by actively developing content verification tools, thanks to research financed by the European Commission and funding from Google’s Digital News initiative. At the same time, Pagella Politica (Italy), LUISS Data Lab (Italy), T6Ecosystems (Italy) and Aarhus University (Denmark) lead this effort on establishing a network to jointly counter disinformation.
SOMA has also launched two national centres of excellence: Aletheia, hosted by the Luiss Data Lab in Italy, and Remid, based at the Aarhus University in Denmark. The aim is to foster the research on the topic also at national level, including researchers and experts working on vertical topics such as health and climate. Moreover, SOMA is defining a comprehensive framework to map the impacts of disinformation on our societies which is planned to be published in February 2020.