Multidisciplinary initiatives needed to combat disinformation

Our Reporter
Dimapur, July 24 (EMN): In order to combat disinformation, communities need to undertake a multidisciplinary initiative to understand and study its different sides across countries and languages, according to Nikos Sarris a Senior Researcher and Advisor on Media Tech at ATC, Greece and Executive Board member, The European Digital Media Observatory Project.

He said the initiatives need to be practical to carry out specific investigations, theoretical to study the scientific aspects, need to be wide to offer availability of resources at all times and focused in specific areas to show tangible results, and also manageable for a central operation centre to be possible to work. However, building a community against disinformation is a huge task as significant resources are necessary to do it right, he added.

Sarris was addressing a webinar on “developing collaboration and new tools to combat misinformation” for Indian journalists, journalism students, media educators and bloggers organised by Data Leads Google News Initiative India on July 23.

Sharing on lessons learnt through communication activities, Sarris underlined that such initiatives are much more demanding in communication than usual research projects and should be treated as such from the planning phase.

‘Significant resources are necessary in professional marketing activities, paid advertising can help but are costly and need to be budgeted early on, and to attract a wide and representative community such initiatives have to be acknowledged as flagship from the highest level and promoted,’ he said.

In the lessons learnt from engaging the community, he observed that such a wide and inhomogeneous community cannot be easily engaged as different members need to be treated in different ways, multiple tiers of participation need to be employed, and specific recurring activities need to be organised for regular output.

According to his observation, different tasks need to centre around different members based on expertise and interest.

Most organisations are under-resourced and to offer their time they need to be somehow motivated, and an engaging team needs to have expertise and skills in various sectors.

Access to data is necessary for scientific research on disinformation, he said while social media platforms are reluctant to provide access for various reasons as support is necessary from the higher level of policy makers, and significant time is needed to achieve results as continuation of such efforts needs to be ensured across consecutive projects.

“Significant computational resources are necessary to support a scaled up utilisation of tools that support deep analysis of disinformation and Centres of Excellence can be established but need continuous support to maintain their operation,” he said.

Repository of fact checking initiatives, he said, include a comprehensive map of initiatives and organisations that meet specific criteria, which includes interactive maps with names and locations of relevant organisations which is ‘zoom-able, sortable and searchable’ with extended information and more detailed editorial section featuring short portraits of individual operations.