MONITORING ELECTIONS IN THE DIGITAL AGE

EU DisinfoLab released a publication titled “The Many Faces Fighting Disinformation: Safeguarding Civil Society’s Role in the Response to Information Disorders which is a panorama of innovative, multidisciplinary actors responding to information disorders. It is important for civil society to react to disinformation challenges with new types of expertise, but it also exposed to novel risks. 

This project by EU DisinfoLab, in the framework of which this publication was supported, focuses mainly on Europe and maps a cross-section of an expanding network of individuals and initiatives - from broadcast journalists to open source investigators to election observers to technology developers – in total 14 actors from across this emerging civil society ecosystem. 

As EU DisinfoLab notes on the project blog, many of the actors interviewed do not see themselves as responding to disinformation per se. The problem encompasses disinformation and misinformation, mistrust in journalism and the weaknesses or deficits in existing media, the business model behind clickbait and disinforming content, algorithmic targeting, and other opaque mechanisms in our digital information architecture. 

This report is necessarily limited in scope. The stories in the publication represent a snapshot or cross-section of an expanding network of individuals and initiatives presented in a way to show how they were created and how they have evolved over time, and to examine in detail the difficulties these actors face in terms of sustainability, security, and impact. They exhibit new types of expertise – from digital forensics to crowdsourced research, to journalism-classroom partnerships.

We are featured in the publication as an organization monitoring elections in the digital age. It tells our story of 23 years’ experience in monitoring information coverage during elections – starting from traditional media to social media which we have started monitoring some 3 years ago. Much of our work includes capacity building and training, enhancing the media monitoring activities of local partners. More information about the project and all 14 initiatives can be found here eudl-faces-magazine-v4

"Platforms should be geographically blind when it comes to applying their rules" Rasťo Kužel