Other Initiatives and Platforms
Projects and initiatives whose research or development work is related to our work here at De Facto. It is important to us to acknowledge the great work of colleagues around the globe who explore and design solutions.
Mediawijs is the Flemish Knowledge Centre for Digital and Media Literacy at imec vzw on the initiative of the Flemish Minister for Media. They help the citizens of the Flemish community in Flanders (Belgium) and Brussels to use digital technology and media actively, creatively, critically and consciously to participate in society. The website contains a bounty of resources for teachers and learners!
https://www.digitalsherlocks.org/
The Digital Forensic Lab at the Atlantic Council is an initiative aiming to, among others, to identify, expose, and explain disinformation where and when it occurs using open source research, and to to forge digital resilience at a time when humans are more interconnected than at any point in history. They work in 6 main areas of global significance.
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/european-media-literacy-week
European Digital Literacy Media Week is a new initiative launched in 2019 by the European Commission to underline the societal importance of media literacy and promote media literacy initiatives and projects across the EU
First Draft is a project originally started by Dr Claire Wardle and is now part of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. De Facto is partly based on the work of Dr Wardle.
A disinformation (news context) oriented simulated environment for media literacy, developed by a team of young politologists from the Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. Main focus groups are teachers and middle-school pupils who learn what critical thinking is, and how to tell whether a news item is true or false.
https://www.disinfobservatory.org/
SOMA project has been launched to provide support to a European community, called “European Observatory against Disinformation”, that will jointly fight disinformation. All members have access to all tools but each group has its separate and private workspace. Collaboration across the two groups for specific investigations is however also possible.
De Facto, under the legal responsibility of NTCenter, has become a mamber of SOMA in 2020.
HOAXY is a complex desktop app which provides clear visuals of claims and fact-checking on the web and on Twitter. It also calculates probability scores indicating whether a particular account is likely to be human or bot. Hoaxy is developed at the University of Indiana and we highly recommend it to researchers, scientists, investigative journalists and educators.
Know Your Meme is a website dedicated to documenting Internet phenomena: viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, web celebs and more.
Kialo is a social platform which attempts to re-design the social debate. Discussions can be mapped using the pros and cons provided by the participants. Kialo allows you to see the discussion tree through the eyes of other participants, opponents, or groups, to better understand their way of thinking. Kialo helps de-clutter the discussion and focus on arguments, rather than emotions and wording.
DROG - The resistance to bad news - is an initative by Ruurd Oosterwoud which has developed an online game where anyone can become a fake news master. A simulated environment with convenient metrics allows users to get into the mindset of creators and distribuitors of disinformation.
