09 Apr In order to fight misinformation, fact-checkers, journalists and media trainers of Eurasia are united in the EFMN partner network
MediaNet International Centre for Journalism and Factcheck.kz announce the creation of EFMN, an international network whose mission is to bring fact-checkers, journalists, media literacy experts and educators together to counter disinformation and promote media literacy across Europe and Asia.
The Eurasian Fact-Checking and Media Literacy Network (EFMN) was created to strengthen partnership among journalistic and educational projects, whose primary goal is to foster critical thinking and media literacy of citizens, as well as countering disinformation and other information threats.
Collaboration among practitioners and projects in this area demonstrates extremely high productivity. So, recently 41 fact-checking organizations from around the world participated in a joint project to debunk the myths around coronavirus. It is joint international projects, which were simultaneously implemented in different languages and in different countries, which made it possible to counteract mass disinformation and connect technology companies such as Facebook, Twitter or Google to this fight against fake information.
The idea of creating this network arose in the course of joint educational campaign implementation in Central Asia by the editors-in-chief and project managers of Factcheck.kz (Kazakhstan), BezBrehni (Ukraine) and Monitor (Russia).
At the time of its launch, the Eurasian fact-checking and media literacy network united 12 projects from Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Moldova, Macedonia and Bosnia. Organizations wishing to join the network can fill out an application. Participants will also be able to attend the first Network conference.
The first EFMN conference, as well the constituent meeting of its potential participants from more than 20 countries, will be held in Almaty in June 2020. The conference is organized by the teams of EFMN and Factcheck.kz.
The Conference will be organized into several working group sessions to work on joint projects and cross-border topics to combat disinformation. EFMN’s work will cover several areas including interaction with global IT companies, the use of artificial intelligence; the introduction of media literacy in school education; fact-checking monetization methods and other socially important projects; safety of journalists and fact-checkers; digital rights and others.
EFMN has been created due to the support provided by OSF (Open Society Foundations).
Please contact us for more information:
Alyona Koshkina [email protected]
