The primary aims and tasks of EDMO are to bring together “fact-checkers, media literacy experts, and academic researchers to understand and analyse disinformation, in collaboration with media organisations, online platforms and media literacy practitioners”. All this is done to “contribute to a deeper understanding of disinformation relevant actors, vectors, tools, methods, dissemination dynamics, targets, and impact on society.”
With this as goals, it is evident and obvious that EDMO and vera.ai are a perfect fit for collaboration.
Cooperation and exchanges between the vera.ai project and EDMO have been operational since the very beginning of vera.ai. This is facilitated because of a number of links that exist between the two, such as:
All this ensures frequent exchanges and close working relationships between EDMO and vera.ai personnel, guaranteeing that information, know-how and activities are exchanged both ways.
The EDMO Hubs
In total, there are now 14 so-called EDMO Hubs, covering – taken together – the entire European Union’s 27 member states.
A Hub can either concentrate its activities on a single country (e.g. the Italian Digital Media Observatory IDMO focusses primarily on Italy); a region (e.g. the Nordic Observatory for Digital Media and Information Disorder (NORDIS) is a consortium of researchers and fact-checkers from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland); or a linguistic area (such as the newly launched GADMO - German-Austrian Digital Media Observatory - that concentrates on disinformation in the German language).
Cooperation and links between vera.ai and the EDMO Hubs
Various vera.ai project partners are members in EDMO Hubs (note: this list is not necessarily complete).
Expected benefits
These direct links and overlaps are expected to be hugely beneficial and valuable to both the vera.ai consortium as well as the EDMO Hubs. While vera.ai can expect guidance from requirements and needs coming from the involved fact-checking organisations and initiatives, they in turn can count on improved services and research results coming out of vera ai. This can be in the form of stand-alone solutions (such as a further enhanced verification plug-in), or components being integrated into Truly Media, the collaborative verification platform that is made available to all EDMO Hubs for their collaboration and verification work.
Author: Jochen Spangenberg (DW)
Additional material and sources:
EU: Hubs of the European Digital Media Observatory now extend to the whole EU27
EDMO: Overview of all EDMO Hubs
About the EU’s Digital Europe Programme which funds the EDMO initiatives