The Flemish Government is releasing over €3 million to support five projects in the fight against disinformation, stated the Flemish Media Minister Benjamin Dalle.
Last year, the Flemish Government decided to use €35 million to prepare the media sector for the digital future. Some of those funds were set aside for projects on disinformation, the deliberate spreading of misinformation.
Following a call for projects, five projects have now been selected, amounting to €3.15 million. The projects involve all kinds of partners, ranging from media companies to universities, colleges and knowledge centres.
One such project is the "First Aid for Doubt" project in which several universities (KU Leuven, VUB, and UA) and different editorial departments (VRT/Knack) will join forces with technology players, Textgain, and fact-checking platform, deCheckers, to make more the region more resilient against disinformation.
Supporting information organisations
Overall, the aim of the five projects is to provide more insight into how media users perceive disinformation, how they interact with it and how editors and journalists can detect and fact-check disinformation faster and more efficiently.
"Disinformation is very widespread in our modern society, It is often used with wrong intentions and sometimes even as a weapon of war. The impact on our society is hard to overestimate," Minister Dalle said.
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"We want to support editors, journalists and organisations to deal with disinformation more efficiently and react faster in a digital environment where it is becoming easy to spread disinformation by the day. We also want to teach news users to be more resilient in dealing with disinformation," the CD&V minister concluded.
