Fighting against disinformation through easy knowledge sharing

The European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) is a European multidisciplinary community gathering digital literacy experts, media practitioners, academic researchers, fact-checkers and other relevant actors. The main purpose of all the hubs is to actively detect, analyze and expose disinformation campaigns across Europe, while improving public awareness, providing tools for detecting fake news, and designing effective responses for local audiences. XWiki SAS provided the technical solution for the following three EDMO hubs: DE FACTO, ADMO, and BROD.

DE FACTO is the French hub that unites fact-checkers, researchers, and educational entities to fight disinformation in France. The hub aims to provide a pluralistic, open and independent platform that focuses on the challenges of information in the digital age and facilitates verification, analysis and media education in this key EU region. This platform brings together fact-checks from leading French media – French Press Agency (also known as AFP), 20 Minutes, Libération, Les Surligneurs, France Info – as well as tutorials, analyses and tools to decipher fake news.

BROD stands for Bulgarian-Romanian Observatory of Digital Media. It brings together some of the most renowned researchers, media literacy providers, journalists, and policy partners active in the region, and the biggest fact-checker worldwide, AFP with its fact-checking operations in Bulgaria and Romania. They also provide tools, videos, tutorials, articles, and other educational resources created by the Hub’s partners aiming to assist teachers, journalists, and citizens in enhancing their media literacy and competences.

ADMO or Adria Digital Media Observatory is the umbrella name for the Croatian and Slovenian hub operation for tackling disinformation and cooperation with EDMO on multiple levels by a multidisciplinary and intersectoral approach. The hub brings fact-checked information, media literacy training programs, and research. The project also aims to encourage governments and regulators to strengthen the collective response to disinformation threats to democracy.

EDMO and its subsequent hubs appeared as part of European Commission's objective to fight threats raised by disinformation in the media sectors while promoting a free, diverse and pluralistic media environment. In 2020 the initial list of hubs was made and approved, in which DE FACTO was also included. The future hubs needed a technical solution with a wide range of tools for writing, publishing, crosschecking information that would later act as the backbone for the development of digital hubs for other European regions.

DE FACTO sprung up from discussions between AFP and the Sciences Po médialab. The AFP R&D team got in touch with XWiki SAS more than 15 years ago for the first time to develop XWiki Watch – a collaborative feed reader. AFP proposed XWiki SAS to take part in the initiative to bring to the consortium its technical know-how in structuring advanced content collaboratively. Thanks to the excellent collaboration on DE FACTO, XWiki was further recommended to be part of the consortiums that developed ADMO and BROD.

For XWiki SAS, taking part in these European hubs fighting disinformation is very important and inline with the company's values. Creating an information ecosystem that is more transparent, with greater diversity and democracy values at its core requires not only strong and accurate journalism, research analyses and media literacy resources, but also the setup of innovative collaborative and open solutions.

With its collaboration, openness, and decentralization embedded values, open-source software plays a significant role in how information is managed, checked, published, and debated.

Most of these features were further implemented into the ADMO and BROD hubs with several improvements across time. Some of these improvements include the structuration of fact-check metadata in BROD with Ontotext and ATC in particular, which will be included in the near future in ADMO as well. These enhancements came from the need to align the formats used by all partners and integrate tools that will provide data regarding information propagation statistics and other metadata.

Furthermore, XWiki SAS took part in several events about disinformation, in particular Infox sur Seine 2023 where it presented a demo of the DE FACTO platform. The feedback from users was positive overall, as pointed out by François Bancilhon, from the Infox sur Seine organization committee:

All three hubs are connected and can exchange data with other European fact-checking platforms and the EDMO portal. DE FACTO, ADMO, and BROD benefit from both structured data with a backend workplace for the project partners and flexibility in uploading a variety of formats for the fact checks.