Fighting Disinformation
Results of the First Round

A call for abstracts

The research seminar of the Hungarian Digital Media Observatory, a European Commission funded project hosted by Agence France Presse and with the collaboration of the news organisation 444/Magyar Jeti Zrt., the French ePress, and the Media Universalis Foundation, with the collaboration of ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, aims at addressing the content and contours of the disinformation ecosystem, based on empirical research in the field. Over the past year, Lakmusz.hu, Hungary’s leading fact-checking portal, has provided ample material for the assessment and reviewing of theoretical assumptions about how audiences form normative judgments about media performance in general and disinformation disseminated by the news media in particular. Hence researchers and practitioners will gather in Budapest on 26 and 27 January 2023 at the Central European University to discuss recent trends in the field and to map the prospective journalistic, academic and policy-related tracks of inquiry and action. The event concludes the HDMO project’s first segment with the involvement of a small but strong cohort of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from across Europe.

The topics covered will include the professional, theoretical, and policy-related implications of the epistemologies of truth, the professional legitimation strategies of fact-checking practices, the types of polarisations around truth-bending interventions, as well as the audiences and fans of fakery, just to name a few.

The event will include a series of seminar sessions to be followed by participants’ debates, with connected side events at the Budapest campus of the Central European University. The working language of the event is English.

Organisers call for 300-word abstracts addressing recent issues in sociocultural and political ecosystems of disinformation for panel presentations to this address:

Deadline: December 20th, 2022.