Date and time: 25 May 2023 (9h00-17h45 CEST)
Venue: NH Brussels EU Berlaymont (Bd Charlemagne 11/19, 1000 Bruxelles)
The event will convene media and policy practitioners, policymakers, academics, regulators, journalists and members of civil society to look at the challenges of online disinformation and how to tackle it. EDMO and its hubs will also share their results in addressing online disinformation and the conference will also look ahead at disinformation in the run-up to the European elections in 2024.
The conference will be hosted on Swapcard with the possibility to join in-person (limited seats) or remotely. Parallel sessions will be open to in-person attendance only.
The event will be followed by a cocktail.
Registrations Closed
Journalists interested in attending are kindly requested to contact us by email [email protected]
Programme
| 09:00 – 09:30 CEST | Registrations and networking |
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09:30 – 09:50 CEST **** Room: Jean Rey I-II-III |
Welcome and introduction
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09:50 – 10:50 CEST **** Room: Jean Rey I-II-III |
Plenary Session – AI and Disinformation Chair: Madeleine de Cock Buning | European University Institute, EDMO Advisory Council
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10:50 – 11:10 CEST **** Room: Jean Rey I-II-III |
Plenary Session – Transnational responses to disinformation Chair: Paula Gori | European University Institute and EDMO
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| 11:10 – 11:50 CEST | Coffee Break |
| Parallel Sessions | |
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11:50 – 12:50 CEST **** Room: Jean Rey I-II-III |
Disinformation: The Code of Practice and the DSA Chair: Paula Gori | European University Institute and EDMO
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11:50 – 12:50 CEST **** Room: De Gasperi II-III |
Disinformation and Open Source Intelligence Chair: Christophe Leclercq | EDMO and Europe’s MediaLab
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| 12:50 – 14:00 CEST | Lunch |
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14:00 – 14:50 CEST **** Room: Jean Rey I-II-III |
Plenary Session – Research on disinformation and data access Chair: Lisa Ginsborg | European University Institute, EDMO
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| Parallel Sessions | |
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14:50 – 15:50 CEST **** Room: Jean Rey I-II-III |
Identifying Media Literacy interventions that really work Chair: Sally Reynolds | EDMO Executive Board, Media and Learning Association
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14:50 – 15:50 CEST **** Room: De Gasperi II-III |
Independent fact-checking – which sustainable model? Chair: Peter Erdélyi | EDMO Executive Board, 444.hu and Hungarian Hub Against Disinformation (HDMO)
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| 15:50 – 16:20 CEST | Coffee Break |
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16:20 – 17:15 CEST **** Room: Jean Rey I-II-III |
Plenary Session – Disinformation, resilience and the 2024 EU elections Chair: Lauri Tierala | European University Institute, EDMO
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17:15 – 17:35 CEST **** Room: Jean Rey I-II-III |
Keynote
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17:35 – 17:45 CEST **** Room: Jean Rey I-II-III |
Closing remarks
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| 17:45 CEST | Cocktail Reception |
Keynote
Věra Jourová is currently Vice President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency and deals with democracy, rule of law, media pluralism and fight against disinformation. From 2014 to 2019, she served as EU Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality. In 2014, before arriving to the European Commission, Ms Jourová held the position of Minister for Regional Development in the Czech Republic.
Meet your speakers
Alberto Rabbachin joined the European Commission in 2013 where he is currently a Deputy Head of Unit. He works mainly on the strategy to tackle disinformation, including the Code of Practice on Disinformation. Before joining the Commission, Alberto was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Oulu.
Alexandre Alaphilippe is the executive director & co-founder of the EU DisinfoLab. Since 2017, he has coordinated some of the organisation’s largest investigations into Information Operations linked to Russia, India and China, and is a member of a number of working groups in Brussels and Washington DC linked to platform regulation, transatlantic relations, and hybrid threats. He has published papers for the Brookings Institution and his work has been featured on CNN, BBC, Le Monde and Politico.
Alina Bârgăoanu, PhD, is a Romanian communication scholar, dean of the College of Communication and Public Relations, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (Bucharest); member of the Advisory Council of European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) and of EDMO’s task force on the war in Ukraine; Marcin Król Fellow at Visegrad Insight; visiting fellow at Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University (October 2018 – March 2019).
Anja Bechmann is professor at Media Studies and director of the interdisciplinary research center DATALAB – Center for Digital Social Research at Aarhus University in Denmark. Her research examines digital and social media communication and collective behavior using large-scale data collection and applied machine learning. She is Principal Investigator of NORDIS.
Bert Pieters is staff member polarisation, disinformation and online hate at Mediawijs, the Flemish knowledge center for digital and media literacy. He co-created different educational tools about propaganda, conspiracy thinking, polarization and online hate. He currently coordinates the media literacy activities within EDMO BELUX and supports the TeaMLit project that aims to form and strengthen a network of teacher trainers working on media literacy in Europe.
Beth Lambert is Head of Policy at Logically AI, a tech company that develops AI to fight harmful online content at scale using fact checkers, OSINT investigators and data science. She is the former Head of Counter Disinformation for the UK Government’s Department for Digital. In 2021 Beth was elected Chair of the Council of Europe’s expert advisory committee on the integrity of the information environment. She also holds a Churchill Fellowship for her research on online harms.
Carlos heads Maldita’s public policy and advocacy operation since 2020, engaging with public and private institutions to adopt more effective policies against disinformation. Before, he worked in TV for 15 years as a reporter, correspondent and executive producer. He has a BA in Journalism (USP-CEU, Madrid, 2006) and a MA in Elections and Campaign Management as a Fulbright Scholar (Fordham University, New York, 2014). He is a regular contributor in Media and a professor at Universidad de Alcalá.
Christine is the director for Europe at AFP. As such she oversees the editorial output and the commercial revenues on the continent. Christine is a journalist and has spent 15 years developing AFP’s video activity before becoming the head of Europe for the global news agency.
Christophe Leclercq is a media entrepreneur, founder of EURACTIV Media Network & Chairman of the think-tank Europe’s MediaLab. He addresses high-level conferences on media policy and strategy. He wrote several opinion articles on Fake News and Disinformation, co-signed by high-level media stakeholders and European policy leaders.
He was on the EU’s High-Level Expert Group on disinformation in 2018 (leading to co-regulation of GAFAs in in Europe), and now is on the Advisory Board of EDMO.
Professor of AI & Society, with a special emphasis on Media and Democracy. Member of the Executive Board of EDMO.
Clare is the Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer of The Global Disinformation Index, a not-for-profit that aims to disrupt, defund and down-rank disinformation. Clare has been a CEO in the commercial and not-for-profit sectors, and has worked on startups in e-commerce, fin-tech and ed-tech. Currently, Clare also serves on the Advisory Council for the European Digital Media Observatory, a project that supports the independent community working to combat disinformation.
Craig Matasick is the Information Integrity Team Lead at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). He manages the OECD DIS/MIS Resource Hub, and has helped spearhead the organization’s work on identifying governance responses to disinformation and building information integrity. Before that, he worked for 7 years with the OECD’s Open Government team.
Delphine Colard is the Head of Unit in the Spokesperson’s unit in the European Parliament also dealing with the fight against disinformation. Before that, she was press officer for Institutional affairs following the AFCO committee in the Press Unit. She joined the European Parliament’s Secretariat in 2010 after serving in the Belgian diplomacy as Deputy Spokesperson of the Belgian Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Spokesperson of the Belgian Permanent Representation to the EU.
Denis Teyssou is managing Agence France-Presse (AFP) Medialab R&D. After serving as a reporter and news editor, he evolved towards journalism and tech projects. He is currently the innovation manager of the EU-funded project vera.ai and participates in DeFacto (French EDMO). Denis is the founder and maker of the InVID-WeVerify verification plugin developed during two eponym H2020 innovation actions and used weekly worldwide by more than 90,000 journalists, fact-checkers & human rights defenders.
Evita Puriņa heads Re:Baltica’s fact-checking section Re:Check since it was created in 2019. Prior to that, she led a media literacy program in Latvian secondary schools. Has more than 20 years of experience in journalism.
Foard Copeland leads TikTok’s Election and Civic Integrity policy, advising strategy and policy development for elections and civic events as well as the platform’s approach to government institutions, politicians and political parties. His team is focused on efforts to safeguard election integrity on TikTok. His first career was in international development where he supported the implementation of national and regional policy frameworks in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
Gianni Riotta is the Pirelli Visiting Professor at Princeton University. He is the Dean of the Master of Communication and Research Center Datalab at Luiss University where he leads IDMO,the national hub of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO),the European Union SOMA Project against disinformation,Media Futures,Data-driven innovation hub for the media value chain project and a new program against the spread of disinformation in partnership with Harvard University and the MFA.
Ginny leads Democracy Forward, an initiative within Microsoft’s Technology & Corporate Responsibility organization that is focused on addressing ongoing challenges to the stability of democracies globally. The program includes efforts to protect elections, political parties, campaigns, and NGOs from cyber-enabled threats and also leads Microsoft’s work to improve the information ecosystem.
Giovanni Zagni is the Director of the Italian fact-checking projects Pagella Politica and Facta.news, and a member of the Executive Board of EDMO. He is a member of the MSI-INF Committee of Experts on the Integrity of Online Information established by the Council of Europe.
Director for Media Policy at the European Commission since 2016. In charge of:
- Copyright law. We prepared and negotiated the reform of the European copyright regulatory framework.
- Broadcasting law. We updated and negotiated the audiovisual media services regulatory framework.
- the MEDIA programme, which provides financial support to the European audiovisual industry and
- the fight against online disinformation and fake news.
Guilherme Canela holds the position of chief of the section of Freedom of Expression and Safety of Journalists at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Before that he was Regional Coordinator of the UNESCO Initiative for the Promotion of Democracy and Freedom of Expression in judicial systems in Latin America. He has a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Brasília (UNB) and a Master’s Degree on Political Science from the University of São Paulo (USP).
Iva Nenadić is an Assistant Professor at the University of Zagreb and a Research Fellow at the European University Institute, affiliated with the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom (CMPF) who coordinates Policy Research and Analysis pillar of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO).
Juan Gomez-Romero is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department of Universidad de Granada. His research focuses on Applied Machine Learning on social and cyber-physical systems. He coordinates the work package in IBERIFIER that investigates the positive and negative effects of Artificial Intelligence on disinformation campaigns and fact-checking activities.
Julia Conemans coordinates the Dutch and Flemish hub BENEDMO. She is affiliated with the Institute for the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision where she works as program manager media and democracy. Within this role she is responsible for the Dutch expert group Round Table on Disinformation. Julia has academic degrees in European law and European studies and has worked in journalism.
Katarína Klingová is a Senior Research Fellow at the GLOBSEC Policy Institute, a think tank based in Bratislava. As member of GLOBSEC’s Democracy & Resilience Program she has been analyzing disinformation and influence operations Central Europe region since 2016. She has authored or co-authored numerous analyses on the impact of information operations and social media on a democratic society, building societal resilience against hybrid threats and strategic communication.
Krisztina Stump is Head of the Unit in charge of combatting online disinformation at the European Commission. The Unit drafted the Commission Guidance on how to strengthen the Code of Practice on Disinformation and accompanied the drafting of the new Code. She is the Chair of the Task-force of the Code of Practice. Krisztina has held various positions within the European Commission, notably in the fields of telecommunications, audiovisual media, media freedom & pluralism and copyright.
Lauri Tierala works at the European University Institute (EUI) School of Transnational Governance as Programme Director for the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO). Until December 2021, he was a Partner and Senior Advisor at Miltton, a public affairs and communications consultancy. Before that has doing global and European public affairs for Finnair, an airline. Lauri has a long record of European policymaking, having worked earlier in at e.g., the European Parliament and European Movement and as a special advisor on EU affairs to e.g. the Prime Minister of Finland. He holds a M.Soc.Sc. from the University of Helsinki.
Leo has a long career in Media Literacy, research and development in higher education, teacher education and sustainable development both in developing and developed country context. He is the Deputy Director of the National Audiovisual Institute of Finland and the Head of its Media Education and Audiovisual Media Department, a government authority under the Ministry of Education and Culture. His main tasks are the promotion of media education and supervision of age ratings in audiovisual media.
Lisa Ginsborg works at the EUI School of Transnational Governance on EDMO and is a Lecturer in International Human Rights at NYU Florence. She has worked in a number of research and teaching positions, including at University College Dublin, the EUI-based Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom and at the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation (EIUC). She previously worked at UN OHCHR and in the legal department of the International Secretariat of Amnesty International.
Campaign Director at Avaaz, he has been leading the organisation’s efforts against disinformation since 2019, both on the research and the advocacy front, including working on the Digital Services Act and currently co-chairing the Working Group on Structural Indicators of the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation. His background is in Computer Science and Machine Learning Research.
Madeleine de Cock Buning is the Vice President for Public Policy EMEA at Netflix. She is also a professor of Copyright and Media Law at the University of Utrecht Faculty of Law (UU), chaired professor of Digital Politics, Economy and Societies at the School of Transnational Governance of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence and Chair of the Advisory Board at the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO).
Maia Klaassen is a Junior Research Fellow in Media Literacy at the University of Tartu. Besides teaching subjects related to information disorders, she is also a Program Manager for the microdegree Information Resilience. She is the coordinator for the Baltic EDMO hub BECID and has facilitated MIL trainings in the NGO field for over 10 years as a youth trainer.
Miguel Poiares Maduro, Dean of the Global School of Law at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa. He is also Chair of the Executive Board of the European Digital Media Observatory. He was until the summer of 2020 Professor and Director of the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute where he continues to be a Visiting Professor. From 2013 to 2015 he was Minister Adjunct to the Prime Minister and Minister for Regional Development in Portugal.
Nikos Sarris is a Senior Researcher at MKLab of ITI-CERTH, a member of the Media Analysis, Verification and Retrieval group and an advisor on media technologies at ATC. Nikos has been working for more than 20 years in R&D projects as a researcher, project manager and coordinator of large multinational consortia mainly related to the semantic ‘understanding’ of content and the assessment of its trustworthiness. Nikos is the coordinator of MedDMO and a member of the Management Committee of EDMO.
Patrick Aichroth worked as a freelance software developer and IT trainer before becoming a researcher at Fraunhofer IDMT in 2003. Since 2006, he has been head of the Media Distribution and Security Group at IDMT, which focuses on the development of technologies for media security, audio manipulation detection and provenance analysis, technical privacy and trustworthy AI, and has conducted numerous industrial and publicly funded R&D projects in these areas.
Paula Gori is the Secretary-General and Coordinator of EDMO. She joined the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute in 2017 where she is a member of the management team. Prior she was the Coordinator of the Florence School of Regulation – Communications and Media, which offers training, policy and research activities on electronic communications regulation and competition and she collaborated with the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom, which she coordinated during the initial set-up phase back in 2012. She was for several years the Scientific Coordinator of the Annual Conference on Postal and Delivery Economics and she is one of the authors of the report for the European Commission on European Union competences in respect of media pluralism and media freedom. Paula has a legal background and is a qualified civil mediator.
Peter Erdelyi is a media executive from Budapest, Hungary with 20+ years of experience in journalism and media management. Over the past two decades, he was involved with launching various digital and print media projects. Most recently, he founded Hungary’s first dedicated anti-disinformation site lakmusz.hu where he serves as director. He is on the executive board of the European Digital Media Observatory an teaches digital media strategy at the ELTE University.
Dr. Rebekah Tromble is Director of the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics and Associate Professor in the School of Media & Public Affairs at George Washington University. She is a member of the EDMO Advisory Council and served as chair of EDMO’s multi-stakeholder Working Group on Platform-to-Researcher Data Access, which produced a draft Code of Conduct for researcher data access under Article 40 of the GDPR.
Ruurd Oosterwoud is the founder and director of DROG Group, a company that develops data-driven solutions to combat online manipulation. DROG has successfully transformed multiple solutions, ranging from social media monitoring to digital resilience, into sustainable ventures. A well-known example is Bad News, which combines gaming and active inoculation to effectively create resilience against harmful techniques.
Sally is the chief coordination officer of the Media & Learning Association (MLA) and joint Director of ATiT. MLA is a not-for-profit membership and networking organisation with over 70 members in 18 countries with a key interest is media education and media literacy. Sally is also director of media literacy for EDMOeu with responsibility for supporting the networking activities related to digital and media literacy amongst the 14 EDMO hubs.
Siada El Ramly is the Director General of DOT Europe. She has over 20 years experience in European public affairs and in particular experience in European Digital Policy having worked for the hardware and software industries in the past. Siada was part of the drafting group on the 1st Code of Practice and took part in the revision of the Code.
Stanislav Matějka is Head of Analytical Department of the Council for Media Services, a national regulatory authority in Slovakia. Since 2022 he is serving as a Chair of ERGA Subgroup 3 Countering disinformation and strengthening democracy in the digital environment. Prior to joining the Council, he served as an analyst within the Hybrid threats Unit and Strategic Communication Unit at Slovak Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs.
Stefan Voss is the head of verification at the German news agency dpa. He has been working for dpa for over 20 years, including more than a decade as a foreign correspondent in Kyiv and Moscow. Stefan is the founder of dpa’s fact-checking team (which now employs around 30 journalists). For many years Stefan has been active as a Social Media trainer for journalists both in Germany and internationally. He is a board member of the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN).
Tommaso Canetta (Milan, 1986) is the deputy director of Pagella Politica and Facta news, the two main Italian fact-checking outlets, the coordinator of the fact-checking activities of EDMO, and a member of the EFCSN governance body. He contributes to the activities of IDMO, the Italian national hub of EDMO, works on several European projects and writes about political fact-checking, especially about legal issues.
Urška Umek is Head of Media Unit at the Council of Europe’s Information Society Department, responsible for developing standards in the area of freedom of expression and media freedom in the digital public sphere. She previously worked as a lawyer at the Registry of the European Court of Human Rights and lawyer-linguist at the Court of Justice of the European Union, after starting her career as a legal adviser at the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Slovenia.