On June 7, 2023 I had the pleasure of joining a panel with Heather Thompson (Democracy Reporting International), Rita Jonusaite (EU Disinfo Lab), and Lea Frühwirth (CeMAS) where we shared insights, lessons learned, and ideas for how to counter disinformation.

Three concrete action items for civil society researchers to help monitor and understand the spread of disinformation that I took away from this session:

👉 Share your research approaches and data requests to help others get a sense of what data platforms hold and what insights are possible. This can form the basis of a joint data knowledge hub that allows us to build on each other’s work and therefore scale up our capabilities to monitor the ever increasing, never sleeping data flows on social media.

👉 No one organisation will be able to monitor all platforms, in all languages, all the time. With the EU elections coming up in 2024, we need to collaborate and share our resources — not in competition with each other but as a united front.

👉 Don’t let platforms of the hook — their profits are beyond any resources that governments or civil society can invest in investigating disinformation campaigns, we can jointly call on them to reduce access burdens, maintain databases, and open up their own tech and research tools to help scale independent efforts.