The Department of Communication Science of the University of Dubrovnik, is project lead of the Adria Digital Media Observatory (ADMO) project, whose aim is to fight disinformation in the digital media in the territory of Croatia and Slovenia. Namely, the European Commission has selected six new hubs, among which ADMO, which are to join the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), whereby EDMO covers the entire territory of the European Union. The project commences on 1 January 2023 and will last for 30 months, and it is EUR 1.8 million worth.
The objective of ADMO is creating and ensuring a long-term development of an independent Croatian/Slovenian hub on digital media, comprised of a multidisciplinary community of academic researchers, fact-checkers, media practitioners, journalists and civil society advocates who are capable of detecting and analysing disinformation campaigns and support the government and regulators in strengthening the collective response to disinformation threats’, pointed out the chief project coordinator and Head of the Department of Communication Science Professor Mato Bratuović, PhD.
ADMO will ensure continuous operation of fact-checking in Croatia and Slovenia and a series of analytic reports on disinformation contents, disinformation sources, origins of disinformation narratives, role of international actors in spreading disinformation, disinformation acceptance and debunking, implementation of the Code of Practice on Disinformation in Croatia and the financial viability of the Croatian and Slovenian news media sector. Also, trainings for journalists and students of journalism will be held and various activities will be carried out with respect to media literacy of the citizens from this region.
Apart from the project lead, the Department of Communication Science of the University of Dubrovnik, project partners are as follows: the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing from the University of Zagreb, the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Zagreb, the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Zagreb, GONG, Adria News d.o.o. (N1 television), Agence France Presse (AFP), Xwiki (France) and Oštro (Slovenia).
The strengthening of the European ecosystem working on fighting against disinformation is extremely important, and one of the most important activities of the European Commission in the solving of this problem was to establishing the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO). EDMO has been active from June 2020, and it is situated at the European University Institute in Florence. An independent multi-disciplinary community of researchers, media literacy experts and fact-checkers are active within EDMO. In cooperation with numerous media organisations and online platforms, they try to find ways how to better understand, analyse and solve the problem of disinformation.
