(CEM) A meeting was held at the Council for Electronic Media between the members of the CEM and the project managers for the GATE’s project Bulgarian-Romanian Observatory for Digital Media – BROD – Prof. Silvia Ilieva, project coordinator, Assoc. Prof. Milena Dobreva, scientific coordinator and Borislav Bankov, organizational manager.
The Chairperson of the CEM, Sonja Momchilova, informed that, regardless of the deficiencies in the Law on Radio and Television, the Council has conducted a number of initiatives and discussions on the topic of disinformation and media literacy.
During the presentation of BROD, Prof. Ilieva emphasized that the Institute “Big Data for Smart society” (GATE) at Sofia University is the coordinator of the project, which includes eleven partners from five European countries, among which Agence France Presse, BNT and others. The project aims to create a multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder and multi-nationality hub for detecting, analyzing and combating disinformation in Bulgaria and Romania. The observatory will provide international expertise and various capabilities for the rapid detection and analysis of disinformation and will cooperate with the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO). In the field of media literacy, the observatory has set itself the goal of developing an algorithm for sifting fake news from authentic news.
CEM members and project representatives agreed on the need for joint cooperation in the fight against disinformation and fake news. It was noted that the Council’s specialized monitoring could assist the observatory by providing it with narratives ascertained from the monitoring, which are often used to exchange data and from social go to electronic media. CEM expressed readiness for cooperation by mediating the observatory with the countries that took part in the Balkan meeting of media regulators in November in Sofia, with which it is in effective cooperation.
The participants in the meeting agreed to soon draw up and sign a joint agreement on partnership and cooperation between CEM and BROD.
This project has received funding from the European Union under Contract number: 101083730 — BROD. This document reflects the views only of the independent Consortium, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained herein.