The Bulgarian-Romanian Observatory of Digital Media (BROD), operating under the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), has officially launched its website. It arrives at a critical juncture as disinformation and hybrid warfare present significant challenges to the European Union.
The website is accessible in three languages – Bulgarian, Romanian and English – and offers a wide range of resources. Users can examine fact-checks, media literacy materials and research specifically focused on disinformation within the region. The content provided on the platform is unique, developed in collaboration with BROD’s esteemed partners. Additionally, the website will include references to important developments from other observatories affiliated with the European Commission.
BROD portal provides fact-checking content in Bulgarian and Romanian, produced by the partners Agence France-Presse (AFP), Romanian NGO Funky Citizens and the newly-established team at the Bulgarian National Television (BNT). A special section is dedicated to studies on disinformation narratives and campaigns that are to be carried out by researchers from GATE Institute at Sofia University (the project coordinator), the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD), Slovak-based think tank GLOBSEC and the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration in Bucharest (SNSPA).
The Romanian Center for Independent Journalism CJI and the Bulgarian National Training Center will regularly publish media literacy materials aimed to address the educational gap in this area. Technology partners contribute to the website in their own specific ways: XWiki has developed and maintains the portal, Greek company ATC establishes the connections with the EDMO network, and we at Ontotext focus on providing tools to ease fact-checkers’ work and inform the public.
With the project’s launch earlier this year, Ontotext’s involvement in BROD further solidifies its ongoing commitment to combating disinformation. Building upon their previous work in projects like WeVerify and vera.ai, Ontotext’s primary task within BROD is to enhance its publicly available graph database of debunked content, which was initially created during the WeVerify initiative. As the consortium continuously adds new fact-checks to the database, Ontotext is implementing new cross-lingual search functionality to enable Bulgarian media professionals and researchers to access fact-checks in Romanian, and vice versa.
If you want to learn more about BROD partners’ commitment to the topic of fighting disinformation and to be the first to learn about project contributions at the national and European levels, follow the consortium’s Twitter and LinkedIn channels.
This project is co-funded by the European Union’s Digital Europe programme under grant agreement No 101083730. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
For more information, contact Doug Kimball, Chief Marketing Officer at Ontotext