BROD aims to create a multinational, multi-stakeholder and multidisciplinary regional hub for detection, analysis and combating disinformation circulating in Bulgaria and Romania.
Project website: https://brodhub.eu/
CORDIS website: (to be added, not yet available)
Social Media: LinkedIn, Twitter
Contact: Andrey Tagarev
Project Overview
The Bulgarian-Romanian Observatory of Digital Media is highly relevant in the region, which due to the poor media freedom and low citizen media literacy is highly prone to coordinated internal and external disinformation campaigns aiming at the EU. Through multi-stakeholder, cross-border collaboration in fact-checking and ground-breaking research, the hub will enable uncovering harmful disinformation narratives and their impact on society and democracy across states, cultures, and languages.
The project brings together seasoned researchers, media literacy providers, journalists, and policy partners active in the region as well as the biggest fact-checker worldwide, AFP, with its fact-checking operations in Bulgaria and Romania. Leveraging partners’ expertise, BROD will offer locally adapted multilingual tools for disinformation campaigns analysis, media literacy activities, fact-checks and media and disinformation research to meet the needs of national media and public authorities.
Ontotext’s Role
In its work on BROD, Sirma AI (trading as Ontotext) will build upon its sustained efforts to contribute to the fight against disinformation, which include participation in the WeVerify project and its currently ongoing continuation, vera.ai. Ontotext’s primary task within BROD is to further develop its publicly available graph database of debunked content, created in the course of WeVerify. As fact-checks produced by the consortium will be continuously added to the database, we will implement new cross-lingual search functionality to enable Bulgarian media professionals or researchers to study fact-checks in Romanian and vice versa.
In addition to the standard keyword search box, the search user interface of the database will also offer localised faceted search and browse capabilities based on topics and entities that occur in the fact-checks. This intuitive cross-lingual search interface will then be integrated within the BROD multilingual web portal, developed by partner XWiki.
Ontotext’s experienced research team is also set to contribute to the study of disinformation narratives and campaigns across Bulgaria and Romania.
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.