Project Upstream is a joint effort by Público and MediaLab Iscte to increase Público’s fact-checking capacity, widening the coverage and optimising response time. The focus is no longer solely on debunking false information, but in making prebunking top priority – by being able to anticipate disinformation narratives at their “seedbed”, we can tackle them sooner, and curb their propagation. Simultaneously, this project aims to increase the visibility of MediaLab’s research work on disinformation, providing a scientific context to Público readers – while also contributing to MediaLab’s scientific output production. At the project’s conclusion, the consortium will host a conference bringing together fact-checkers from all Portuguese IFCN-signatory media, as well as representatives from academia, public entities and NGO’s. Público started regular fact-checking activity in 2021, amidst the pandemic’s disinformation high tide. Since then, the scenario has changed for the worse. Despite increased efforts by media outlets such as Público, disinformation keeps emerging as fast as we can tackle it (if not faster) – and spreading at a much larger scale than checked content. Despite its importance, debunking alone is no longer enough to staunch the narrative flow. No matter how good a fact-checking process is, we can only mitigate the velocity at which disinformation spreads by detecting it at its source. In the social media ecosystem, algorithms governing content visibility tend to favour that with higher user interaction, regardless of the message conveyed. Hate content may go unchecked for quite long until platform moderators decide to flag, restrict or remove it. In Portugal, the last couple of years have witnessed a huge growth in anti-migration disinformation content, an unusual discourse for a traditionally welcoming and gregarious country. The phenomenon does replicate narratives earlier disseminated in other European countries, but one must not dissociate it from the ...

  MIL Community Connections (MIL CC) aims to tackle three major challenges faced by public libraries today: 1) librarians often lack Media and Information Literacy (MIL) training and crucial skills, especially in the age of generative AI; 2) despite the availability of high-quality, free-to-use MIL resources, most are not tailored to the specific needs of libraries and their patrons; 3) library structures and community contexts vary greatly across Europe, yet MIL resources are often created without considering issues of translation and adaptation.   To address these challenges, MIL CC offers a hybrid course for librarians, designed and implemented by Learn to Check (Spain), involving librarians and local community members, including teenagers, adults, and elderly people. Initially in Catalan, the course will be translated into English, Portuguese, and Spanish, and will be updated and improved based on the results of a 2023 Irish pilot community training program aimed to empower teachers, librarians, and community leaders to deliver MIL workshops within their communities.   Through the MIL CC course, 150 librarians will develop community MIL projects tailored to specific contexts. They will also design, implement, and evaluate MIL activities, establishing a set of best practices. Standards for course implementation and project creation will be established and validated by national supporting partners and an international expert consultation group, using a co-design methodology.   All training materials and standards will be published under a Creative Commons license and extensively promoted through existing networks (e.g., EDMO) and a network of interconnected libraries, one of the key outcomes of MIL CC.  

The Iberian Digital Media Observatory (IBERIFIER Plus) aims to expand the ongoing activities of IBERIFIER (www.iberifier.eu),the Iberian hub established in 2021 dedicated to researching and combating disinformation in Spain and Portugal. Composed of ahighly experienced and qualified consortium of 25 partners and 1 associate partner, the new hub plans to engage in fact-checking inthree languages (Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan) while exploring artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for early disinformationdetection. It will also analyse the impacts of disinformation, particularly in the digital media ecosystem, and promote media literacy.Thus, IBERIFIER Plus covers all the key objectives of the Call, including actively engaging with EDMO, fact-checking harmfuldisinformation, conducting research on disinformation's impact on society, supporting media literacy campaigns, monitoring onlineplatform policies, and enhancing communication efforts. Aligned with the Call's focus on linguistic areas, IBERIFIER Plus' unique aspectis its ambition to expand its activities beyond Spain and Portugal, influencing the Ibero-American region, Africa, and Asia, where Spanishand Portuguese are spoken by over 800 million native speakers. Regarding impact, IBERIFIER Plus plans to employ dissemination,exploitation, and engagement strategies to ensure the effective sharing, application, and engagement of multiple stakeholders with itsresearch outcomes. Overall, IBERIFIER Plus aims to contribute to the Digital Europe Programme's objectives and EDMO strategy byaddressing disinformation challenges in Spain and Portugal, and expanding its reach beyond these two countries.

The ESIF.COM-BOOST Project stems from the recognition that European citizens in general, and Portuguese citizens in particular, possess limited knowledge about European funds and hold a moderately positive perception of their impact. This project, funded under the Technical Assistance Programme 2030 (PAT2030-FEDER-00023200), aimed to enhance public awareness of European funds through the qualitative improvement of communication efforts under PT2030, a public policy framework consolidating European funds in Portugal. To achieve this, an applied research initiative was developed to identify the primary constraints affecting communication within the process of constructing the public value of European funds. Additionally, it sought to pinpoint key interventions capable of overcoming these barriers and generating causal chains with the potential to strengthen their public value over time. Furthermore, the project identified gaps in knowledge and competencies among media communication professionals, facilitating the development of action proposals for capacity building within audiences directly linked to the media communication ecosystem.

ALGOWATCH aims to create a dedicated multi-stakeholder team focused on algo-literacy, an emergent sub-field of Media and Information Literacy (MIL), with a special focus on how to detect and deflect algorithmic disinformation. The action will use an empowerment by design methodology, having participants co-create interactive quizzes and board games, to foster self-efficacy and participatory processes among people with low skills (youth 15+ and multiplier professionals). ALGOWATCH will capitalize on 2022 Crossover project (https://crossover.social), to scale up algo-literacy across Europe. It will unpack the Crossover “Algo literacy for all in 10 key points, with interactive quizzes and board games shared in local exhibits, for better e-inclusion. The action will have a strong focus on behavioural change, motivating watchful participants to build individual resilience and collective resistance to disinformation (verification, advocacy, alternate uses). The ALGOWATCH work plan includes 4 activities, over 2 years: 1) Produce interactive quizzes and games for awareness; 2) Engage participants in co-creative activities in an exhibit space; 3) Deploy exhibit in workshops with multiplier professionals in formal settings (schools) and in informal settings (libraries, museums); 4) Disseminate the resources for transfer of practices. The final deliverables will consist of an activity bank and a dissemination toolkit (with pathways for e-inclusion, communication plan and evaluation plan). The ALGOWATCH consortium brings together all required expertise, each partner working with an extended network of partners and EDMO hubs: 1) S*D (France), a MIL NGO with experience in games, quizzes and project coordination; 2) DKMK (Croatia), a MIL NGO with experience in workshop evaluation; 3) NUIM (Ireland), a university specialised in digital games and empowerment by design; 4) ISCTE (Portugal), a university specialised in training and outreach to diverse communities of practice. ...

O MetDigi - Metodologias de Pesquisa Digital é um projeto desenvolvido no âmbito das atividades de investigação do MediaLab, laboratório integrado no Centro de Investigação e Estudos em Sociologia (CIES-Iscte) do Iscte - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa. O seu principal objetivo é o estudo de plataformas digitais (redes sociais, aplicações móveis, motores de pesquisa) e de fenómenos sociais que acontecem e se desenvolvem nas mesmas. O ambiente online é o contexto de investigação e as dinâmicas inerentes o seu objeto de estudo. Desinformação, relacionamentos, saúde, política, recomendações, movimentos online, são alguns exemplos de temas já investigados. Fá-lo desde uma abordagem metodológica qualitativa e quantitativa, numa ótica dos métodos digitais. Recorre a ferramentas digitais para recolher dados, ordená-los, classificá-los e visualizá-los de forma a enquadrá-los de acordo com dinâmicas culturais e sociais. Reflete sobre como as plataformas digitais moldam tais dinâmicas e como são moldadas pelos utilizadores. O MetDigi - Metodologias de Pesquisa Digital convida estudantes e investigadores, que pretendam aprender sobre métodos digitais e recorrer aos mesmos para estudar fenómenos online, para ficarem atentos aos resultados de investigação e oferta letiva no âmbito. Equipa do projeto: Gustavo CardosoRita Sepúlveda José Moreno Inês Narciso Nuno Palma        

This proposal focuses on migration and mobility as one of the key priorities addressed by the EU’s Comprehensive Strategy with Africa. By addressing capacity building in higher journalism education, the project will promote the quality of information and public discourse about migration and mobility in countries of origin and transit of migration towards Europe. Thus, not only HEIs and the media industry, but also societies at large will be impacted. The project is entitled Communicating Migration and Mobility – E-Learning Programs and Newsroom Applications for Sub-Saharan Africa. CoMMPASS will conceptualize a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) curriculum on media and migration for Sub-Saharan Africa HEIs. Thus, the project will support the highly needed digital transformation of higher education in Sub-SaharanAfrica (SSA). Six HEIs from three LDCs (Burkina Faso, Malawi, Uganda) will participate in the project, alongside 8 HEIs from further African countries as associated partners. The African Media Initiative will serve as an industry partner; the Media Challenge Initiative will ensure the students’ perspective throughout the project. UNESCO is among non-HEI partners.The CoMMPASS project will train 100 researchers and teachers at partner and associated partner HEIs, 380 students participating in pilot teaching of the MOOCs, and 250 practicing journalists. CoMMPASS will furthermore support sustainable regional networks by stipulating the establishment of an Alliance of African Journalism Educators (AAJE) and a Forum for African Journalism Students(FAJS). Major outputs will be the 14-module sets of MOOCs in four key languages for SSA (English, French, Portuguese, Swahili), the pilot teaching and a comprehensive multimedia stakeholder communication strategy aimed at key decision makers for journalism education in SSA.  

The News Barometer periodically analyzes the most prominent 'top stories' on online news media in Portugal. Thus, it is intended to identify, systematically and with a consistent methodology over time, the thematization of the public debate through the media. It is assumed that the news media contribute to shape the cultural and social ‘fabric’ through the selection and dissemination of certain media events, in the most diverse social fields. The choice of online media is related to the growing relevance of online news, which corresponds to changes in journalistic practices and, ultimately, how the news reaches the public, in general.  The project is carried out in partnership with Priberam that provides its news monitoring platform and technical support to the proprietary algorithm behind Priberam news clipping web service. The platform dynamically captures all news publications available in more than 1,000 entities (sources of information). The algorithm delivers the 50 most significant 'stories' grouped into clusters. After this process, semantic validation is carried out by human coders, using traditional content analysis techniques. 

IBERIFIER is an Iberian hub that aims to tackle disinformation in Spain and Portugal by bringing together aconsortium of 23 partners, composed of 12 universities, 5 independent fact-checking organisations and publicly-owned news agencies, and 6 leading institutions on strategic analysis, computer and data science, and mediaresearch. With the support of public authorities of both countries, relevant media organisations, several scientific andprofessional associations, as well as some other stakeholders, the activities of this Action comprise: (1) scientificresearch and analysis for the security and development of the Iberian digital media ecosystem; (2) fact-checking inthree languages (Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan); (3) computer and data research aimed at developing systemsfor early detection of disinformation; (4) strategic analyses about the impacts of disinformation on areas such aspolitics, economy, social and security issues, science and technology, and the media industry; and (5) developmentof media literacy, through a set of activities targeted mainly to young people, journalists and citizens in general.Although the consortium focuses its activities on Spain and Portugal, its impacts are expected to reach far beyondthese two countries, thus contributing to the overall strategy and goals of the European Digital Media Observatory.Thanks to the international dimension of some of the consortium partners, as well as the set of scientific,communication and dissemination activities planned, IBERIFIER aims to have impact in the socio-cultural andlinguistic area that comprises all the Iberian-American region as well as some other countries in Africa and Asia,where Spanish and Portuguese languages are spoken by more than 600 million people, spread over 21 Spanish-speaking and 9 Portuguese-speaking countries.

The EUMEPLAT project aims at analyzing the role of media platforms in fostering or dismantling European identity. The assumption we will draw on is that European dimension has rarely been dominant in media history. In most cases – i.e., movie – market shares are mainly divided among national productions and importations from the most influential country. In broadcasting both regional and national patterns emerge, with properly European exchanges being the exception more than the rule. Web platforms are usually owned by US companies, with a new threat appearing in our media landscape. We will focus on the “platformization” process, as the rise of new closed Web architectures, so as to inquire its positive and negative externalities, functional and dis-functional consequences. Positive externalities are beneficial to society at large, in a way that explains the overall ambition of the project. Detecting the insurgence of negative effects is a fundamental duty for scholars and policy-makers, as externalities of both kinds tend to reinforce themselves, giving rise to positive loop feedbacks and critical vicious circles. Negative externalities include misinformation, toxic debate, exclusion of independent voices; positive externalities encompass European co-productions, or practices able to bring people out of the information bubble. For this purpose, we will run a multidisciplinary analysis of platformization in three fields: news, video sharing, media representations, with the final goal to offer a theoretical synthesis. The research question is whether or not new platforms – YouTube, Netflix, NewsFeed - are making European culture more European, based on indicators related to production, consumption and representation. Patterns will be detected by comparing national, regional and European and level. Advanced methods will be applied for data analysis, so as to provide guidelines for decision-makers (i.e., fake news prevention; best practices in co-productions).

The project is the extension of the Erasmus+ KA2 project NEWSREEL - New Skills for the Next Generation of Journalists. The primary goal of NEWSREEL2 - New Teaching Fields for the Next Generation of Journalists is to improve such skills of a new generation of European journalists that are connected to the use of digital communication opportunities in a creative and responsible way for enhancing social benefits of the digital era. Creative and responsible use of digital tools is an indispensable ability of journalists. They should remain reliable and trustworthy sources of news in the digital noise to counterpoint the unverified information that affects the raw emotions and temper of the audience. To achieve these objectives, in the framework of NEWSREEL2, we will develop innovative teaching methods and materials for media and journalism students on the fields of:Storytelling in social media in order to students learn how to present journalistic contents on social media networks;Graphic journalism to get to know the basic tools and subgenres of comics journalism;Improving democratic sensibility to be aware their social role and responsibility in a democratic society of the digital age;Covering migration to improve their research and reporting skills, and understanding migration in a global context;Foreign coverage to be able to contribute to a more balanced coverage of international topics;Journalism for voice-activated assistants and devices to learn how to use them and see the potential that they can bring to newsrooms;AI and journalism, robot journalism and algorithms to know how it can be used, and see clearly its potential and threats;Verifying and analysing fake news to be able to identify information and opinion going viral and to verify information with the help of suitable tools and softwares;Debunking disinformation to get solid knowledge regarding the mechanisms used for debunking fake news and disinformation.

The Covid Check project aims to help optimize official communication and clarify the main issues of the Portuguese about the pandemic, through the creation of a public knowledge network that will be available through a specific website. In this way it can contribute to the optimization of the effective results of communication protocols between health entities and their stakeholders, at internal level, and journalists and citizens, at external level. The expected results are: the promotion of effective and clear messages among the population; contribute to the identification of disinformation that may be harmful to public health; and encourage society to search for reliable sources. To achieve this: entities must improve their communication based on research results; the media must create more focused messages; citizens must understand the practices and behaviours desired to resolve the pandemic. The project is part of the research on desinformation on course in the MediaLab_Iscte.

The main focus of the project is to monitor propaganda and disinformation activities on online social media networks with the objectives of mobilisation, polarisation and political destabilisation in Portugal, regardless of the origin of these activities. Throughout the project period, which corresponds to a moment of great political activity in Portugal, marked by three elections (European, Regional - Madeira and Legislative), an attempt was made to identify and analyse organised movements, political party’s related or not, of propaganda and disinformation with the aim of influencing the informed participation of citizens in the elections. Social network analysis methodologies and tools (i.e. Crimson Hexagon, Netvizz, Google Trends, etc.) will be used to identify, transversally and longitudinally, messages and information dissemination networks with malicious objectives and their international relationships, with special attention to the relations between populist movements and their sharing of messages of misinformation ("fake news"). The final objective is to identify messages, protagonists and channels of disinformation that seek to influence political discourse through the main public online social media networks (Facebook, Twitter and Youtube). The project also aims to contribute to the warning and prevention of the dissemination of malicious propaganda, collaborating with journalistic projects to develop and disseminate the results of research.  Regarding WhatsApp, as it involves the integration of public access groups via an access link, it is expected to replicate the methodology used by Resende et al (2019) that addressed the same phenomenon in Brazilian elections. The anonymization of the personal data of the participants of the groups (phone number, photo and other information associated with the profile) will be made in the collection process, thus not integrating the analysis of the results. This anonymisation of the data in the collection process...

The main focus of the European Media Coach project is the improvement of media literacy levels among young people through the development of large pool of media literate professionals working with youth in schools, youth centers and in non-formal contexts like libraries and museums. Instead of attempting the development of a pilot experimentation project, the European Media Coach project proposes the scaling up of a recognized and proven innovation in the field of media literacy. more specifically, the European Media Coach project aims at the replication of a practice in the field of media literacy that has demonstrable results with qualitative and quantitative evidence of impact; that of the Dutch national media coach program. Number of years the Dutch media coach training initiative has successfully achieved the goal of improving media literacy among children, young people and parents by training youth professionals, notably, teachers, librarians, youth workers, government officials and other societal professionals and by giving them the opportunity to study the possibilities and challenges of these new media and new literacies.

Journalists have an essential role in the new media landscape as a pillar of credible and contextualized information. Being in competition with several alternative forms of news, non-professional or even deliberately manipulated news, professional journalism should be empowered by new competencies and skills. Opportunities enabled by digital technologies, such as processing, analysing and visualising large amounts of data, as well as multi-sectoral and digital cross-border co-operations, open new fields of journalistic activities, and new ways to speak about public issues. However, this environment also entails technical and economic risks, and demands expertise in IT security, as well as the development of business models and strategies from journalists and media companies. Journalists face several ethical challenges that should be handled to meet their social responsibilities. Fake news and hate speech have become major issues in the public sphere, as have whistleblowing and activism. By improving skills of a new generation of European journalists, NEWSREEL will contribute to the strengthening of the common European democratic public sphere. It will do so by improving collaborative and cross-border journalism that is able to elaborate and make tangible the huge amount of available data, and which is based on a predictable business strategy and a firm ethical foundation. The main goal of the project is developing e-learning materials connected to four fields: data journalism, new business models, collaborative journalism and ethical challenges. All educational materials produced by the project will be made openly and freely accessible through open licenses via the project’s website.

The main goal of the survey is to analize the working conditions of the portuguese and foreign journalists working in Portugal.It is also an objective to know their education background and professional profile.The survey also wants to identify the main constrains and challenges that journalism professionals face in the current media market in Portugal.The target of this survey is all journalists working in Portugal.

The Reuters Digital News Report is an international research project, coordinated by the University of Oxford's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Started in 2012, its main objective is to monitor the evolution of the consumption of digital news in the countries and provide timely analysis and data for industry, regulators and academia. Portugal participates in the study, since the 2015 edition, with the collaboration of researchers from CIES and OberCom.

The European Journalism Observatory is an ongoing project designed to build bridges that links journalism cultures across Europe and the US, facilitating collaboration between media researchers and practitioners. Making media research results accessible to larger audiences by studying “best practices” in journalism and analyzing trends in the media industry is a major goal of the European Journalism Observatory (EJO http://en.ejo.ch ), which also seeks to contribute to improving the quality of journalism, better understanding of the media and freedom of the press. EJO's work addresses the needs of journalists and media managers at the same time, serving as a resource for those interested in media developments to narrow the gap between academia and the media professional. The European Observatory for Journalism was established in spring 2004 as a non-profit institute at the Italian Università della Svizzera, and Portugal has joined the project since 2014. EJO is a developing network with the collaboration of universities and institutes from 13 countries. This project also works together on various smaller projects that emerge over time. As an example, projects were undertaken to analyze the news approach to migrant issues in Europe, or the approaches to Brexit or elections that elected Donald Trump in the USA.

Using a combination of well-accepted scientific survey methods and techniques for social science data analysis, the research team will conduct a two year long longitudinal study on the impact over time of computers, the Internet and related technologies on families and society. The team is already working closely with comparable teams in the USA (UCLA); Nanyang Technological University (Singapore);SDA Bocconi University in Milan (Italy);World Internet Institute (Sweden);Oxford Internet Institute (Britain);Theseus International Management Institute (France);European Institute for the Media (Germany); Technical University of Budapest (Hungary);Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (China); City University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong); National Chung Cheung University (Taiwan); Toyo University (Japan); Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (India); University of Macau; Yonsei University (Korea); Universidad Catolica de Chile; Servilab (Spain); Institute of Applied Economics & Fundacion de investigaciones Economicas Latinoamericananas (Argentina);Canadian Media Research Consortium (Ryerson University, York University, University of Montreal, University of British Columbia, University of Laval). The research team became interested in this project while doing extensive work over the past four years on televison, radio, newspapers, internet and its content (COST A20 research network). <br>In 1998 television viewing by children under the age of 14 in the United States dropped for the first time in the 50-year history of television, the same phenomena seems to happen currently in several countries, Portugal included. It is possible that for the very first time, in two generations, children might have found something more appealing than television: computers and the Internet.

The research project is part of an action of COST A20 (http://cost-a20.iscte.pt) and being developed in 22 European countries. The main objective of the project is to increase knowlegde about the complex interplay between the Internet and Mass Media in different European countries.