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 ...

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.

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        

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 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 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.