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 rise of populist and far-right parties – in just 2 years, voting for these parties rose 199% (from 426k to 1.28M votes), while the number of Parliament seats went up by 317% (from 12 to 50). This gave higher visibility to manipulation-prone political actors, which poured into a much greater output of disinformation content and contaminated public discourse. From our perspective, it is of the utmost urgency to widen the scope of disinformation coverage, by implementing prebunking methods, tools and routines, as a complement to daily fact-checking duties. It is urgent to stop disinformation narratives as further upstream as possible. Project Upstream relies on monitoring disinformation “seedbeds” resorting to social media tracker tool Newswhip. Day-to-day operations will be ensured by hiring one more fact-checking journalist, as well as a PhD researcher in charge of methodology, tracking setup, data collection, reporting and liaising between Público and MediaLab.

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