On October 26-28, 2022, IMG and EI experts presented the CounteR solution to a select group of journalists and fact-checkers, working for Bulgaria’s largest and most trusted public broadcaster – the Bulgarian National Radio (BNR).
In a joint effort with other international experts in fact-checking, cybercrime and journalism, EI’s Dr. Borislav Mavrov and IMG’s Georgi Kostadinov provided an advanced training for BNR’s dedicated fact-checking team, organised as part of the #factcheckEI_BNR initiative.
The capacity-building training enabled the team to utilise digital tools and platforms for checking facts more effectively, analysing content and images, monitoring the disinformation ecosystem, discovering the linkages between websites that disseminate misleading information and the mechanisms through which disinformation works on social media.
In their interventions, Mr. Kostadinov and Dr. Mavrov stressed that IMG and EI work jointly on the CounteR project, funded by the H2020 Programme. They briefed the participants about the project goals, the consortium, and the expected project results. The workshop participants were particularly interested in the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in detecting radical content online and in the tools for curbing vulnerable audiences from being exposed to radicalisation online.
In his presentation, Mr. Kostadinov focused on how to detect ShallowFakes – i.e. images edited manually using Photoshop – and DeepFakes, generated automatically via Deep Learning AI and shared online. Next followed a module featuring practical exercises on how to spot the subtle artefacts and nuances that tell whether a given visual media has been manipulated. “The more people are aware of the existence of such content and the methodologies to spot them, the less impact disinformation and misinformation online will have”, Georgi Kostadinov commented. Georgi Kostadinov was invited to participate in a popular radio talk-show, “Horizont Do Obed” providing insights about the role of AI in the fight against misinformation and radicalisation in order to raise the general public’s awareness on this subject, and in line with CounteR’s communication strategy.
