Donor: British Embassy Prague
Improving the resilience of the Czech population to disinformation through evidence-based counter-strategies and educational interventions.
Project objective: The coronavirus crisis has been a rich source of misinformation and disinformation. We will use the lessons learned to empower individuals, especially vulnerable groups such as seniors. Our project seeks to create a more resilient society to disinformation and hybrid threats by improving the population’s media literacy and by providing practical support to public health institutions, policymakers, educators, media, and journalists in their communication operations and educational efforts. Not restricted to this pandemic, we intend to extrapolate the benefits of this project to any future disinfodemic.
Activities:
1. Public poll and controlled experiment by the STEM Institute to understand:
a) The impact of disinfodemic;
b) The populations´ trust in sources of information;
c) Effective strategies for disinfodemic resilience.
2. Roundtable to present the research findings and to collect feedback from the expert community.
3. Methodology to counter C19-disinfodemic based on the research recommendations with the help of public health, communication, and education experts will be tested through online (lectures to various age groups) and offline (events in local towns) interventions.
4. Final set of guidelines for 5 types of audiences – teachers, librarians, seniors, media, public institutions, accompanied by individual consultancy and mentoring.
5. Training of media literacy trainers and fact-checkers
Updates:
We conducted a survey with the independent STEM institute of empirical research, which looked at public attitudes on conspiracy theories and COVID-19 in the Czech Republic. Full report here. Here are some findings:
