The European Digital Media Observatory gets 6 new hubs and now covers the whole EU territory

Great news for the fight against disinformation last week! The European Commission (EC) announced that 6 new hubs will be part of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO). The new hubs have been selected following a call for proposals and will complement the territorial scope covered by the hubs already in place. EDMO’s hubs now cover all the EU countries which is a great step forward for addressing disinformation challenges in all EU languages. 

EDMO was launched in June 2020 and is a follow-up of the EC action plan on fighting disinformation released in 2018. It constitutes a hub for fact-checkers, academic researchers and other relevant stakeholders contributing to disinformation research and fight. It is a key infrastructure which enables collaboration and knowledge exchange while taking into consideration the linguistic contextual and cultural specificities of each territory and population covered by each of the respective hubs. Elements which are crucial to address disinformation while respecting freedom of expression. EDMO coordinates, supports and maps fact-checking organisations, disinformation research. It supports public authorities and ensures privacy compliant access to the platform’s data to conduct research.  

The hubs have different tasks such as detecting, analysing, disclosing disinformation campaigns, assessing disinformation’s impact, promoting media literacy, monitoring online platform’s policies, cooperating with national authorities. Two MediaFutures consortium partners are part of the EDMO hubs namely LUISS and KU Leuven.

The hubs sometimes cover several member states. 

The existing 8 hubs: 

• BENEDMO – Belgian Netherlands Digital Media and Disinformation Observatory (covering Belgium, the dutch speaking part and the Netherlands)
• EDMO BELUX – Belgium-Luxembourg Reseacrh Hub on Digital Media and Disinformation
• Ireland Hub 
• CEDMO – Central European Digital Media Observatory (covering Slovakia, Czech Republic and Poland)
• IBERIFIER – Iberian Digital Media Research and Fact-checking hub (covering Spain and Portugal). 
• NORDIS – The Nordic Observatory for Digital Media and Information Disorder (covering Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland). 
• DE FACTO– Observatoire de l’Information et des médias (covering France)
• IDMO – Italian Digital Media Observatory 

The new 6 hubs: 

• ADMO – Adria Digital Media Observatory (covering Croatia and Slovenia);
• BECID – Baltic Engagement Centre for Combating Information Disorders (covering Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania);
• BROD – Bulgarian-Romanian Observatory of Digital Media;
• GADMO – German-Austrian Digital Media Observatory;
• LAKMUSZ – EDMO Hungarian hub against disinformation;
• MedDMO – Mediterranean Digital Media Observatory (covering Greece, Malta and Cyprus)

The new hubs will be operational in 2023!