“Nuclear war, chemtrails, HIV as a means of reducing world population. The number of misinformation spread online is still growing,” was heard in the Newsroom ČT24 program last Sunday.
And then the presenter presented a project with which the organization Demagog.cz fights against influencing the European elections.
Its representatives explained that with the development of AI technology, they expect this year’s European elections “an awful lot of content of various fictional conspiracies”.
The project wants to counter this by appealing to voters not to believe these things. For this purpose, a campaign was created, which the association wants to spread on television and on the Internet.
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The Demagog.cz project was created in 2012 as an initiative of two students of Masaryk University in Brno, who verified the veracity of politicians’ statements. They found inspiration in Slovakia, where a similar project had already run before.
Some of their evaluations faced criticism, especially because they tried to categorize the statements consistently in the true-false category, which did not always manage to cover all aspects.
Their analysis of the statements of associate professor Martin Konvička was criticized a lot, when the evaluators were treading on the thin ice of religious texts, and overall their evaluation seemed very biased and doubtful.
At the time, doubts were also raised about the financing, to which the family of George Soros’s Open Society Fund made a significant contribution.
When, after Brexit and the election victory of Donald Trump, the mainstream media explained that these unexpected results were caused by disinformation, and the European Union defined the fight against it as its theme, a well-established fact-checking organization became part of the nascent anti-disinformation structures.
In 2020, they joined a network of independent fact-checking partners who verify the veracity of selected Facebook and Instagram content for Facebook. “As part of our cooperation with Facebook, we have flagged over 861,000 false or otherwise misleading posts in the Czech Republic since the beginning of 2023 alone,” says its coordinator. Demagog.cz is also a member of the International Fact-Checking Network.
Demagog also participates in the CEDMO project, which examines disinformation from a theoretical point of view and is backed by FSV UK academician and Czech TV presenter Václav Moravec.
We have already informed repeatedly about the financing of Moravc’s project from public money. Most recently, the Central European Observatory of Digital Media placed an order with the company Design Press Albums modification of the logo and manual of the new visual style for 80 thousand crowns plus VAT.
CEDMO is also led as a media partner for their latest project Misinformation can affect us more than we think.
Therefore, he “tries to emphasize the urgency of educating the public about the risks that misinformation increasingly poses to society.” Project coordinator Petr Gongala talks about coordinated campaigns that try to influence, for example, the upcoming European elections.
Lukáš Kutil, a data analyst from the CEDMO observatory, emphasizes that the feeling of being threatened by disinformation among people has intensified in recent months. “People also perceive possible security threats to the Czech Republic as a result of the spread of disinformation, and for that reason they also agree to a certain form of state regulation of media that spread unverified information,” he states.
And hopes in “addressing an even wider circle of the public, which, for example, has not yet found a reason to independently reflect on the negative effects of disinformation”.
The project is linked by a video with a senior citizen who believes misinformation about a fake nuclear explosion and, fearing an atomic attack, walks around the city with a mask in full protective gear, the so-called “atomic brothel”.
The confused pensioner is played by Jan Slovák, an actor known from Prague’s Sklep theater.
The spot will be broadcast on Czech TV and in cinemas.
Money from Google and the EU
As part of the project, a “special website was created, through which the Demagog.cz project presents some of the identified sociological data”.
Web includes a total of four pages, of which the first part of the project name is given on the first, the second part on the second with information that 73 percent of the Czech population perceives disinformation as a problem and 60 percent as a security threat. These data are based on the CEDMO survey.
The third page presents Demagog.cz as a unique Czech project, and you can click through to the fourth, which offers the mentioned video with a pensioner who succumbed to misinformation. Or to the main website of the organization Demagog.cz.
In addition, economic journalist Aleš Borovan in connection with this project points to the problematic independence of the Demagogue with regard to its financing by the European Union or Google. The European Union is also a political entity defending its own political interests, which is even more problematic for a project that assumes the role of a media arbiter.
“Recently, the European Union has come up with several initiatives or regulations that can threaten democratic principles and freedom of speech – especially the censorship Digital Services Act (DSA) or the Orwellian Media Freedom Act (EMFA), which is actually a threat to the functioning of independent media in the EU,” adds Borovan.
“Demagog.cz presents itself as an independent initiative. But as everyone can verify on the Demagog website, the Demagog.cz project is/was financed by the European Union or Google and as such cannot be considered independent,” the journalist repeats for ParlamentníListy.cz.
For a project whose purpose is the search for disinformation, he was also unpleasantly surprised to find that he himself was spreading some disinformation. “It uses the misinformed term ‘marriage for all’, but in reality it is ‘marriage for same-sex couples too.’ Here I quote from the website Demagogue: “Pirate MPs participated in the preparation of a law that proposed to introduce marriage for all in 2018.” Not true, the Pirates are trying to introduce marriage for same-sex couples as well. That’s the difference,” he states as an example.
According to him, in the event that Demagog receives space on public television as part of the cooperation, it should be transparently stated what kind of project it is and who it is financed by, so that the viewer can form an independent image.
That Czech Television decided to focus on the topic of disinformation is fine. But it cannot be overlooked that he approaches this somewhat selectively.
“From my point of view, CT clearly ignores the disinformation spread by government politicians. Currently, it concerned, for example, misinformation from the Austrian Minister of the Interior about the migration pact,” concludes Aleš Borovan for ParlamentníListy.cz.
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author: Jakub Vosáhlo
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