As fact-checkers, we have faced many attacks throughout our work, but that is our challenge. I would not predict how the war against disinformation would end, I see it as a hybrid war and it will intensify. However, with coordinated action we can become more resilient. We can start engaging everyone in society, starting with the government, the media organizations, the journalists themselves must respect professional standards and together we must create a front that will try to prevent all this hybrid war with disinformation. This was stated by the editor-in-chief of Portalb.mk, Elida Zilbeari, speaking on the topic “Encouraging the initiative for verification of facts” at the POINT conference (Political Accountability and New Technologies) that started today in Sarajevo.
Speaking about the importance and the fight against fake news, Zilbeari stressed that the path of fact checking is full of challenges and problematic, because different actors are constantly taking different actions to misinform the people. She explained how they have been working in this direction at the Metamorphosis Foundation for the past decade.
“We started checking the facts ten years ago, and we started checking the promises of politicians, their lies and we documented it all, and we were very interested in following what they say and how they say it. After a while, in 2012, we saw that this is not enough because we live in a time when the so-called regime was in power. Those politicians and the government had captured all state media and the internet was the only free space where we could work, in two languages, Albanian and Macedonian,” Zilbeari said.
Elida Zilbeari, photo: Fisnik Xhelili / Portalb.mk
Given that the citizen is at the center of Metamorphosis’s mission, to empower them to make decisions, to be active, and to participate in policy-making, Zilbeari said that the citizen must receive credible, truthful information and be worthy of making the right decision.
“But the information, the messages that came from the politicians-government were propaganda, disinformation, so in 2013 we started with the service for checking the facts in Albanian and Macedonian, in order to check the facts about the contents published in the media. We tried to control the content with a strict and transparent methodology, which is not something new; it is based on the journalistic code. It was important to do it mainly in Albanian and Macedonian because two different propaganda were spread in the two different ethnicities,” Zilbeari said.
Elida Zilbeari, photo: Fisnik Xhelili / Portalb.mk
Angie Holan – Editor-in-Chief of PolitiFact from the USA also spoke with Zilbeari at this panel; Milijana Rogač – journalist and media researcher from the NGO Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability- CRTA from Serbia; Enock Nyariki International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) Manager and Ieva Ivanauskaite – Head of Business Development at Delphi – the largest online news organization in the Baltic States. You can watch the conference live.
The members of the ACTION SEE network, of which the Metamorphosis Foundation is a part, organize the POINT conference.
In addition to Zilbeari, Vladimir Petrevski, Editor-in-Chief of Truthmeter in Macedonian, also spoke at the conference today, and tomorrow will speak the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Meta.mk – Bojan Blazevski.
