Moldovan Media Learn New Skills to Build Resilience

Moldovan journalists from national, regional and local media have learned new skills in detecting and countering fake news from experts from Romania and Georgia in a series of specialist workshops.

IWPR’s local partner in Moldova, the Association of Independent Press (API), held two seminars in May and June 2022 as part of a project supporting Moldovan media’s resilience to disinformation following Russia’s invasion of neighbouring Ukraine.

 The 19 Moldovan journalists took parts in sessions covering how to identify individuals and groups who disseminate disinformation and then package the results of such investigations into engaging articles with the help of infographics. As fact-checking is key to uncoveringdisinformation, participants discussed how to use specific tools, focusing on Facebook, CrowdTangle and Ad Library.

"In journalism, as in medicine, you must always keep your hand on the pulse of technologies that can be used in the name of good but can also have harmful effects,” said Elena Chiriac, director of regional newspaper Est Curier. "The fact-checking workshops were both informative and instructive as they helped us avoid false leads so as not to mislead readers with counterfeit information.”

"Disinformation techniques and tools are advancing at a rapid pace,” noted Sorina Obreja, a former TV journalist and author of False Antibodies, a series of misinformation stories.

“Today, fake distributors are setting up real online factories to spread their messages. It is necessary for honest journalists to take a step forward, to know their mechanisms and judgments so that they can prevent misinformation or at least combat its consequences.”

In the next stage, participants will be paid to write ten stories challenging falsehoods spread about the war in Ukraine, which will benefit from the consultation of fact-checkers and be published both on the journalists’ platforms and on API’s Stopfals.md portal.

“At these workshops I learned about their fact-checking methods and the tools they use to uncover and refute fakes,” continued Obreja. “We will apply them and pass them on to our colleagues or future journalists.”

The project is funded by the United Kingdom's Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).