A guide by our Associate Fellow and Fact-checker Szilárd Teczár

With the elections for the European parliament coming up in June, official media channels as well as social media platforms are important sources of information for voters on which to base their decisions.

However, disinformation campaigns by actors interested in undermining democratic procedures and societal cohesion have been rampant, as is well documented now. Often, such disinformation comes in the form of carefully crafted narratives that disseminate false claims and twist facts so plausibly that it is not easy to debunk them. Disinformation can be presented as distorted quotations, AI-generated videos or manipulated sources, which are hard to spot for the average media consumer. 

Associate fellow Szilárd Teczár, a journalist from Hungary, is an expert in identifying and countering such narratives, which is part of his daily work at Budapest-based fact-checking agency Lakmusz. In our short video, he talks about the risks of disinformation and lists five strategies on how to spot and  deal with disinformation.