Lisbon, March 24, 2025 (Lusa) - Disinformation is a small part of the problem when there are "hybrid threats", argued the representative of the Advisory Board of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), Alina Bargoanu, at the conference "Truth in the Age of Disinformation" in Lisbon.
At the conference taking place on Monday at the Catholic University, the professor said that what she calls "cognitive and information warfare" is at stake because, in addition to disinformation, there are "influence operations, foreign interference in elections, cybercrime, algorithmic invasion, diplomatic pressure...".
In this sense, she argued that "this type of influence is trying to interfere with human cognition, emotion and attention, affecting democratic processes and institutions, but also individual and public health in non-democratic nations".
In addition, the professor also raised the question: "Is the current structure of information networks compatible with democracy?", saying that the original technological problem has impacts in several areas.
For the academic, it is "important to understand the technological infrastructure that is influencing these operations, and then go on to the question of foreign interference", highlighting the Romanian context, in which elections were cancelled by the Constitutional Court due to apparent foreign interference in TikTok.
In the context of the Baltic countries, "Russia spends a lot of energy and resources to contaminate public discourse with the aim of making our side of the world look unstable, because the European Union and NATO have intervened to make it unstable," said the director of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network office, Jeta Xharra, who also took part in the conference.
Nevertheless, "locally, the enemy you don't expect is an enemy that treats women very badly. Disinformation treats women worse [than men] and this can be seen in the Kosovo elections in February, where three women ran who were targeted more by disinformation than the other candidates," she said.
"The bad news about this big campaign of disinformation, of violence against women, is that it's affecting decisions, because most women are choosing not to enter public life. So politics has become a field only for the most tough, with a very hard skin, not a field for normal people," she concluded.
Catholic University professor Shenglan Zhou mentioned that disinformation in China has worsened in recent years.
Focussing on understanding "how propaganda and information change children's minds", Zhou used the example of North Korea to say that the country is "using children to produce fake news and that's scary".
Fake news expert and University of Montreal professor Simon Thibault cited research into foreign interference in Canada to say that the country was once described as a "resilient country when it comes to online disinformation".
The conference aims to promote dialogue, identify common ground and develop innovative strategies to effectively tackle the issue of disinformation, while at the same time promoting freedom of expression and freedom of the press.
PYR/AYLS // AYLS
Lusa
