The course addressed the importance of fact-checking in daily reporting, reporting on inter-ethnic issues, propaganda, misinformation and the handling of disinformation and fake news on social media.
A total of 13 journalists, 11 of them women, gathered for the training course which started with a keynote speech from BIRN project manager Arita Suhodolli.
The first part of the training was delivered by Kreshnik Gashi, managing editor at KALLXO.com, who used illustrations to explain how information can be altered while spreading across different media.
Gashi also presented the findings from BIRN’s report ‘The Story of Our Lies’, about the influence of China and Russia on disinformation in Kosovo. He discussed with participants the difference between disinformation, fake news, deep fakes and other forms of fake news production.
Gashi closed his part of the course with some practical work on analysing articles by using fact-checking techniques to improve the participants’ critical thinking and taught them various techniques for verifying news.
Dorentina Kastrati, an editor at BIRN, spoke about local initiatives addressing disinformation and misinformation. She started her lecture by presenting BIRN Kosovo’s initiative to create the Coalition Against Disinformation. She also emphasised the importance of inter-ethnic groups of journalists engaging in fact-checking and ended her lecture with a summary of how to write fact-checking activity proposals.
The training concluded with a lecture on handling disinformation and fake news on social media networks by the another guest speaker, Faik Ispahiu, the executive director of Internews Kosova.
Ispahiu talked about how KALLXO.com’s Krypometer (Truth-o-meter) become the first fact-checking tool in Kosovo to be granted a licence by the International Fact-Checking Network. He also explained the mechanisms Facebook and other social media companies use for fact-checking news.
The training course was supported by the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, UNMIK.