11/29/2022 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 11/29/2022 06:34
According to the IPSOS agency, 29% of people surveyed this year in Central Europe and the Baltic express being strongly affected by disinformation in the media. And the trend is echoed internationally.
Every day, millions of people use Google and YouTube to access accurate information, and help them sort the facts from fiction. We take the challenge of fighting the spread of misinformation online very seriously, but it's not something we can do alone.
Today, Google, in partnership with YouTube, the European University Institute and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, is convening European policymakers, NGOs, media organizations, academics and tech companies to collaborate and share knowledge about tackling misinformation. Over 920 people in Brussels and online will join the discussion, with talks led by experts from across the misinformation landscape.
Today we're announcing additional ways we are furthering media literacy efforts through partnerships and initiatives across Europe:
These new initiatives build upon our work at Google and YouTube to create products and tools to help people around the world better understand what they are seeing online. For instance, About this Result, a feature in Search which provides critical context on a result before you visit the page, was recently expanded to additional languages and has been used more than 2.4 billion times. We also launched a "Super Searchers" initiative to train librarians and library staff across 12 European countries on media literacy best practices, including how to use these tools and our Google Safety Engineering Center for Content Responsibility, in Dublin, opened in 2021 to provide greater transparency to policymakers, researchers and regulators on our work tackling the spread of harmful and illegal content.
Jigsaw, a team within Google that develops research and technology to counter online harms, has also partnered with local experts and academics to develop approaches to both directly counter disinformation and help people more easily identify and refute it. The team recently deployed a series of prebunking videos as a preemptive tactic to help counter anti-refugee narratives across Central and Eastern Europe.
We're grateful to have the opportunity to hear from experts in the misinformation and media literacy communities today in Brussels, and will continue the open and constructive dialogue on how we can make progress together.