Learn to Check Holds Workshop to Combat Disinformation About the DANA Storm
Residents of the Valencian town of Aldaia learned to detect hoaxes and verify information in the first workshop of the project ‘Fake News, Real Victims,’ in which we are participating alongside EFE Verifica
The Aldaia library hosted the workshop “Disinformation and the DANA Storm: The Flood of Fake News,” a training session led by Learn to Check and promoted by EFE Verifica as part of the “Fake News, Real Victims” project. This project aims to denounce how disinformation affects people and repair the damage caused in their communities. The session, held just days before the first anniversary of the flash flood that devastated several towns south of the city of Valencia, offered practical tools to recognize and stop disinformation.
During the activity, around thirty participants learned to verify digital content using techniques such as reverse image search, video verification, and the identification of different types of falsehoods, based on real-world examples of hoaxes that circulated after the DANA storm.
During the workshop, held at the Aldaia Municipal Library, which lost more than 50,000 books in the flood, a documentary about Verónica Galduf, a resident of Alfafar and the protagonist of the first story in the “Fake News, Real Victims” series, was shown. She recounted the personal consequences of being a victim of disinformation. “It has helped us to rationalize the dangers we face and to detect them more critically,” one of the participants remarked at the end of the session.
This workshop was the first of six media literacy sessions planned as part of the Learn to Check and EFE Verifica project, which aims to raise awareness about the social impact of hoaxes and strengthen citizens’ information resilience.
Other projects to mitigate the harm of disinformation
El proyecto Noticias falsas, víctimas reales se suma a otras iniciativas que Learn to Check está impulsando para concienciar sobre los daños de la desinformación e impulsar la verificación y el pensamiento crítico. Ejemplos de ellos son el proyecto Media and Information Literacy Community Connections (MILCC), un proyecto internacional para formar en AMI a 150 profesionales de bibliotecas en España, Irlanda y Portugal o el proyecto de talleres intergeneracionales Lo que yo sé sobre Europa. Y tú, ¿qué sabes?, para fomentar la verificación digital, el diálogo intergeneracional y los valores democráticos.
The Fake News, Real Victims project joins other initiatives that Learn to Check is promoting to raise awareness about the harm of disinformation and to encourage fact-checking and critical thinking. Examples include the Media and Information Literacy Community Connections (MILCC), an international initiative to train 150 library professionals in Spain, Ireland, and Portugal in information literacy, and the intergenerational workshop project What I Know About Europe. And You, What Do You Know?, to promote digital fact-checking, intergenerational dialogue, and democratic values.
