European Union supports the efforts of the Republic of Moldova in fighting propaganda

Six media organisations received financial support from the European Union to improve the public’s ability to identify and recognize misinformation. 

With the support of the European Union, six civil society organisations – Centrul Media pentru Tine, Ca Lumea, ADEPT, SuperLike, WatchDog.MD and Comunitatea Plus – will help citizens to navigate the complex information environment and learn to distinguish facts from falsehoods.

“The European Union supports the Moldovan efforts in fighting propaganda, assisting authorities, and supporting media and civil society organisations via new projects to help these efforts. Our goal is to help people distinguish reliable information from biased or false information. In this way, they will make better decisions for themselves and will think twice before sharing dubious content on social media,” stated Jānis Mažeiks, Ambassador of the European Union to the Republic of Moldova.

The project foresees different types of activity within the planned actions. Beyond the media literacy efforts, activities primarily target young people and Moldovan citizens in the regions. Selected institutions are to implement their ideas using social platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and establish cooperation with institutions to reach a considerable number of young people and create trustworthy content for different types of information consumers.

Organisations will also monitor the impact of harmful and unreliable information, manipulating and false narratives to measure the volume of the propaganda effect in the Republic of Moldova, both online and offline. This activity will also help to document existing information trends and to answer the question “Why?” it has become trusted in Moldovan societies. Nominated projects suggest strengthening people’s capacities in critical thinking on the national and local levels in different languages spoken in Moldova. 

The organisations received around €38,000 each and have been selected under the “Community Response to Disinformation” grant program launched in August 2022 by Internews and funded by the European Union and are part of the “Supporting Independent Media and Information Resilience (SIMIR) in Moldova” project.