WHEN:
Friday, 26 October 2018, 7pm
WHERE:
Ukrainian Cultural Centre, 154 Holland Park Ave, London W11 4UH
Admission:
Free with registration here
As part of its Informal Talks series, The British Ukrainian Aid is hosting Margo Gontar, co-founder of the fact-checking website StopFake.org and presenter of its weekly TV show, StopFakeNews. Listed by Kyiv Post 2017 as one of the winners of Ukraine’s Top 30 Under 30 award for young leaders, Margo is among pioneering journalists in combating false news and propaganda.
Amongst other topics, including the latest fake campaigns against Ukrainian Church receiving the tomos, Margo will present “Fakes Debunked by the StopFake Project between 2014-2017: Narratives and Sources”. This analysis includes the results of research conducted by StopFake based on archived data of debunked messages from Russian media.
Of course, we are also aiming for a lively chat with the guest on combatting the disinformation campaign by Russian media and the fake news trend in general.
About Margo:
Margo has spent almost 15 years in media industry, and is currently focusing on propaganda, fakes, weaponization of media and its direct influence on global democratic processes and institutions, as well as such phenomena as ‘post-truth’ and ‘post-truth society’.
She has been a keynote speaker at a number of international media and politics related events such as Brussels Forum in March, 2018, ‘International Democracy day’ at European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, in September, 2017, Digital Disinformation Forum at Stanford, USA, in June 2017, ‘EU Eastern Partnership: Battlefield of Information War’ discussion at Swedish Parliament in Stockholm in May, 2017, Warsaw Security Forum in Warsaw in October 2016, News Impact Summit in Helsinki in September 2016, Discussion on Digital Disruption in Ukraine at Legatum Institute in London in July 2015, and at Cambridge conference “Ukraine and the Global Information War” in October, 2014 among others.
Margo contributed her comments to The New York Times, RFE/RL, The Guardian, Vice News, Euronews, DW, YLE, NiemanLab, ARD and more.
About StopFake:
The 2016 U.S. presidential election and the U.K. Brexit referendum brought the phrases “post-truth’” and “fake news” into the global vocabulary. But while the West has only just declared war against propaganda and lies, Ukrainian journalists have been fighting on the front lines against falsehood before much of the world realized the dangers of disinformation.
When Russia invaded eastern Ukraine and illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, instructors and students of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy Journalism School launched a project to track and debunk false news about Ukraine and the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution. Much of the nonsense emanated from Russia.
Since then, StopFake.org has grown into a fact-checking platform in 13 languages and acquired a huge body of knowledge about Kremlin propaganda that other nations can learn from. Today, StopFake.org deals with anti-Ukrainian falsehood coming not only from Russia, but from foreign media too, such as when the British newspaper The Independent ranked Kyiv as the most dangerous city in the world, or The New York Times claimed that Ukraine had supplied missile engines to North Korea.
Every month Gontar and her team spend hundreds of hours reading and watching news in Russian and foreign media outlets. Not only do they track, translate and debunk fake news, but they also study the effects of propaganda and teach others how to identify hoaxes.