By Raluca Tomoni, CiTIUS-USC
The HYBRIDS Doctoral Network is proud to announce its participation in the upcoming MSCA Lunchtime Conversations event titled “Digital Democracy and Citizenship – What Skills in the Era of Fake News and Disinformation?” This event, organized by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) policy unit of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture (DG EAC), will take place online on 31 January 2025, from 12:30 to 14:00 CET.
As part of MSCA’s policy feedback series, this event fosters a dialogue between researchers, EU policymakers, practitioners, and civil society organizations to address emerging challenges and opportunities in the realm of digital democracy and disinformation. HYBRIDS was identified as a good practice project of high relevance for the event, particularly for its contributions to tackling disinformation and supporting democratic participation through interdisciplinary research.
Pablo Gamallo, HYBRIDS Coordinator and senior researcher at CiTIUS-USC, will represent the project as one of the invited panelists. He will be joined by Erik Bran Marino, a doctoral candidate from the University of Évora (UEVORA) whose research focuses on the analysis of political propagation campaigns in social networking platforms. Together, they will present HYBRIDS’ contributions to understanding and addressing the challenges posed by disinformation and the evolving role of digital platforms in democratic participation.
This MSCA Lunchtime Conversation is expected to attract a wide audience, including representatives from various European Commission Directorates, Executive Agencies, researchers, national-level bodies, and civil society organizations. With over 90 attendees in its November pilot event, this series has become a valuable platform for interdisciplinary exchange and impactful discussions on critical societal challenges.
For more information and registration on the MSCA Lunchtime Conversations, please visit the save-the-date page here.
We look forward to contributing to this important dialogue and sharing HYBRIDS’ insights on navigating the complexities of digital democracy in the era of fake news and disinformation.
About the HYBRIDS project
The HYBRIDS project is supported by the Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (HE MSCA) and co-funded by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) HE funding guarantee. The project covers a range of topics related to disinformation, abusive language, and public discourse, including automatic characterization of micro-level structures in social media discourse, measuring the impact of political discourse on public opinion, identifying the stance of argumentative opinions, analyzing political propagation campaigns on social media, detecting hate speech against immigrants, identifying toxic bots on Twitter, detecting hyperpartisan political news, generating hybrid data for online harassment detection, claim verification for fact-checking, detecting harassment on social media, and cross-lingual claim detection for fact-checking.
Coordinated by the Research Centre on Intelligent Technologies of the University of Santiago de Compostela (CiTIUS- USC), it involves partner universities, leading research centres, non-profit organisations, and innovation companies across Europe: Université de Caen (France), Universidade da Coruña (Spain), Universidade de Évora (Portugal), Radboud Universiteit (the Netherlands), Queen Mary University of London (UK), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (Spain), Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Italy), GESIS-Leibniz-Institut fur Sozialwissenschaften (Germany), Fondazione Openpolis ETS (Italy), Fundación Universidad Empresa Gallega (Spain), Factoria de software e multimedia S.L. (IMAXIN, Spain), Industrieanlagen Betriebsgesellschaft MBH (IABG, Germany), Newtral (Spain) and Universita di Padova (Italy).