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Commission launches call to create the European Digital Media Observatory

The European Commission has published a call for tenders to create the first core service of a digital platform to help fighting disinformation in Europe. The European Digital Media Observatory will serve as a hub for fact-checkers, academics and researchers to collaborate with each other and actively link with media organisations and media literacy experts, and provide support to policy makers. The call for tenders opened on 1 October and will run until 16 January 2020.

graphic showing magnifying glass over a newspaper with text disinformation

European Commission

Tackling disinformation

UPDATE: the call for tenders deadline has been extended until 16 January 2020.

On 1 October 2019, the Commission launched the first call for tenders for the creation of the European Digital Media Observatory. The call for tenders of up to €2.5 million is the first real step towards the implementation of a European hub to fight disinformation online. The European Digital Media Observatory will allow fact-checkers and academic researchers,  to bring together their efforts and actively collaborate with media organisations and media literacy experts. The platform will provide media practitioners, teachers and citizens with information and material aimed at increasing awareness, building resilience to online disinformation and supporting media literacy campaigns.

The observatory will help design a framework to ensure secure access to platforms’ data for academic researchers working to better understand disinformation.

The call for tenders had alredy been opened until 16 December 2019.  The deadline has been extended to 16 January 2020.

The creation of the Observatory is one of the elements in the Commission’s detailed action plan on fighting disinformation, published on 5 December 2018. The plan aims to reinforce capabilities and strengthen cooperation between Member States and the EU in four key areas: improve detection, coordinate responses, work with online platforms and industry, raise awareness and empower citizens to respond to disinformation online.

Specifically, in the area of awareness and citizens’ empowerment, the plan foresees concrete actions to help fact checkers and researchers in their fight understanding and discovering the sources of disinformation. The Commission committed to finance a digital platform which will network together independent national multidisciplinary teams, and this call for tenders is a direct implementation of the commitment made in the action plan. 

To implement the three other areas of actions, the EU has: