Timea Steingart
Mar 19, 2023
The Pioneer Foundation's Second Fake News Workshop, held on July 8, 2023, was a successful event designed to combat misinformation and promote media literacy. The workshop took 18 participants through both theoretical and practical lessons on recognizing and protecting against false information.
Last Saturday, July 8, 2023, we once again had the pleasure of welcoming 18 participants to our Fake News Workshop at the Media Pioneer studio in Berlin.
With all the news, social media posts, images, and videos out there, how can you tell what is true and what is not? How can you avoid becoming a purveyor of fake news yourself, and how can you expose false information? The participants learned all this and more from our speakers, who took them on a journey into the world of fake news.
Gabor Steingart, journalist and founder of ThePioneer, gave a presentation on fake news and events in the US. André Wolf, fact checker and press spokesman at Mimikama, then explained conspiracy theories and gave a detailed overview of the development of fake news since 2014. In light of current developments surrounding deepfakes, he also spoke to participants about the relevance of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT.
Participants were then able to use this knowledge base to put theory into practice with Jan Ludwig, fact checker and trainer at dpa, and learn how to carry out fact checks themselves.
After this informative day, participants now know how to recognize fake news, how to track it, and how to protect themselves from it. We are delighted with the inspiring discussions that took place between participants and speakers and would like to thank everyone for their extraordinary commitment and interest in this important topic.
As was the case last time, the feedback from participants was very positive:
“There was a lot of controversial discussion and I took away a lot for my own work – thank you for an inspiring day!”
“The speakers did an excellent job of providing deeper insights into this highly topical issue and shared many practical and technical tips for recognizing fake news. All questions were answered very competently. In addition, there was a lot of discussion and networking among the participants during the workshop and breaks. The organization of the workshop was exemplary.”
“Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.”
– Walter Cronkite.