Éva Bognár and Judit Szakács Present Study to EP’s INGE Committee
Our Senior Program Officer and Researcher Éva Bognár and Outreach Coordinator and Fellow Judit Szakács presented their study on minorities and disinformation to the European Parliament’s INGE Committee.
Although the study focused on disinformation originated, funded or amplified by foreign powers, the main findings presented included the importance of domestic actors as well as that of the social context in which disinformation campaigns take place. Bognár and Szakács offered some examples of minority-related disinformation discussed in detail in their study, and explained to MEPs that most of the disinformation leverage old stereotypes and fears about minorities that exist in EU member states’ societies. They presented their findings regarding the actual and potential impact of disinformation campaign but emphasized the difficulties of establishing causality.
The committee meeting included two additional presentations, one on disinformation campaigns and the LGBTQI community, and one by Khadijah Abdurahman, co-founder of We Be Imagining (WBI), a public interest technology project at Columbia University.