From digital debunking to media censorship: a Malta workshop

21.01.2025

Doing research into disinformation is rewarding. Sharing it – and how we go about it – with a group of close to 100 students is even more so.

On Tuesday 21st January, Megan Mallia, from the University of Malta’s Department of Media and Communications, met students at Junior College, Malta, to talk about media literacy and misinformation.

The hour-long session covered a variety of subjects, including social media and AI-generated content and how the web archive can be used to save and browse pages and posts.

Megan also presented MedDMO’s latest research from Malta on bogus copyright complaints being submitted to Google by bad actors to get legitimate content removed from search results.

Students were encouraged to think about how the term ‘fake news’ can be problematic in that it is often used as a censorship tactic against the media, with local examples including the dehumanisation campaign against Daphne Caruana Galizia and the prime minister’s recent comments about online investigative platform The Shift.

The session ended with a simple message: ‘In a world that sometimes feels hopeless, don’t lose hope. Be critical, not cynical.’ The interest shown by the 16 to 17-year-old students was certainly encouraging, and at least one of them said that he would like to be a journalist – ‘where do I start?’