Disinformation is a phenomenon of growing interest in recent years, especially related to political and institutional events, such as elections of various kinds, or civil mobilisation events, such as 8M. In the case of digital communication, disinformation, along with hate speech, have been issues of growing interest due to their proliferation in corporate social networks (Mathew et al., 2019). These two phenomena complement each other in that they both coincide in having a persuasive nature that benefits from a lack of information on an issue and in undermining human rights and the principles of coexistence (Pate and Ibrahim, 2020).

In order to combat these practices, which foster polarisation and put deliberative democracies at risk, verification companies have proliferated internationally in recent years. In this sense, the profile of the verification journalist has become a job opportunity for future graduates in journalism and related fields. Journalism studies have begun to offer this type of training in different subjects, such as Journalistic Documentation or Digital Journalism, in order to value the social commitment of this profession.

However, verification must also be linked to other social fields, such as sociology, political science, economics or law, as well as to scientific branches, all of which are affected by the manipulation of information for ideological and/or economic purposes. However, it is still not possible to provide a deep, contextualised and technical specialisation on the democratic transcendence of disinformation, the nature of verification projects and the specific methodologies used for the detection and analysis of hoaxes in these training degrees.

Therefore, the aim of this course is to ensure that participants –whether they come from social or scientific backgrounds– are able to use digital tools to examine and contrast dubious information content, especially with regard to human rights.

This course is aimed at people interested in detecting and verifying the different types of disinformation content (hoaxes, deceptions, decontextualisations, exaggerations) that currently attack environmentalism and awareness of climate change, feminism and gender identity politics, migratory phenomena and the right to health protection.

The course is taught through the tools offered by Zoom and the Virtual Classroom of the Universitat de València.

Information about the course: hhttps://go.uv.es/K8UMRaz

Self-enrolment: http://links.uv.es/w2e0IP8