Disinformation hackathon takes the fight to fake news, battles manipulation
Journalists, programmers, data analysts and designers meet in Buenos Aires to debate and design tools to combat disinformation at an event organised by Fundación Perfil.
Journalists, communicators, media professionals, programmers, data analysts, designers and experts gathered in Buenos Aires this week to tackle one of the biggest issues facing the world today: how to tackle fake news and disinformation in the age of Artificial Intelligence.
The initiative brought together a diverse and mixed group. They gathered in downtown Buenos Aires to find creative ways to deal with the challenges associated with communication and new technologies.
After two intensive days of debate, creation and analysis, attendees at “Hackeá a la desinformación,” organised by Fundación Perfil, walked away inspired.
One of the competing teams also walked away with a considerable pile of pesos in their pocket – a qualified jury judged the projects on show and awarded a million-peso-prize to the most deserving creation.
The winning team, which was awarded 1.5 million pesos, was the creator of “Checknet” – a creative proposal to mitigate disinformation in real time.
Second prize was won by the project ‘Contraverso,’ which walked away with a quarter of a million pesos, as did the third-place team, which created ‘Good News’ and ‘Notiplus.’
The jury’s reasoning had to do with how the proposal was put together and the group’s contribution to the fight against disinformation. Two other remaining teams received a shared third place prize of 125,000 pesos each.
Organised by Fundación Perfil and with the support of Universidad del Sur, the gathering was supported by the US Embassy in Argentina.
The star turn at the event was James Rubin, US State Department Special Envoy and coordinator of the Center for Global Engagement, an agency dedicated to combating disinformation as a propaganda tool.
Read an exclusive interview with Mr Rubin on our backpage of today’s edition.