AFP held fact-checking trainings before the 2025 International Fact-Checking Day
Four AFP journalists from the digital investigation department travelled to Sofia, Bucharest and Budapest, in March and April 2025 to provide fact-checking training to journalists and journalism students.
The sessions were led by Marion Dautry, with her colleagues Rossen Bossev, Paula Cabescu and Ede Zaborszky, experts in tackling disinformation respectively on Bulgarian, Romanian and Hungarian social networks.
The participants learned, and practiced digital investigations techniques, during intensive in-person days of exercises between late March and early April in Bulgaria Romania and Hungary.
“What did I like the most about the training? Being given practical tools for fact-checking” (a Hungarian participant)
They deepened their knowledge of how to detect and tackle misinformation, using techniques such as archiving, reverse image search or geolocation, with a special focus on AI. The trainers also shared advice on staying safe online.
At the end of the training, the participants received a certificate, and key takeaways for their future work.
The trainings were organised by AFP as part of its participation in the Bulgarian-Romanian Observatory of Digital media (BROD) and the Hungarian hub against disinformation Lakmusz-HDMO, two projects focused on fact-checking, media literacy and research on disinformation and co-funded by the European Commission.
AFP is an active partner of these projects belonging to the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) network. Within EDMO, AFP reporters have trained dozens of journalists in Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Hungary and Romania, helping local media organisations to build or develop their fact-checking units.
