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HDMO, an organisation comprised of journalists and researchers, is revamping its website, Lakmusz.hu, while launching a new website, hdmo.eu, with the support of AFP’s fact-checking team to confront disinformation spreading across Hungarian digital media. Both websites will help to expand the organisation’s reach by disseminating fact-check articles to a larger audience.

“AFP is proud to be taking part in the current fight against disinformation in Hungary, one of the countries most affected by this phenomenon in Europe,” said Bronwen Roberts, who manages AFP’s team of European fact-checkers. “AFP notably provided training during an initial project to help the country’s first internationally recognised fact-checking organisation to emerge. This is a wonderful recognition of the work done daily by our teams in the domain of digital verification.»

HDMO’s original site, Lakmusz.hu was born from a project co-financed by the European Commission. Launched in January 2022, Lakmusz.hu is the first dedicated fact-checking website in Hungary, hosting fact-checking articles produced by journalists of Lakmusz as well as by AFP. Lakmusz.hu is published by Hungarian publisher Magyar Jeti, and it closely cooperates with Magyar Jeti’s popular online news site, 444.hu, which helps to promote fact-checking content.

The new HDMO website, hdmo.eu, includes articles about disinformation published by the research institute Political Capital (the project leader) and independent Hungarian media monitoring group Mertek, as well as media education content produced by Hungarian foundation, Idea, in partnership with AFP.

Both websites were developed by the French software company, ePressPack.

The Lakmusz-HDMO project, co-financed by the European Union, is part of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO). This independent coordinating body was created in 2020 to unite journalists, scholars and experts in media education in the fight against disinformation. The network covers every European Union country through 14 hubs. AFP is a member of 8 EDMO hubs.