Christo Grozev and Ivan Krastev Discussion on Disinformation

As the world’s attention is centered on the war in Ukraine with news of Wagner’s Yevgeny Prigozhin’s short-lived insurrection in June 2023 still a top story, disinformation has been employed as part of the arsenal of Russia’s war against her neighbor. Fittingly, Prigozhin also is (or probably was) a warlord on the disinformation front with his Agentstvo Internet-issledovaniy (The Internet Research Agency (IRA) troll farm, among others, along with the military mercenaries of Wagner.

As disinformation, and especially disinformation related to the war in Ukraine, remains a major challenge, two notable speakers debated the issue in an online panel on 7 June 2023 within the conference The Role of Civil Society in Countering Disinformation and Promoting Media Literacy. The speakers were Christo Grozev, Investigative Journalist, Bellingcat and Ivan Krastev, Chair of the Board at the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (IWM), and the panel was moderated by Irina Nedeva, President of the Association of European Journalists in Bulgaria and esteemed journalist at the Bulgarian National Radio.

The conference took place on 7-8 June 2023 in Sofia, Bulgaria. Organized by the Active Citizens Fund operators from Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia, the event brought together civil society organizations, activists, experts, government representatives, and other stakeholders to address the pressing challenges of disinformation and the need for the promotion of media literacy in Central and Eastern Europe. 60 participants from eight countries – Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, and Slovakia – took part in the event.

The video recordings of the Special Talks panel of the conference are now available for viewing.