George Pleios
George Pleios is a Professor at the Department of Communication & Media Studies of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has also worked at the Department of Sociology, University of Crete, and University of Ioannina. Since 2003, he is Director of the Laboratory for Social Research in Mass Media. He taught also in China, Hungary, Ukraine, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Portugal and other Greek Universities. Author, coauthor, and editor of 9 books, 32 chapters, more than 45 articles published in Greece and internationally (UK, USA, Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria, Romania, China, Australia, Turkey) and PI in 36 research projects. Former member of the Supervisory Board of the ECPMF (2015 – 2017) and of the National Council for Radio and Television of Greece (2016 – 2023), Vice Coordinator of the Research Network 18 (Media Sociology) of the European Sociological Association (2011 – 2014), Vice- President (2016 – 2018) and President (2018 – 2020) of the Hellenic Sociological Society (HSS). His recent publications focus on news and information society, fake news, news and the pandemics, war reporting and political economy of the internet.
See for more: https://pleios.gr/
Disinformation and fake news. Is media education enough?
Abstract
Tackling disinformation, and especially fake news, is a multifaceted and difficult task. Several aspects attach importance to fact-checking. There are currently globally over 400 organizations that do fact-checking, but the phenomenon is not being addressed. On the contrary, it is expanding. Another way is media literacy. It is complementary to fact-checking and not competitive. It matters how we perceive media literacy, by which institutions and how it should be done. However, media literacy alone or in combination with fact-checking may not be able to effectively address misinformation. The speech examines the reasons for this weakness and analyzes complementary ways in which we could achieve better results in the fight against misinformation and fake news.