Demagog

Report March 2025

Submitted
Demagog is the first Polish fact-checking organization, established in 2014. Our mission is to combat disinformation and improve the quality of public debate by providing access to unbiased and credible information. For more than 10 years we’ve been fact-checking political claims, keeping track of the promises and debunking harmful disinformation. We strive to build a strong misinformation-resilient civil society that keeps politicians accountable for what they say and promise. We believe that we can achieve this goal by empowering citizens with critical fact-checking and media literacy skills. That’s why we share our expertise with others in our educational project called Fact-checking Academy.

We are signatories to the 2022 European Code of Practice on Disinformation and the Polish Code of Good Practices in Combating Disinformation. We are members of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN) and the Central European Digital Media Observatory Hub (CEDMO). We are partners to Meta's Third Party Fact-checking Program and TikTok's Fact-checking Program.

So far, we have fact-checked more than 6000 political claims and additionally, nearly 3000 of fake news.

Activities of our Fact-Checking Academy have ever-increasing scope. So far, we have organized more than 700 different workshops and seminars that gathered approximately 18 000 participants in total. We believe that only via scaling of our media literacy activities we can achieve meaningful change. That’s why, in parallel to our on-site workshops and seminars, we have also developed our elearning platform. Currently, almost 4000 users of the platform have access to various online courses on fact-checking, media literacy and digital skills.

We are active members of various international projects, including EU-funded consortiums. For example, we are participating in the Hatedemics project, whose aim is to strengthen the preventive and reactive measures against hate speech and disinformation online. It aims to empower NGOs/CSOs, fact-checkers, public authorities and youngsters as activists to  effectively prevent and combat polarisation, the spread of racist, xenophobic and intolerant speech, as well as conspiracy theories.

In 2021, we were awarded with the Polish-American Freedom Foundation's Sektor 3.0 prize for innovation in socially useful activities. In 2023, our work was recognized by journalists of the Press Club Poland, who distinguished our organization with their special award for supporting journalists and their audiences in defending against disinformation.

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