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DisInfoResist is the name of the student-driven pilot study and intervention project devoted to building up resilience to disinformation on Russian-Ukrainian conflict among Polish teenagers. It took place in Opole in the summer semester 2024 and was carried out by a group of University of Opole MA students of English Philology in collaboration with University of Lucian Blaga in Sibiu and a local public comprehensive secondary school in Krapkowice, a town 30 km from Opole.
Motivations
The idea for the project arose in early 2024 at the intersection of three opportunities. The MA students had just started taking their Academic Research module for their major in English Language and Communication Studies. In their classes with prof. Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska, they got acquainted with various research orientations and approaches to media analysis, including participatory methods, such as oral histories, citizen science, action research and co-creative interventions. Research projects developed with the use of some of these methods are conducted at UO, in collaboration with FORTHEM labs and educational partner institutions.
At the same time, linguists and media and communication researchers at UO and ULBS launched a joint research project – <a href="https://grants.ulbsibiu.ro/corecon/">CORECON</a> – devoted to exploring and comparing the coverage and reception of Russian-Ukrainian conflict in the Polish, Romanian and English-language media. As a result, some tasks and examples that UO MA students were using in class were related to various representations of the war in the media, with special attention paid to the phenomena of fake news, disinformation, misinformation and malinformation.
To help UO students to understand issues of disinformation better, ULBS expert Ecaterina Ilis, who is concluding her PhD dissertation related to fake news, was invited to give a lecture on the theoretical concepts related to disinformation and to get the students acquainted with current research. In addition, the students were able to learn about the psychological, social and political mechanisms of disinformation campaigns through a simulation and had a chance to analyze and assess fake news from a variety of media sources. Ecaterina Ilis made them acquainted with a large data set of fake news in various languages and across various media related to the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, which was compiled by the experts and activists of <a href="https://russiandisinfo.voxukraine.org/en">VoxUkraine</a>. It is available online as “Propaganda Diary” and can be used for fact-checking.
As both UO and ULBS belong to the FORTHEM Alliance, which offers funding for student-driven projects, and which had just posted a call for applications for the 2024 cycle, the group of six MA students, led by Julia Wnuk-Lipińska, were approved to pursue their DisInfoResist project within the FORTHEM Lab “Resilience, Quality of Life and Demographic Change”. The project took about two weeks to develop, mainly because the team had to ensure that there was an external partner willing to co-create a resilience-themed intervention with UO students. Finally, a secondary school in Krapkowice agreed to join, and a history and civics teacher Krzysztof Adamaszek, as well as the school education advisor Malwina Szaja became involved.
Aims
DisInfoResist promises that the actions would enable young people to successfully spot and identify fake news about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and develop a capacity of remaining resilient to disinformation. Through a combination of research and intervention co-designed by UO and ULBS with partner organizations, the project would seek to equip teenagers with the necessary awareness, analytic skills and media knowledge to critically evaluate information and resist the spread of disinformation.
The specific goals of the <a href="https://www.forthem-alliance.eu/get-involved/labs/resilience-life-quality-demographic-change-lab">project</a> include:
<ul> 	<li>Finding out if teens are exposed to fake news by conducting pilot research in a secondary school in Krapkowice, Opolskie region.</li> 	<li>Organizing workshops with ULBS fake news expert and co-designing strategies to boost critical thinking about the information possible to find online.</li> 	<li>Collaborating with educators to gather data and co-produce tailored intervention proposals.</li> 	<li>Sharing the findings and recommendations to the broader community.</li> </ul>
Co-creation
According to FORTHEM Labs Mission, student-driven projects should be co-created with external stakeholders. This means that the school partner is not to be on the receiving end of the intervention, but that it is supposed to be actively involved in designing the actions and tailoring the solutions to pupils’ needs. Because of the distance between Opole and Krapkowice, much of the early negotiations between UO and the school about available resources and specific needs were conducted remotely, through emails or phone calls.
As reliable input data on the current situation are preconditions for a successful intervention, the first step was to inquire how much Polish teenagers already know about the Russian-Ukrainian war, where they get their news from, and how they form their opinions and judgments about the conflict. The aim was also to elicit information that would correctly benchmark the level of (language) awareness of various mechanics of disinformation and media manipulation.
The secondary school selected a cohort of first graders (14–15-year-olds) as the targets of DisInfoResist interventions, due to their being relatively vulnerable to media influence and their proneness to emotional volatility in some cases. The teachers consulted and advised on the instruction that the UO team had developed to elicit useful information on the teenagers’ typical media consumption practices and responses to media content.
Rather than using questionnaires or interviews, pupils were given 40 minutes of lesson time to express themselves in writing through a narrative that included six prompts on:
<ul> 	<li>associations or images of the war starting or of any memorable media coverage;</li> 	<li>preferred sources of information about the war and the way they customarily made use of them;</li> 	<li>changes to the way they approached media coverage since the war started, and if so how and why the change happened;</li> 	<li>reactions and feelings they had in relation to how war developments were reported at the beginning and now;</li> 	<li>attitudes with respect to the participants in the conflict, primarily Ukraine/Ukrainians and Russia/Russians;</li> 	<li>expectations for the future.</li> </ul>
The narratives were anonymized; the pupils were allowed to write as much or as little as they preferred, but they were incentivized to be open about their opinions. Such narratives are deemed as able to yield a broad spectrum of reflections and input data. Afterwards, the school also helped in co-creating, adapting and implementing the follow-up intervention.
Workshops
On the basis of the analysis of pupils’ narratives, it was possible to assess what can be done to strengthen critical thinking, resilient media consumption and language awareness. The UO team approached the school teachers to help calibrate some interventions. Those included:
<ul> 	<li>an overview of the teens’ typical patterns of media use and reception of Russian-Ukrainian conflict that were revealed in narratives with conclusions and recommendations developed on their basis;</li> 	<li>a Kahoot quiz to check the level of teens’ ability to differentiate between fake news and true information related to the war, with subsequent discussion on the cases that were problematic;</li> 	<li>a workshop devoted to teens’ identifying the stylistic mechanisms through which media sensationalized the war coverage based on a corpus of authentic headlines from online versions of two Polish tabloids;</li> 	<li>an online role-playing <a href="https://www.getbadnews.com">game</a> that shows how disinformation campaigns tend to be organized. The player is advised by a bot on the subsequent steps how to impersonate, misinform, and troll other media users – this reveals some of the traps that media users are likely to fall into when disinformation campaigns are coordinated by malicious agents;</li> 	<li>a tailor-made board game that teaches responsible media use by awarding points to players with dispositions to responsible media use and media literacy and eliminating players that chose to use media only for entertainment.</li> </ul>
The intervention was conducted in two 90-minute sessions on 6th June 2024. The pupils were engaged in the activities and actively competed in games and simulations. They also shared ideas and reflections as well as asked some provocative questions about fake news and fact-checking.
The school expressed its appreciation of the UO student team for the willingness to take on such a challenging topic and for the effort to co-create useful activities and offer tailored recommendations, as well as to FORTHEM Alliance for enabling the project. The experience was also memorable for the UO students who developed new skills and competences (see their testimonials in a separate blogpost <a href="https://www.forthem-alliance.eu/blog/disinforesist-university-of-opole-students-testimonials-on-completing-a-project-at-forthem-resilience-lab" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">LINK</a>).
Text by Julia Wnuk-Lipińska, Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska
<a href="https://api.forthem-alliance.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/Blog/Workshop_DisInfoResist_by_FORTHEM.jpg"><img alt src="https://api.forthem-alliance.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/Blog/Workshop_DisInfoResist_by_FORTHEM.jpg" style="height:450px; width:732px"></a>
DisInfoResist introduced as an example of FORTHEM Alliance cooperation (photo Bozhena Korhunyk)
Cover photo: Krapkowice school pupils engaging in a quiz on true or fake news items related to Ukraine war (photo Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska)

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