Maldita.es' rules for awareness-raising, public policy and lobbying activities

At Maldita.es we are dedicated to the fight against disinformation. Often we do it by verifying hoaxes, but also in other ways: creating technologies that help people to distinguish between what is real and what is fake; teaching in schools, institutes and universities; or fighting for administrations to behave with transparency and not with obscurantism. And, of course, talking to politicians and institutions.

Why? Because we have to tell them what we do and what they can do to fight disinformation. We want to explain why we believe that certain measures would be effective against disinformation and, above all, we want to tell you what evidence has led us to think this way. Since 2020, a unit of Maldita.es is specifically dedicated to improving public policies.

If we tell you this it is because we have published our standards for awareness-raising, public policy and lobbying activities. It is a set of clear rules so that our team knows what they can and cannot do, but above all so that you know exactly what limits we have set ourselves when we talk to politicians and institutions to explain our knowledge of disinformation and our positions on the policies that should be implemented. These are some of the principles we will follow:

• We will only lobby on issues directly related to our mission: disinformation, fact-checking, journalism, media literacy, information technologies, transparency and freedom of expression.

• Let’s be transparent. When we promote a policy, we will publicly explain our reasons and record in a public record all the meetings we have regarding it with political actors or public officials.

• All of our awareness-raising, public policy and lobbying activities will be clearly separated from our editorial activity, so that the editorial independence of Maldita.es is never compromised. 

• Maldita.es will never officially support a candidate or political party and accepting any position in a party is incompatible with working here, in accordance with our neutrality policy.

• Our positions will evolve and change in response to new scientific evidence. Those changes and their reasons will be made public. 

• We will not accept any funding if it depends on taking one position or another on public policy or carrying out awareness-raising, public policy and lobbying activities outside of our mission.

You can see the full rules here, but you’ll find that they all revolve around the basic principles of transparency and independence. We believe that they will help us do a better job in the area of ​​public policies and that they will also serve to clarify any doubts about what we do. 

A work in progress

We decided a long time ago that sharing our experience doing journalism with institutions was important. In Spain we have told you why we wanted to talk about disinformation with all the political parties represented in the Congress of Deputies, but the truth is that most of the major debates on the regulation of disinformation occur in the field of the European Union.

In 2017 we were part of the European Commission’s High Level Group on disinformation and at the end of last year we explained why we are also involved in the drafting of the new European self-regulation code on Disinformation together with the main digital platforms. We also wanted to tell you how we saw certain debates regarding the new European Digital Services law and how they could affect disinformation.

In order to help design effective policies against disinformation, it is important to have good information and collaborate with others. Maldita.es heads the EFCSN project to write and implement a Code of Professional Integrity for Independent European Fact-checking Organizations and we are also in the consortium that directs Iberifier, the disinformation observatory in Spain and Portugal that belongs to the Observatory network European Disinformation EDMO. Recently, we have joined the EDMO task force for the Ukraine crisis.