Maldita.es wins the European Press Prize 2021: European Journalism Award for its WhatsApp chatbot

26,000 users in one year: 61% recurring

In July 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, we launched our WhatsApp chatbot  to automate the process by which we received reports of possible misleading content from our community and the responses. In addition, this system allows us to collect, classify, track and analyze disinformation to study how it circulates. In this way our journalists can better serve the community and bring users closer to quality journalism and information. Our automated chatbot allows us to verify suspicious content in video, audio, image or text format; until receiving content on media literacy. You can also request a written or audio summary of the latest verifications.

After almost a year in operation, more than 26,000 people have used our automated service, of which 61% have done so more than once. Our chatbot has sent more than 400,000 messages, received 108,000 pieces of content to be verified and provided 143,800 summaries of daily denials in text format and 18,400 in audio format. In 2021 alone, 16,200 users have contacted us, with an average of more than 950 conversations per day between those seeking to verify content and those requesting other options from our chatbot. The WhatsApp chatbot is a joint effort between Maldita.es and the technology company Wealize dedicated to creating conversational platforms.

This award coincides with the publication of an analysis on the functioning of our chatbot from our Academic Research Unit under the title «Disinformation on WhatsApp: the Maldita.es chatbot and the ‘Frequently Forwarded’ attribute» which yields some highly valuable data for fact-checkers when confronting misinformation on WhatsApp. This report shows with data how the attribute «frequently forwarded» (those messages that have been forwarded more than 5 times) are indicative of high virality and misinformation when we talk about complaints in a WhatsApp chatbot like ours. In 80% of cases, the most viral content is also the one with the most alerts associated with FF.

If you are interested in understanding this better you can read the report here:

Download report in Spanish .

Download report in English .

The third time lucky

This is the third time we have been nominated for the European Press Prize in 4 years.

• In 2017, Maldita Hemeroteca was nominated.
• In 2018 he was nominated Maldito Bulo.

This year’s jury included former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbriger: Süddeutsche deputy editor Alexandra Föderl-Schmid; the deputy director of Eldiario.es, Juan Luis Sánchez; the editorial director of Le Monde, Sylvie Kauffmann and the freelance journalist, Sheila Sitalsing.

In the rest of the categories, the winners were:

• Janusz Schwertner from Poland in the category of Distinguished Reporter for his work «Love in the time of plague» about the story of a 14-year-old transgender boy, victim of homophobic attacks who was not treated by the system psychiatric hospital in Poland.
• Roman Anin from Russia in the Research category for his work «Kirill and Katya: Love, offshores, and administrative resources. How marrying Putin’s daughter gave Kirill Shamalov a world of opportunity» in which he tells a story of money, power and corruption with the emails exchanged between Kirill Shamalov and Katerina Tihonova, former brother-in-law and daughter of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
• Zsolt Nagy from Hungary in the Opinion category for his article «When Trianon hurts differently » about the importance of the Trianon Peace treaty between Hungary and Romania signed 101 years ago.
• Anastasiya Boika, Maxim Litavrin, David Frenkel, Yegor Skovoroda, Maria Tolstova, Nikita Shulaev, Dmitrii Treshchanin from Belarus in the Special Prize category with their project «Brutalised Minsk: how Belarusian police beat protesters» and is awarded in honor of the independent journalists working in that country.

This prize has been awarded every year since 2012 to celebrate the greatest achievements in European journalism. This year it received more than 1,000 applications from 47 countries, the largest amount in its history. The competition is organized by seven European foundations: The Guardian Foundation, The Politiken Foundation, Agora Foundation, Media Development Investment Fund, The Jyllands-Posten Foundation, The Irish Times Trust Limited, The Thomson Reuters Foundation, Stichting Democratie & Media, Vereniging Veronica and Luminate.

This recognition would not be possible without the support of our Malditos y Malditas community. If you are not yet part of our community, go to this link.

If you want to use our chatbot and help us fight misinformation, write to WhatsApp +34 644 22 93 19. You can notify us of possible hoaxes that are circulating and if they are already verified by our team you will receive the denial instantly. Additionally, each day you can receive an audio and text summary of the day’s denials and you can also learn more about how to combat misinformation with the media literacy content option.