We've reached 1000 collaborations with the Superpowers of Maldita.es!

When disinformation circulates, experts are the best weapon to discredit it. During the pandemic, they were the most reliable sources on COVID for 86% of Spaniards, according to the Reuters Institute. You can also be part of this community: your superpowers are those topics you know a lot about, what you study, or are curious about and have a knowledge base. You can share them with us by becoming a maldito/a here.

A community committed against disinformation

At Maldita.es, we quickly realized that without our community, we’d be nowhere: your alerts on WhatsApp are essential in our work against disinformation. The community is also crucial for spreading our debunkings and as financial support as ambassadors of Maldita.es. But, in addition, among the malditas and malditos, there’s a lot of useful knowledge to stop the hoaxes.

November 2018 was a key date to build together what Maldita.es is now. We launched our crowdfunding #FundaMaldita to become a foundation and told you for the first time that, as journalists, we couldn’t know everything. We asked if you wanted to join our battle against disinformation, and the response was overwhelming: more than 2000 people participated in the survey and gave us many ideas for what later became the superpowers community of Maldita.es.

In June 2019, we made our first official call for you to join the community with your superpowers. Before that, we prepared internally to make the most of your willingness to help us. Thanks to a grant from the European Journalism Center, we took the first steps to build the community we have today at Maldita.es. The community we have built together has been the subject of study by other organizations and an international case study.

Facing Hoax Crises Together

In times of uncertainty, the best vaccine against hoaxes is to provide accurate information to the public. Having malditas and malditos who know firsthand the details and intricacies in times of crisis and who share their superpowers with us allows us to be more agile in our fight against disinformation.

During the pandemic, the malditas and malditos experts in immunology, virology, clinical trials… were essential to better understand key concepts and debunk a multitude of hoaxes about the origin of the coronavirus, masks, and prevention measures first; and about vaccines later. On Maldita Twitchería, we spoke with Roger Solanas, a maldito and expert in clinical trials, who helped us with many of these hoaxes.

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, unleashing a flood of hoaxes and disinformation, especially in the form of images and videos, that overwhelmed us. We decided to take a step further in our collaboration with the community and form ‘The O Team’. O for OSINT: a volunteer anti-hoax brigade to fight together against disinformation about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This team, composed of malditas and malditos who had lent us their superpowers related to OSINT, has been helping us provide context to videos and images related to the Russian attack on Ukraine and have been a fundamental part of the international collaboration among fact-checkers #UkraineFacts.

Another hoax crisis you surely remember is the one we experienced after the eruption of the La Palma volcano. We already told you how we used the superpowers in this crisis: Eduardo Suárez, a maldito and seismologist at the IGN (National Geographic Institute), told us about the huge responsibility felt when participating as an expert in the media during a catastrophe. Gonzalo Pascual, a maldito and Councilor for Spatial Planning, Innovation, and New Technologies at the Cabildo of La Palma, told us about the disinformation that most concerned the people of La Palma at that time.

Superpowers on Maldita Twitchería

But the malditas and malditos are not only there during crises, also in celebrations! In 2021, when we were almost debuting Maldita Twitchería, we celebrated with malditas like Paula González or Mar Arribas the first anniversary of Maldita Tecnología. They told us how they collaborate with their superpowers to prevent us from falling for scams or phishing.

On Maldita Twitchería, we also had Alicia Bayón, a doctor in Chemical and Environmental Engineering, who shared her superpowers here: https://clips.twitch.tv/PopularSparklingFlyDansGame–YC7VHcbNXKw9Hkd

Other malditas and malditos have also come to contribute their knowledge and help us resolve your doubts, like Julián Estévez, a researcher in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence and professor at the UPV-EHU, who participated in the Twitchería on autonomous driving; or Miguel Calvo, a teacher and researcher in cybersecurity and computer science at the URJC, and Susana Alwasity, a criminologist and jurist specialized in cyber intelligence, privacy, and cybersecurity, who told us why it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish phishing cases. Ana Belén Ropero, a professor of nutrition and bromatology at Miguel Hernández University, talked to us about the Mediterranean diet on Maldita Twitchería, and we also had a special Twitchería in which several malditos shared their experience.

Some Numbers and Areas for Improvement

One of the goals of the superpowers program at Maldita.es is to offer a space to experts who do not usually participate as sources and to increase diversity in the media. It’s a goal we pursue day after day, but we still have much to improve. 30% of the collaborations are from malditos living in the Madrid or Catalonia communities, and almost 68% of collaborations in the last three years have been made by men.

In the coming months, we want to work on expanding the territorial diversity of the malditas and malditos with superpowers, with greater implementation in other Spanish provinces and growing throughout the global Spanish-speaking environment. We also seek to improve parity in the collaborations we perform. We need you by our side to achieve these goals. Join the Maldita.es community and help us with your superpowers in the battle against lies: become a maldito, become a maldita, and remember that together, it’s harder for them to deceive us.

Do you want to know the editorial team’s favorite collaborations? We tell you about them here.