Hello everyone and welcome to a special episode of Europeans at Heart, the podcast created,

written and produced by young European ambassadors from the European Union and the UK.

Today, we are glad to introduce you to Elina Langayyjyotanamishvili, an expert from the NATO

Strategic Communication Centre of Excellence. Helena has a background in communication science and

individual and stage arts.

She specialized in documentary filmmaking.

In fact, in 2020, she released her debut documentary,

Restless Memories that we hope to watch as soon as possible.

Today, we are going to discuss with her the topic of disinformation.

We noted four questions and we're excited to hear the answers. Let's get to it.

So let's start with the first question. What is this information and why should we worry about it?

So disinformation is not the 21st century phenomena,

but I think now it's more prevalent because of the modern technologies.

Information can be spread instantly to wide audiences and so can disinformation. And it goes very quickly beyond geographical borders.

It is also quite difficult to verify these days truthful information to cross-check information.

But performers have a very clever way of creating an illusion that such information is actually confirmed in multiple sources.

So they create these, let's say, fake websites who carry this disinformation, and when you try to Google it, what you see is that multiple sources apparently

confirm whatever the disinformer is trying to tell you.

And I think that social media networks such as Facebook and others have particularly contributed

to this spread of disinformation because psychologically social media networks act as real peer-to-peer networks.

So it's based on personal connections, it's based on trust,

and that's how most people link up on social media networks,

...