On December 5, 2022, the Faculty of Philology hosted a master class by guest speaker Gregory Simons (Uppsala University, Sweden). The main topic of the meeting was: “Specifics of Information Pollution and Disinformation during Election Campaigns and Presidential Races”.

The speaker talked about how disinformation and misinformation work during the elections, and pointed out the main ways to deal with these phenomena:
1. Monitoring the activities of political parties, media institutions, media curators of parties, candidates, supporters and individuals interested in conveying messages about elections and governance.
2. Spreading behavior change ideas and messages developed from monitoring to make informed decisions before and during elections and to reduce election violence.
3. Increasing the capacity of media institutions, political parties and their media handlers to engage positively in campaign and/or policy issues and reduce smear campaigns.

The students, who were journalism students from different countries, were interested in the topic: some expressed a desire to conduct a similar analysis of election campaigns in their countries.