Competition “The Great Unmasking”

Оnline “the bag of lies” seems bottomless, but it is also gathering increasingly difficult-to-uncover falsehoods. Today, there are countless websites that do not adhere to journalistic standards for fact-checking, and innumerable posts on social media where the control and self-control regarding truthfulness are diminished. These are fertile media spaces for planting a lie which, repeated 100 times, can grow into a “truth.” The blurred line between lie and truth threatens our ability to make fair judgments about what is right and wrong, good and evil, just and unjust.

The media is a powerful tool for influencing the minds and hearts of people, but it is up to each of us to decide whether to use it to spread truth and goodness or lies and evil.

The competition “The Great Unmasking” is an initiative through which we express our conviction that every citizen, regardless of their age, education, gender, ethnicity, or religious affiliation, has the right to the truth and must be protected from widely spread lies and deceptions.

That is why we are appealing to students, young people, volunteers and civil activists to participate in the “The Great Unmasking” competition by sharing with us lies and manipulations from publications in the media, the Internet and social networks that they consider particularly harmful and dangerous for young people in Bulgaria. The point is not to collect and sort out as many misleading or false media reports as possible into three categories:

1.     Outright lies and delusions – the most primitive and superficial fabrications and lies – for example, like those from the tales of Cunning Peter: We have two suns. We have winged donkeys and rabbits lay eggs in their nests in the highest trees.

2.     Lightly veiled and misleading information – untruth that at first glance can be taken as “pure coin” or mixed with “truth” for greater “credibility”.

3.     Hard-to-detect lies and misleading messages – lies and misrepresentations that catch the eye of a mass audience and that can only be exposed by experts.

You can join immediately at the following link – https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Razobli4 or by using this QR code:

Don’t forget to enter your contact email to be notified of the results of our raffle with prizes from the competition “The Great Unmasking” that we’ll be drawing at the end of 2024.

You can expose any false and misleading publications – on various media: TV, Internet, social networks, etc. To expose more than one post, you can enter an unlimited number of times at “The Great Unmasking” link – https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Razobli4. We will be grateful if you send the link to your classmates and friends, so that they can also join.

Thank you – with your active participation in “The Great Unmasking”, you are an example of young people’s intransigence with lies and manipulation, and you are helping students and volunteers in the Amalipe Center network to learn how to better get involved in the fight against fake news !

 

 

The initiative took place within the framework of the “Intercultural Academy for Civic Participation and Tolerance” project, which was implemented with the support of the U.S. State Department through the US Embassy in Bulgaria.