Our Mission

Lie Detectors is an independent and award-winning media literacy organisation in Europe whose remit is to counter the corrosive effect of online disinformation and online polarisation on democracy.

To do this, Lie Detectors empowers young people and teachers to tell fact from fake online and understand how professional journalism works. Interactive training sessions for school and teacher-training communities are run by selected and trained journalists and enable young and old to fact-check online content, understand news media, make informed choices and resist peer pressure as they assemble their worldview.

Lie Detectors contributes its insights from its on-the-ground work into advisory processes in the fields of education and digital rights to facilitate long-term societal resilience to polarisation and disinformation online.

Practically,

We turn working journalists and selected media experts into active participants in the drive for news literacy, creating positive contact between journalists and children as well as teachers. As of June 2021 we are working across Europe with more than 250 professional journalists and media organisations.
We attune teachers in primary, middle and secondary schools to digital media risks, to the tools available to counter it, and to the benefits and relevance of further classroom discussion of a topic often relegated to IT lessons and after-school clubs.
We provide work sheets and create memorable classroom experiences and lasting awareness of children’s own participation in social networks; to propel pupils into an ongoing conversation of news consumption and verifying news.
We provide teacher-training seminars and workshops internationally, both as a Friend of eTwinning and in other fora.
We provide a link between schools and the very best existing news-literacy and news-verification initiatives.
Working with alliances of like-minded organisations, we inform educational policy-making through continued public speaking in varied fora, advocating for the systematic uptake and inclusion of news literacy in the curricula of teacher-training colleges and classrooms across Europe, as urged by Unesco and OECD. As part of this remit, Lie Detectors co-wrote expert recommendations and teacher guidelines as a member of the 2021/2022 Expert Group on Digital Literacy, and was a member of the EU’s 2018 High Level Group on Fake News, advising the European Commission on how to tackle the spread and socio-economic impact of disinformation.
We remain independent of any commercial or political funding.