From September 5 to 8, 2023, international news agency AFP provided a 4-day training course in digital investigation for five Hungarian journalists, as part of the Lakmusz-HDMO project. The training took place at the European Youth Centre in Budapest.

AFP Training coordinator for Digital investigation Europe Estelle Peard and AFP Hungarian factchecker Ede Zaborszky helped participants deepen their knowledge of what misinformation is and how to detect and tackle it, using techniques such as archiving, reverse image search or geolocation.

Ede Zaborszky explained in detail his daily work and went through examples of his own factchecks verifying false information shared online by Hungarian users.

The participants, all professional journalists, were also briefed about issues such as the challenge posed by artificial intelligence-generated content and how to protect oneself against violent content.

“I gave myself 3 stars for the “digital investigation skills”, because I think I need more practice to incorporate the learned things during the training, but the training itself was very effective.” (a participant)

They all appreciated the training and seemed to be willing applying the learned techniques into their daily work.