There's Now a Museum of Fake News

Indeed, we should have a place to preserve memories from the disinformation campaigns of our times

Croatia has a bunch of interesting museums that attract visitors every year and we can rank among them the latest of these repositories of intriguing artefacts – the Museum of Fake News (Muzej lažnih vijesti)

The Museum of Fake News project is the result of many years of work by the Institute for New Media and Electronic Democracy (InMed), which, among other things, has been organizing the international conference "Information Technology and Journalism" at the Interuniversity Center in Dubrovnik for the past 25 years.

After the last two gatherings, there was an increasing recognition of the growing danger of disinformation, which threatens the freedom and independence of the media. InMed has fruitful cooperation with domestic and foreign experts, and a large number of experts from twenty countries participated in the conferences, which it organized.

Educational purpose

InMed is the only member of SOMA (Social Observatory for Disinformation and Social Media Analysis) in the Republic of Croatia, one of the leading networks of a large number of institutions that deal with the detection of fake news and models of its spread both through traditional media and through the Internet and social networks.

The Museum of Fake News project started in 2020 and for now, it only exists as a digital museum. On their webpage mlv.hr (only in Croatian), you can find a lot of interesting articles about fake news and disinformation. You can learn how to fact-check information that you found on the Internet and read about different aspects of media and journalism. 

The museum also has a section of testimonies that different people were willing to share. Those testimonies were written by popular Croatian journalists, academic professors and scientists. 

The Museum of Fake News is a great idea, put in action, to approach audiences in a new way and get their attention on how to read between the lines. Its goal is to instil a habit among content consumers not to trust everything they see, hear and read and most importantly not to promote and share disinformation in their own social circle, not to create panic or overthink the propaganda messages with which news outlets are constantly flooding the public space.