Olga Yurkiw is a journalist, editor, teacher, TED Fellow and co-founder of StopFake, a volunteer organization launched in 2014 to combat false news reports coming out of Ukraine and Russia during the Maydan Revolution of Dignity. Since then StopFake has evolved into an advanced fact-checking organization with over 200,000 active users covering media in 11 languages and in multiple countries. Their original mission has broadened to help educate news consumers on how to spot fake news on their own, providing useful guidance on exposing biased or inaccurate reporting in order to rebuild the trust we’ve lost in our journalists, leaders and institutions.
Olga was a featured speaker at this year’s Journalism Under Fire conference presented December 4-7 by the Santa Fe Council on International Relations (https://www.sfcir.org/journalism-under-fire/). Afterward, Olga granted us an interview to reflect on the work of the organization from its inception, provide an overview of their effectiveness so far and consider where they are heading in the near future. The interview was conducted in her native Ukrainian.
Learn more about the fight against harmful propaganda and misinformation as well as two critical ways we can ensure that we’re not reading (or sharing) fake news. Olga’s TED talk from April 2018 in English is here: