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On a brisk October morning in Sofia, a room full of people who spend their working lives worrying about the truth gathered at the GATE Institute, and for a few hours, they did something almost radical: they shared what they had learned. This was the first annual expert workshop, modestly titled “From Analysis to Action,” and it was organized by BROD, one of fifteen hubs in the European Digital Media Observatory network. The mood was not one of panic, but of quiet, determined urgency. Bulgaria, after all, is a country where the information environment is under constant, grinding pressure—a daily flood of half-truths, manipulated narratives, and outright fabrications that seep into news feeds, group chats, and living room conversations. The people in that room worked in different worlds: some built algorithms, some taught schoolchildren, some drafted legislation. But they all recognized a common enemy in the erosion of shared reality. The workshop was less about diagnosing the problem—everyone already had a stack of diagnoses—and more about moving from knowing to doing. It was about turning frustration into strategy, and strategy into something that could survive contact with the messy, chaotic real world of Bulgarian media.
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What made the gathering feel human, rather than purely academic, was the quiet acknowledgment of how exhausting this work has become. Fact-checkers in the room described mornings spent debunking the same viral hoax for the third time, knowing that the correction would reach a fraction of the people who saw the lie. Researchers talked about patterns in Telegram channels and Facebook groups, mapping the way falsehoods travel like gossip through a small town—fast, familiar, and hard to stop. There were stories of elderly relatives convinced by health misinformation, of young people who no longer trusted any news outlet, of local officials who repeated Kremlin talking points without any sense of irony. The participants came from universities, from civil society organizations, from the GATE Institute’s own technical labs, and from the newly energized regulatory sphere. They did not pretend to have easy answers. But they agreed on one foundational truth: there is no single silver bullet. Disinformation is a hydra, and cutting off one head simply grows two more. The only realistic approach, they concluded, is to fight on multiple fronts at once—technology, education, and regulation—each one reinforcing the other, like the strands of a rope.
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The conversation about technology was grounded, pragmatic, and refreshingly free of hype. Yes, artificial intelligence can help spot suspicious patterns, and the GATE Institute is doing serious work in that space, developing tools that track the spread of coordinated narratives in real time. But the technologists in the room were the first to admit that AI is not a savior. A detection model can flag a bot network, but it cannot persuade a skeptical grandmother that the video she is watching is fake. It can map the spread of a rumour, but it cannot repair the trust that the rumour shattered. The panelists emphasized that human judgment must remain at the center of this work—that algorithms should serve as assistants, not replacements, for the women and men who stare at screens all day, verifying old claims and chasing new ones. There was also a healthy discussion about the limits of transparency from platforms. Researchers are often locked out of the very data they need, forced to rely on crumbs of information from the tech giants. The room pushed back on this, demanding better access, more accountability, and a genuine partnership rather than a one-way street of goodwill announcements. Technology, they argued, must serve the public interest, not just the corporate bottom line.
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If technology is the shield, then media literacy is the long-term cultivation of resilience, and the workshop gave it the weight it deserves. The educators in the room spoke about the slow, unglamorous work of teaching critical thinking in classrooms where attention spans are short and TikTok is always one tap away. They showed sample lessons where students learn to check the source, question the motive, and distinguish an opinion from a fact—simple skills that are increasingly rare in a world optimized for outrage. There was a deep sense that media literacy cannot be a one-time lecture or a downloadable poster; it must be woven into the fabric of schooling, community centres, and even workplaces. The panelists shared small wins: a high school where students now cross-check viral claims before sharing them, a village library that hosts weekly sessions for pensioners on spotting scam ads and fabricated news. The word “empowerment” came up again and again, but not as a cliché. It was used to mean something very concrete: giving people the confidence and the tools to pause, to ask, to verify—before they hit the share button. In a society where trust in institutions has been repeatedly damaged, rebuilding the citizen’s own inner compass may be the most important long-term investment of all.
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No conversation about disinformation in Europe is complete without talking about regulation, and this part of the workshop was notably mature. The room did not treat the Digital Services Act as a distant Brussels abstraction, but as a living framework that Bulgaria must now learn to use effectively. There was honest acknowledgment of the gap between law and practice—of the compliance burdens on small media outlets, of the challenges in enforcing rules against platforms that operate from other continents, and of the temptation to use anti-disinformation laws as a cudgel against legitimate criticism. The regulators in the room stressed the need for independence, for clarity, and for capacity. It is not enough to have a law on the books if the responsible authority has three staff members and an ancient spreadsheet. They called for more funding, more specialists, and more coordination with counterparts across the EU. But they also warned against over-regulation, against creating a state arbiter of truth that would undermine the very pluralism they seek to defend. The balance, as one speaker put it, is like walking a tightrope in a storm: you want to lean into the wind of transparency without falling into the abyss of censorship. The consensus was that regulation must be smart, targeted, and reversible—a scalpel, not a hammer.
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The final message of the workshop was hopeful, but not naive. Bulgaria’s information ecosystem is not beyond repair; it is, in fact, a place where creative solutions are being born daily, driven by people who refuse to accept manipulation as the default state. The collaboration between BROD, the GATE Institute, civil society, and the research community is itself a powerful countermeasure. The participants left with a shared commitment to return next year with more data, more stories, and more concrete results. But they also left with a clear-eyed understanding that this is a marathon, not a sprint. Disinformation networks adapt; they evolve; they find new channels when old ones are closed. The defenders must adapt faster. That means investing in people as much as in tools, in patience as much as in urgency, and in dialogue as much as in declaration. In the quiet corridors of the GATE Institute, after the panels had ended and the coffee had gone cold, the conversations continued—small clusters of people exchanging phone numbers, promising to share datasets, to visit each other’s classrooms, to pressure the platforms together. This, perhaps, was the true achievement of that day: not a grand plan, but a web of human connections, forged in the shared belief that the truth is worth fighting for, one fact-check, one lesson, one regulation at a time.