In addition, since we first called on the community in June 2019 to share their superpowers, we have collaborated more than 1,000 times with our community to debunk hoaxes and explain doubts, so we are extremely grateful and celebrating such a round number!
When disinformation circulates, experts are the best weapon to discredit it. During the pandemic they were the most trusted sources on COVID for 86% of Spaniards, according to the Reuters Institute. You can also be part of this community: your superpowers are the topics you know a lot about, what you study or what you are curious about and have a knowledge base in. You can share them with us by becoming a Maldito/a here.
A community committed against disinformation
At Maldita.es we quickly realized that without our community we would get nowhere: your alerts on WhatsApp are essential to our work against disinformation. The community is also key to spreading our debunks and supporting us financially as Maldita.es ambassadors. But in addition, among the Malditas and Malditos there is a lot of useful knowledge to stop hoaxes.
November 2018 was a key moment in building what Maldita.es is today. We launched our #FundaMaldita crowdfunding campaign to become a foundation and told you for the first time that, as journalists, we cannot know everything. We asked if you wanted to join our battle against disinformation and the response was overwhelming: more than 2,000 people participated in the survey and gave us many ideas that later became the superpowers community of Maldita.es.
In June 2019 we made our first official call for you to join the community with your superpowers. Before that, we prepared internally to make the most of your willingness to help us. Thanks to a grant from the European Journalism Center we took the first steps to build the community we have today at Maldita.es. The community we have built together has been studied by other organizations and has become an international case study.
Facing hoax crises together
In moments of uncertainty, the best vaccine against hoaxes is reaching citizens with accurate information. Having Malditas and Malditos who know firsthand the details and complexities of crises and who share their superpowers with us allows us to be more agile in our fight against disinformation.
During the pandemic, Malditas and Malditos who are experts in immunology, virology, clinical trials and other fields were essential for better understanding key concepts and debunking many hoaxes about the origin of the coronavirus, masks and prevention measures at first, and later about vaccines. In the Maldita Twitchería we spoke with Roger Solanas, a Maldito and clinical trials expert, who helped us with many of these hoaxes.
In February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine and an avalanche of hoaxes and disinformation, especially in the form of images and videos, overwhelmed us. We decided to take collaboration with our community one step further and create ‘The O Team’. O for OSINT: a volunteer anti-hoax brigade to fight together against disinformation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This team, made up of Malditas and Malditos who had shared their OSINT superpowers with us, helped provide context to videos and images related to the Russian attack on Ukraine and became a key part of the international fact-checking collaboration #UkraineFacts.
Another hoax crisis you may remember is the one following the eruption of the La Palma volcano. We already told you how we used superpowers during that crisis: Eduardo Suárez, a Maldito and seismologist at the IGN (Instituto Geográfico Nacional), explained the enormous responsibility felt when participating as an expert in the media during a catastrophe. Gonzalo Pascual, a Maldito and Councillor for Territorial Planning, Innovation and New Technologies at the Cabildo of La Palma, shared the disinformation that most worried the people of La Palma at that time.
Superpowers in the Maldita Twitchería
But Malditas and Malditos are not only there during crises—they also join us in celebrations! In 2021, when we had just launched the Maldita Twitchería, we celebrated the first anniversary of Maldita Tecnología with Malditas such as Paula González and Mar Arribas. They explained how they collaborate with their superpowers to prevent scams or phishing attempts from fooling us.
In the Maldita Twitchería we have also featured Alicia Bayón, a Maldita and PhD in Chemical and Environmental Engineering, who shared her experience collaborating with her superpowers.
Other Malditas and Malditos have also joined us to share their knowledge and help answer your questions, such as Julián Estévez, a robotics and artificial intelligence researcher and professor at the UPV-EHU who participated in the Twitchería about autonomous driving; or Miguel Calvo, a cybersecurity and computer science lecturer and researcher at the URJC, and Susana Alwasity, a criminologist and legal expert specializing in cyberintelligence, privacy and cybersecurity, who explained why phishing cases are increasingly difficult to detect. Ana Belén Ropero, professor of nutrition and food science at the Universidad Miguel Hernández, joined us to talk about the Mediterranean diet in the Maldita Twitchería, and we also held a special Twitchería where several Malditos shared their experiences.
Some figures and things to improve
One of the goals of the Maldita.es superpowers program is to offer a space for experts who do not usually appear as sources and to increase diversity in the media. This is an objective we pursue every day, but we still have a lot to improve. Thirty percent of collaborations come from Malditos living in the regions of Madrid or Catalonia, and almost 68% of collaborations in the last three years have been carried out by men.
In the coming months we want to work on expanding the territorial diversity of Malditas and Malditos with superpowers, increasing participation in other Spanish provinces and growing throughout the global Spanish-speaking community. We also aim to improve gender balance in the collaborations we carry out. We need you by our side to achieve these goals. Join the Maldita.es community and help us with your superpowers in the battle against lies: become a Maldito, become a Maldita, and remember that together it is harder for them to fool us.
Do you want to know the newsroom’s favorite collaborations? We tell you about them here.