TED Fellow Olga Yurkova is a journalist and cofounder of StopFake.org, an independent Ukrainian organization that trains an international cohort of fact-checkers in an effort to curb propaganda and misinformation in the media.

Why you should listen

Olga Yurkova edits the Context and Opinions sections of StopFake.org. She teaches different audiences how propaganda works and how to identify fake news, consulting a range of organizations and public structures and collaborating with mainstream media as a journalist.

Yurkova explores propaganda methods and finds out new ways to overcome these new challenges. In June 2017, she and her colleagues Maarten Schenk and Jordy Nijenhuis launched a project called Forbidden Facts, which explains how fake news spreads online through clickbait headlines on Facebook that reach out to skeptical audiences.

Yurkova has 15 years of experience in journalism. She headed the local multimedia newsroom in Ternopil city for six years, becoming the market leader during that time. She then ran the Donbas and Crimea department at the national multimedia newsroom Nova Informacia for three years. She has been working as a new media trainer since 2012. 

For fighting propaganda, Yurkova was included into the list of New Europe 100 and was named a TED Fellow in 2018.

Olga Yurkova’s TED talk

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Live from TED2018

Reimagining the future: Notes from TED Fellows Session 1 at TED2018

April 10, 2018

Forget those miserly folk who hoard their best for the last — TED believes in starting strong. Kicking off TED2018 is Session 1 of the TED Fellows, who count among their ranks artists, activists, scientists, researchers, conservationists, thinkers and changemakers of all kinds. The Fellows program now total 453 individuals from 96 countries. In this […]

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