Critical Analysis of Disinformation on Religious Topics

A public application that reads a Croatian media text and reports whether it carries religious content and whether it shows the markers of disinformation — the first systematic fact-checking tool for religious topics in the Croatian media space.

The application works in three passes. A submitted text is first normalized — numbers, punctuation, and common function words are stripped out. The cleaned text is then matched against two purpose-built dictionaries: one of Catholic terminology, one of terms statistically associated with disinformation. Finally, TF-IDF weighting and cosine similarity measure how close the text sits to a reference corpus of previously identified disinformation. The user gets back a report on two axes: how far the text aligns with Catholic content, and whether it carries elements characteristic of disinformation.

The project is funded under Croatia’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NextGenerationEU), through the measure establishing media fact-checking run by the Ministry of Culture and Media and the Agency for Electronic Media. Alongside the application it produced an elective university course on media and disinformation, a university textbook, and training programmes for journalists and students.

• Croatian Catholic UniversityProject lead, through its communication sciences department.
• Croatian Catholic RadioPartner institution.
• Croatian Association of Catholic JournalistsPartner institution.