The Finnish NORDIS partner Faktabaari, together with the EDMO Taskforce on 2024 European Elections and the EDMO Advisory Board, spearheaded the first meeting for independent actors working on combating disinformation with fact-checking, literacy, and research in Europe and the U.S. The event, organized as a webinar on 14 October 2024, was designed to include takeaways from the EU 2024 elections and from the EU DisinfoLab 2024 Annual conference (9–10 October 2024) prior to the US presidential elections (5 November 2024).

In the short term, the purpose was to share lessons learned and trends to aid prebunking. The long-term purpose was to test the idea of regular knowledge-sharing workshops and equivalent, to create Transatlantic independent expert networks and to follow up implementation of the regulatory (esp. Digital Services Act, Code of Practice/Code of Conduct) and reactions to it in the US.

The result of the US presidential election adds another urgent and highly important purpose for a Transatlantic collaboration – something addressed already in our meeting in October: We need to understand various communities better, demand platform accountability even louder, and build even more robust and broader connections between independent actors across the Atlantic. Most importantly, we need to address the question of trust, ever-divergent information realities, and growing distrust of different groups.

We hope this report provides an input for the NORDIS Conference on “Disinformation in a year of elections” while EDMO-NORDIS has committed to organizing a follow-up transatlantic meeting in January 2025 to solidify alliances and strategies for a joint battle against information disorders.