Governance Body

Clara Jiménez Cruz is the co-founder and CEO of Maldita.es, a Spanish non-profit foundation created to fight disinformation and lies in public discourse. After a decade-long career as a TV journalist, Clara was appointed to the High Level Group against Disinformation by the European Commission and is a current member of the IFCN Advisory Board. Among other recognitions, she was selected as an Ashoka Fellow in 2019 and was awarded Spanish Young Journalist of the Year in 2020.

Vincent Couronne has been a journalist since 2017, the year he founded Les Surligneurs, the first legal fact-checking media outlet. As the director of publication of Les Surligneurs, he has supervised the publication of all the articles, recruited teams, managed both national and European projects, given conferences on fact-checking. He is also a legal researcher at Versailles University and lecturer, specialised in EU law. He is also a member of the Stakeholder Committee of the largest legal publishing house in Europe.

Ana Brakus is a leading young newsroom management professional in Croatia, with years of experience in both journalism and management roles. She is the executive director and co-founder of a non-profit media organization Faktograf – Association for the Informed Public, the publisher of Croatia’s first fact-checking platform. She holds a degree in political science.

David Schraven leads the investigative newsroom CORRECTIV as Publisher since 2014. After spending time at taz and Süddeutsche Zeitung, he worked with the business and North Rhine-Westphalia departments of the Welt-Group. Between 2010 and 2014 David was in charge of the research department at the Content Desk of Funke-Mediengruppe – one of the largest German media organizations. David received multiple journalism awards.

Gülin Çavuş is the Co-founder & Head of Strategy at Teyit. She is responsible for suggesting strategic plans & projects for social impact and aligning the team with the organisation’s targets. She studied Global Politics and International Relations at METU and Binghamton University, SUNY where she graduated with her Master’s degree in Urban Policy Planning and Local Government. Additionally she attended a journalism training at Uğur Mumcu Investigative Journalism Foundation and worked as a journalist on several news websites and was awarded the International Fact-Checking Network Fellowship in 2017 and worked on misinformation problems about refugees with the France 24 Observers team. She has been conducting OSINT trainings for journalists and journalism students and is interested in responsible and ethical tech.

Marie Bohner works on development strategies to support AFP’s global digital investigation team, which takes in more than 140 journalists globally. She accompanies partnerships with the Digital Investigation’s department partners – including major social media platforms, EU institutions, as well as with peer digital investigation and fact-checking organisations in Europe and globally. Marie coordinated the award-winning CrossCheck France collaborative project, gathering more than 30 newsrooms and tech partners to tackle disinformation during the French Presidential Election in 2017. She did so on behalf of First Draft, and was their Global Head of Partnerships until 2021. She’s currently based in France.

Paweł Terpiłowski is the Editor-in-chief and Vice President of the first Polish fact-checking organisation, Demagog. He holds a PhD in Political Science, specialising in foreign and security policy in Central-Eastern Europe, politics of Ukraine, Polish-Ukrainian relations, nationalism and radical movements as well as disinformation. Additionally, he is the expert on Eastern Europe at the Ambitna Polska Foundation, member of the European Code of Practice on Disinformation Permanent Task-Force and in 2022 he was part of the EDMO Task Force on Disinformation on the War in Ukraine.

Phoebe Arnold is one of the senior staff of Full Fact in the UK. She started when Full Fact was a small organisation and helped it grow during elections, the pandemic and the rise of online misinformation in public life. She has also worked at First Draft and Avaaz, training journalists and pressuring platforms to tackle disinformation. She helped to draft the IFCN Code of Principles and served on the IFCN Advisory Board, including a lot of experience assessing applications for verification.

Stefan Voss is the head of verification at the German news agency dpa. He has been working for the Deutsche Presse-Agentur for over 20 years, including more than a decade as a foreign correspondent in Ukraine and Russia. Since 2017 Stefan has built up a team of verification experts in dpa’s Berlin newsroom. He is also the founder of dpa’s fact-checking team (which now employs around 30 journalists). For many years Stefan has been active as a Social Media trainer for journalists both in Germany and internationally. His specialities include digital research, verification and deep-fake recognition.

Thomas Hedin has been a driving force in the creation and development of the Danish fact-checking media TjekDet, since it was established in 2016 by a commercial media company. He was initially a senior editor, but in 2020 took over as editor-in-chief and CEO, when TjekDet changed its legal status to an independent nonprofit organisation. He has been prime mover on several projects focusing on combating misinformation and disinformation – both in the context of education and research – and he regularly participates as a speaker in seminars and debates. He was a researcher and later editorial manager for nearly ten years at the national Danish public-service broadcaster DR – first at the radio news department and later at the DR TV news. In 2007 he became an editor of a journalistic research department at Denmark’s oldest newspaper, Berlingske. In 2015, he switched to the Danish weekly magazine Mandag Morgen, which can best be compared to the American magazine The Economist, where he was hired as a data journalist.

Tommaso Canetta is the Deputy director of Pagella Politica and Facta news since 2020, fact-checker since 2016 and professional journalist since 2012 and mainly deals with European and international projects involving. In particular, he coordinates the fact-checking activities of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) and the Italian Digital Media Observatory (IDMO) and is a member of the Taskforce of the Code of Practice on Disinformation of the European Union. He holds a Master’s degree in Law, with a specialisation in European and international law, and a 2nd level university Master’s degree in Journalism.

Andrew Dudfield has led Full Fact’s artificial intelligence team since 2019, developing technology to tackle misinformation at internet scale by serving the needs of fact checkers around the world. He was previously the Chief Publishing Officer of the UK Office for National Statistics and prior to that spent a decade working in product and technology roles at the BBC.

Emre İlkan Saklıca completed his Master’s degree in International Relations and began his journalism career as a news presenter on the radio. Later, he created a program format called “Güncel” for Kanal B, which discussed the most pressing issues of the day. He was responsible for the production and presentation of this program for many years. In addition to his work as a news presenter, he also served as an editor and reporter for the channel. He has written articles on journalism and digital media for platforms such as NewsLabTurkey and Journo. He was part of the founding team of Medyapod, Turkey’s first podcast network. In 2019, he started working as an editor at Teyit, where he took on the role of editorial manager for two years. At the end of 2023, he was promoted to the position of Director at Teyit.

Estelle Péard coordinates projects related to the fight against misinformation on behalf of AFP and conducts trainings on digital investigation in several European countries together with fact-checkers. A journalist with AFP since 2010, she was an economics correspondent in Germany, a reporter covering social conflicts in France and an editor for the newswire before joining the Europe digital investigation team of AFP as an editor in 2021. She’s currently based in France.

Florian Löffler holds a Master’s degree in political science with a focus on right-wing extremism and populism and has been working in political communications since 2015. He was responsible for communication and design strategies and digital campaigns for foundations and NGOs but also for public institutions. In 2022, he joined CORRECTIV’s Berlin office as a project manager for the several European fact-checking networks.

Nelly Pailleux is Chief Operations Officer at Les Surligneurs. She oversees the organization’s development, driving strategic initiatives to expand its impact in the fight against disinformation and to safeguard democracies. Former journalist she led investigations into disinformation, with a focus on the role of recommendation algorithms on social media. With valuable experience in successful European projects, she is committed to innovating in the fight against disinformation.