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In 2024, over 2 billion people are expected to cast their votes in more than 50 elections worldwide, including in the United States, India, Mexico and the European Union.  

AFP’s open-access training, developed by the award-winning AFP Fact Check team, and supported by the Google News Initiative, is divided into two one hour sessions, with completed courses leading to two certificates. The first part focuses on the lead up to elections, while the second part prepares journalists for election day and the weeks that follow.  

''Elections are fertile ground for disinformation and journalists need to be extra vigilant while checking sources and verifying claims'', said Phil Chetwynd, AFP's Global News Director.   

''AFP’s new digital course will help prepare journalists for a year which is set to be particularly challenging, with many elections worldwide and disinformation spreading across ever-changing social platforms'', he added.  

AFP is introducing the new course in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese during the Médias en Seine festival of international media in Paris.   

"In 2024, with over 2 billion people voting worldwide, the role of journalists in empowering citizens with fact-based information will be vital,” said Sulina Connal, Managing Director, News and Books Partnerships EMEA at Google.  

“It is encouraging to see the expansion of this long standing partnership with AFP to provide journalists with essential skills to tackle misinformation”, she added. 

The new training marks the 12th online course in digital investigation created by AFP Fact Check, the world's largest fact-checking team with more than 140 journalists worldwide, working in 26 languages.  

All of AFP's courses are available on the digital courses platform in four languages — English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.  

Since its inception in June 2022, AFP's digital courses platform has enrolled and trained more than 15,000 journalists and journalism students, with an overall satisfaction rate of 4.5 out of 5.  

The courses have been used and adopted by journalism schools around the world, including Sciences Po Paris and CFJ (Centre de Formation de Journalistes) in France, the Journalism and Media Studies Centre (HKU) in Hong Kong and PUC-SP in Sao Paulo, Brazil.  

AFP's training videos recently won two prizes at the 2023 Lovie Awards, and the digital courses platform was also shortlisted.