ANA-MPA President & Director General Perdikaris: "Cooperation among News Agencies Is Crucial as Social Media Swamp Us with Fake News"

"Cooperation among news agencies is crucial because in our day and age the social media and online information at large are swamping us with fake news," said Aimilios Perdikaris, President of the Association of Balkan News Agencies - Southeast Europe (ABNA-SE) and Director General of ANA-MPA (Greece), in a BTA interview here on Thursday.

Perdikaris is BTA’s guest on the occasion of the agency’s 125th anniversary marked this Thursday.

In his words, "the top priority which also results from cooperation among agencies is to resist fake news and report reality, to provide up-to-date information in its genuine dimensions." 

The interviewee highlighted the traditional cooperation between Greece and Bulgaria. "Even today President Rumen Radev is in Athens and conferred with the political and state leadership. The same traditional cooperation is also pursued by us, the Athens-Macedonian News Agency (ANA-MPA) and the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA)," Perdikaris emphasized.

"Within the framework of ABNA-SE, which has its seat here and which we preside at present, we have mapped out a lot of projects on which we will be working together. Precisely for this reason the two agencies, the two countries can spearhead these efforts so as to play a leading role regionwide by providing, as I already said, up-to-date news in its real dimensions and far from fake news," the ABNA-SE President pointed out.

Asked about his message to BTA on the occasion of its anniversary, Perdikaris said: "I wish BTA to have an occasion to celebrate a lot more anniversaries. Let it proceed along the same path, let it carry on the work it has been doing in recent years, and always with open horizons in the spirit of cooperation and of development, because this is our common future, the future of our agencies, of our people, of our staff, but also of our target audience: the mass media as well as individual users. I wish us to succeed in investing in digital technologies which represent the future, the tomorrow, and we are already working in this direction. Your agency BTA is also working for this. So I wish you a long life, even greater successes, and above all to run your stories in their real dimensions."