When a friend sends a meme through WhatsApp, and we laugh, we tend to overlook that we need a wide range of political, cultural, and historical knowledge to grasp its underlying message. At the Civic Media Observatory, we decode the meaning of media items from different contexts in order to make sense of the world we live in – and the stories we tell ourselves. Memes may seem trivial, but they can be vehicles for hate, propaganda, or false information. Newsrooms, citizens, and governments are often confused about what to do about wrong and false information. For example, misinformation is abundant but sometimes harmless and may simply reflect a lack of knowledge or context. Disinformation on the other hand is intentionally false information created to mislead. A fact-checking industry has developed in response to these problems, and social media companies have endlessly tweaked content moderation rules and opened channels for people to report content that they define as misleading or harmful. Yet, unlike fact-checking, our goal is not only to say what is true or false but to explain the wider environment into which stories are woven. The Civic Media Observatory explores key aspects of how information moves among humans, exploring the effects of emotions, cultures, and storytelling. Observatory researchers comb information networks to find relevant and important narratives, which are underlying assumptions and beliefs that help shape how people talk about things. We identify narratives by analyzing media items. A media item could be a witty tweet, a harmful meme on Instagram, an anti-war graffiti on a wall, a YouTube video, or a wire service news story. Depending on the project, researchers may delve into transnational themes, such as digital authoritarianism. For example, earlier this year, investigations revealed that journalists in El Salvador have been targeted by Pegasus spyware in their phones. What is less known is that El Salvador’s government has been blaming businessman and philanthropist George Soros for the surveillance. Anonymous Twitter users have also been drumming up suspicion of Soros. Our researchers found a pattern of similar attempts to blame Soros for installations of Pegasus spyware in other countries, including in Hungary. For Giovana Fleck, the Civic Media Observatory Lead, narratives are the key to understanding our media ecosystems. “How are narratives formed? Who pushes them, who's behind them, who's benefiting from them, how do they spread, impact people, and how can they be harmful?” she asks. “All those questions guide the CMO.” In the case of Russia, our researchers closely tracked the escalation of narratives for months before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Examples of these narratives include: “The Russia-Ukraine crisis is a fiction created by the West” or “Russia always wins.” These narratives evolved after February 24, and Russian media ecosystems are now rife with altered storylines such as: “The Russian army is saving Ukraine and Ukrainians from Nazism” or “The war crimes that Russia is accused of committing are actually staged by Ukraine and the West.” Key to our research is understanding why people are creating and sharing a particular tweet, meme, or story and what impact it can have on society, especially when it reaches thousands of people. Unlike automated tools that parse thousands of tweets, the Observatory focuses on qualitative analysis of our information ecosystems. We rely on local knowledge to explore nuances of speech, symbolism, and context. To understand what people mean when they create or share information, context and subtext are key. That is why observatory researchers explain the overall political, historical, and sociological context surrounding any media that they are studying. They make the implicit explicit, by unpacking implied meaning and bias in texts and images. For example, one of the Observatory’s India researchers searched Hindu nationalist pages on Instagram and found a harmful montage claiming that the Black Lives Movement in the United States is a hoax. At first glance, we might wonder why this video actually also propagates Islamophobic narratives such as “Islam preaches violence, Muslims are brutal, without culture” and “Hindus are under threat,” as the post never mentions Muslim people. But in the context of India, the video acquires another layer of meaning: it equates racist narratives targeting Black people in the United States with Islamophobic narratives targeting Muslims in India. The comments under the post confirm that this subtextual intent was not lost on the audience. “Approaching narratives requires a certain methodology,” says Giovana Fleck, and requires careful, critical reading.