Combating disinformation in turbulent times
Combating disinformation in turbulent times12/01/2025
The year has got off to a turbulent start for platforms: Mark Zuckerberg is reversing Meta's policy moderation, X faces allegations of Elon Musk’s interference in the German electoral campaign, TikTok awaits a major decision from the U.S. courts... Against this particular - but not very surprising - backdrop, the PROMPT project is making progress. Here's some news and the outcome of our work since last September.
Not yet familiar with PROMPT? Here it is in a nutshell in this interview for the European Journalism Observatory, published in German, French, Portuguese or English.
Romania: a disinformation campaign prevented free suffrage
How did a right-wing, online candidate win the lion share in the first round of the presidential election? Was he the beneficiary of an organised information disorder campaign? If TikTok is to blame, what is the mechanism that supported an online candidate win real, offline elections? How can we prevent coordinated disinformation campaigns, that lead to shocking outcomes during electoral processes?
→ PROMPT partners ADB Romania investigated
Towards a systematisation of LGBTQIA+ disinformation
PROMPT partner Opsci.ai reviews the literature in order to set up a new framework: LGBTQIA+ disinformation as a subfield of gender disinformation, addressing gaps in current gender studies research.
→ Our paper revealing the main narratives, actors, and strategies in the EU, and emphasizing real-world impact
The state of social media research APIs & tools in the DSA era
PROMPT partner University of Urbino's white paper analyzes how the DSA is transforming platforms' data access, drawing on existing literature and extensive testing of research APIs and tools from major VLOPs inclunding Meta, YouTube and TikTok, emphasizing recent developments not yet covered in existing reports.
→ Key gaps, challenges, and potential solutions
Mapping the European ecosystem combating disinformation
As part of our preliminary work, we tried to identify all the neighbouring projects - anti-disinformation, research and applied projects - whose contributions support PROMPT. Given the variety of initiatives, we thought that sharing this inventory could be useful to other students, researchers, journalists and citizens.
→ Database of European projects combating disinformation, and Bluesky 'starter pack' of EU projects and researchers
→ Database of European fact-checkers, and Bluesky 'starter pack' of EU fact-checkers
NLP for disinformation analysis
Opsci.ai shares the main scientific articles used so far in PROMPT's research. They are good starting points for exploring academic work on LLM-powered fact-checking, community analysis, content analysis, and content truthfulness assessment.
→ An ongoing review
Meet the PROMPT team / become a beta-tester
Members of the consortium regularly take part in academic, institutional and professional events. Come and see us at the upcoming Open source AI summit (Jan 22, Paris), at the Methods Workshop on LLMs (Feb 14, Prague), or at Infox sur Seine (Mar 19, Paris).
→ The PROMPT agenda
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