Countering disinformation in electoral processes around Europe

Romania: a case of digital disruption at the ballot box

Building on our December 2024 analysis, our new Euractiv report examines how astroturfing, parasocial influencers, and opaque platform practices helped propel a fringe candidate in Romania’s annulled presidential elections. The case highlights the limits of fact-checking, the influence of right-wing radicalisation, and the urgent need for platform accountability and early-warning mechanisms.

→ Read our report

Building common ground: PROMPT and EU disinfo frameworks

To maximise impact and avoid duplicated efforts, PROMPT has initiated exchanges with several key actors, including ADAC.io, ARM, Decoding Antisemitism, VIGINUM, QuotaClimate, the Diaspora Initiative, and the DISARM Foundation. These efforts aim to align methodologies, identify overlaps, and highlight complementarities across existing disinformation frameworks.

Our collaboration with the DISARM Foundation reflects this ambition: to help shape a common methodological foundation grounded in diverse perspectives and shared learning. This aligns with PROMPT’s broader goal of contributing to a unified, systematised understanding of disinformation across European projects and stakeholders—ultimately strengthening the collective fight for information integrity.

Our blogpost, The PROMPT Codebook: the contribution of narratives, rhetorics and information manipulation techniques to the fight against disinformation, presents PROMPT’s innovative, AI-powered approach to disinformation detection. It also contributes to this wider dialogue between frameworks and perspectives on disinformation threats.

First PROMPT narrative report

Disinformation is an ever-changing phenomenon, with new topics, players and techniques/methods being increasingly instrumentalised. Against the backdrop of these concerns, PROMPT employs AI-driven methods to create a disinformation detection and contextualisation arsenal for journalists and activists.

Central to PROMPT is the hypothesis that propagators of disinformation increasingly leverage culture-, community- and language- specific patterns to achieve greater impact. One needs to understand how narratives are formed and reshaped to resonate in specific communities.

The 1st PROMPT narrative report outlines the current topics dealing with disinformation in a media-driven world against the background of a constant state of polycrisis. It uncovers conceptual challenges and solutions; improved AI-based methodologies to capture the dynamics of online disinformation; and delves into 2 case studies: the information battle surrounding the Russian aggression against Ukraine; and the (re)run of the Romanian presidential elections.

→ Download the narrative report

New methods for tracing how narratives spread

PROMPT partners presented two papers at COMPTEXT 2025: one exploring how Russia-Ukraine disinformation frames circulate on Twitter, and another applying narrative frameworks to Facebook content during Italian elections. These studies contribute to our goal of refining LLM-powered tools for cross-platform narrative analysis.

Reaching new audiences

Over the past months, PROMPT has been presented at several key events, including Infox sur Seine — a French-language event bringing together journalists, computer scientists, social science researchers, NGOs, and other stakeholders to share ongoing research and foster collaboration in the fight against fake news. PROMPT was presented there by Opsci, which also sponsored the event.

Other highlights include EJTA’s Teachers Training in Rome, the Graduate Spring School on AI & Media (co-organised with ECREA), the AJEN’s webinar on disinformation in African media systems, and The Paris Conference on AI & Digital Ethics (16-17 June)

Next up: IAMCR 2025 in Singapore, Meeting for Media Researchers at the Council of Europe, Wikimania 2025, #Disinfo2025, the Digital Governance Research Colloquium and the Better Online conference.

→ Follow our agenda & meet the team

New multifactorial tools for Wikipedia

PROMPT has created a system for measuring the sensitivity of pages in Wikipedia through the factorisation of different metrics. We developed a tool that assists Wikimedians in strengthening their monitoring efforts. We also designed a front-end interface for external analysts, where appropriate, to test encyclopedia pages and visualize aheat, quality or editor's behaviour risks. This tool will be online in the coming days. We welcome your feedback! A public dashboard focused on PROMPT's three main topics will also be published soon. Stay tuned :)