Rectifying disinformation campaigns by disclosing factors and stylistic devices
Disinformation campaigns, in which misleading information is deliberately spread on a large scale, have become a central threat to the political process and social cohesion. They can influence elections and lead people to (self-)damaging or even terrorist behavior. In addition to political grouping and polarization of opinion, they also encourage other phenomena that are harmful to society, such as conspiracy theories.
The DeFaktS project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), takes a comprehensive approach to researching and combating disinformation. To this end, an artificial intelligence (AI) is trained on the basis of extracted messages from suspicious social media and messenger groups, which can recognize factors and stylistic characteristic of disinformation. The AI trained in this way then forms a component for an XAI (Explainable Artificial Intelligence), with the help of which an app can transparently inform and warn users of online services about the possible existence of disinformation.
Another goal of DeFaktS is to make the XAI component accessible to third parties through the development of a programming interface and thus contribute to a solution with which online platforms can be moderated as automatically as possible.
During the project period from January 2022 to December 2024, the FZI Research Center for Information Technology will lead the consortium with the project partners Murmuras UG, Liquid Democracy e.V. and Philipps-Universität Marburg.
