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DeFaktS

Fighting disinformation campaigns by disclosing the drivers and stylistic traits

Start: 01/2022

End: 12/2024

Disinformation campaigns, in which misleading information is deliberately disseminated 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 camp formation and opinion polarization, they also encourage other phenomena harmful to society, such as conspiracy theories.

The DeFaktS project, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), takes a comprehensive approach to researching and combating disinformation. To this end, artificial intelligence (AI) is trained to recognize typical disinformation drivers and stylistic traits based on extracted messages from suspicious social media and messenger groups. 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 possible 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 as automatically moderated 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.

Contact

Jonas Fegert

Department Manager
Division: Information Process Engineering

Research focus

Digital Participation and Democracy

In the Digital Participation and Democracy research focus the spotlight is on inclusive, modern and democratic forms of digital participation as well as the opportunities and challenges of digital democracy.

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Applied Artificial Intelligence

In this research focus, the FZI prioritizes the topics of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as well as human and AI engineering. In addition, the FZI deals with questions on dedicated AI hardware and predictive AI.

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Funding notice:
The DeFaktS project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Project partners:

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