Online disinformation and fake media content have emerged as a serious threat to democracy, economy and society.
Content verification at scale and in near real-time is currently far from trivial, even for experienced journalists, fact-checkers, human rights activists or media literacy scholars.
The WeVerify project aims to develop intelligent human-in-the-loop content verification and disinformation analysis methods and tools. Social media and web content will be analysed and contextualised within the broader online ecosystem, in order to expose fabricated content, through cross-modal content verification, social network analysis, micro-targeted debunking and a blockchain-based public database of known fakes.
WeVerify will develop, test, and deploy in practice:
Pursue a holistic, cross-disciplinary approach including methods for identifying the key information sources, analysing information cascades and social network actors, and multi-modal and cross-modal content verification techniques (text, images, video).
The blockchain will ensure that already verified facts are recorded in an incorruptible, decentralized ledger, with no single point of failure. When the contributing verification community grows large enough, the blockchain will be absolutely necessary to ensure that individuals or groups cannot tamper with the database of known fakes to serve their own purposes.
Aimed at bringing easy-to-use advanced content verification tools into popular web browsers like Firefox, Chrome and Opera.
WeVerify will provide a professional environment with advanced functionality for collaborative content verification, making use of the WeVerify open source AI tools, along with proprietary tools owned by the consortium partners.
The chatbot will guide its users through the verification process, volunteer evidence gathered by the automatic verification algorithms, and suggest the most relevant tools throughout the process. It will also provide advice on the threat of online disinformation, published by reputable media literacy and verification initiatives.
New modules, released in open source, will help verification professionals to identify disinformation ecosystems, the disinformation sources and the way in which disinformation campaigns are exploiting the filter bubbles, echo chambers, and highly polarised communities for maximum damage.