Organisation Profile
The EU DisinfoLab is an international NGO gathering top European experts in fighting disinformation. We also bring a new tool to the ‘fight’ – our own methodology of social network analysis, letting us map suspicious online communities and source ‘fake news’.
Our mission is to counter disinformation by bridging communities and enabling initiatives. One of the priorities in the fight against misinformation is to quickly identify problematic content in order to produce effective debunking for citizens. We have developed two approaches to quickly identifying such content – one is based on the narratives and the other is community-based. Those techniques have been used to identify disinformation with excellent results during the French and Italian elections in 2017. WeVerify will enable us to further our work on understanding which communities are regularly spreading misinformation, and establishing patterns of misinformation spread, as well as develop methods for early discovery of newly emerging misinformation. This in turn will enable the creation of alerts for fact-checkers and journalists, which would “buy” some time for the journalists to detect weak signals of disinformation spread and be able to gather enough information and facts to prevent rapid spread outside fringe communities.
Role in the Project:
The EU DisinfoLab will lead WP5 on sourcing and tracking of disinformation flows in social networks. The team will build on its established track record in using social network analysis to map social media communities, monitor them and source disinformation. The EU DisinfoLab will also play a leading role in the gathering of user requirements and be very active in the work package that covers the community pilots, evaluation, and engagement.