News and Events

The U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center’s 2021 U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge against disinformation and propaganda took place on September 29-30, 2021. The aim was to showcase innovative responses to counter disinformation and propaganda across Europe. The InVID/WeVerify plugin was amongst one of the 8 finalists and today, we were honoured with being amongst the three […]

On 16 and 17 June 2021, the WeVerify project hosted a two-day workshop. Focus: the role of technology and artificial intelligence in the disinformation sphere. In particular, presentations, talks and discussions concentrated on how technology can support in data analysis and its verification, and therewith support in countering disinformation. The workshop was organised over two […]

1st Branch : The Coordination assessment The coordination of accounts and adoption of techniques to publish, promote and spread false content is being referred to as “Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour” (CIB). Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour definition may vary from a platform to another. Although a clear and widely accepted definition of CIB is currently missing, the concept […]

An Online Workshop 16 June 10:00 CEST – 14:00 CEST WeVerify Technology Demonstration 17 June 10:00 CEST – 13:00 CEST The WeVerify project is honoured to invite and welcome you to a free two-day workshop on 16 and 17 June 2021. Day one, 16 June, focuses on the role of technology and tools in the […]

The former US president Donald Trump is well known for his disproportionate use of the expression “fake news” during his four-years mandate. Especially on Twitter, Mr Trump will be recorded as the main politician weaponizing this catch-all expression to undermine media organisations and journalists.  Within the WeVerify EU project, we are building social networks analysis […]

Sam Gregory is Program Director of WITNESS, an organisation that works with people who use video to document human rights issues. WITNESS focuses on how people create trustworthy information that can expose abuses and address injustices. How is that connected to deepfakes? Deutsche Welle’s Julia Bayer conducted an interview with the Program Director of witness.org, […]

Here’s an interview conducted by Deutsche Welle’s Julia Bayer with Jane Lytvynenko, senior reporter with Buzzfeed News. Its focus: online mis- and disinformation and the challenge of dealing with synthetic media (aka so-called “deepfakes”). The interview was originally published on the DIGGER project website and conducted in the context of this Google DNI-funded project in […]

From 11 December 2019 to 31 March 2020, WeVerify project partner CERTH and specifically the MKLab MeVer team, participated in the Deepfake detection challenge. It has been almost 3 months since the final deadline for the challenge on the Kaggle platform. Competition organizers have recently finalized the standings (13th of June 2020) in the private […]

From 24 to 26 April 2020, Europe joined forces to develop innovative solutions for coronavirus-related challenges in the EUvsVirus hackathon, the official and worldwide programming, coding and developments event to fight COVID-19, organised by the EU Commission. The challenges were divided into several topical areas. The participating WeVerify teams focused on the area Social & […]

Europe has joined forces in order to develop innovative solutions for coronavirus-related challenges in the EUvsVirus hackathon, the official EU Commission hackathon to fight COVID-19. Among the many areas which participants were invited to address and work on, our team focused on the Social & Political Cohesion – Mitigating fake news spreading, where our experience […]

Our verification plug-in is being used for debunking disinformation about the coronavirus in numerous countries (USA, France, India, Portugal, Netherlands, Colombia, Ecuador, Mauritius), and languages (e.g. English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese) by many fact-checkers and news organizations (e.g. AFP, France24, The Quint, Boom, India Today, L’Express, Canal 1, Volkskrant). It should be noted that […]

In the run-up to the UK 2019 general election, the WeVerify partner University of Sheffield carried out a longitudinal quantitative analysis of abusive tweets targeting Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson. This showed a 200-fold increase in 2019, from across the political spectrum in which doctored tweets, anti-Semitic tropes and accusations of financial duplicity have been […]

CALL FOR PAPERS Elsevier – Online Social Networks and Media Journal Special Issue on Disinformation, Hoaxes and Propaganda within Online Social Networks and Media Submission Deadline: March 20, 2020 Manuscripts can be submitted continuously until the deadline. Once a paper is submitted, the review process will start immediately. Accepted papers will be published continuously in […]

On 12 December 2019, the MeVer team of MKLab CERTH-ITI launched a user study during a  Media Informatics Lab session in collaboration with Professor Andreas Veglis and Dr. Dimitrios Giomelakis of the Media and Journalism department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The aim of the user study was to assess the value of the […]

From 27 October to 2 November 2019, WeVerify project partner CERTH participated in the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2019 in Seoul, Korea. The ICCV is one of the top computer vision conferences, along with the Computer Visual Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) and the European Computer Vision Conference (ECCV). The venue that hosted the […]

On the 4th and 5th of October 2019, WeVerify members participated in the first Truth and Trust Online conference (TTO) in London, UK. TTO is an initiative involving academics, fact checkers, journalists and industry focusing on promoting the discussion around topics related to online misinformation. Kalina Bontcheva (USFD) was part of the organising committee that […]

On 25 July 2019 WeVerify participated in the International Workshop on Reducing Online Misinformation Exposure (ROME) 2019 in Paris. The event was co-located with the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. Τhe topics discussed in the workshop concerned, among others, the challenges of online misinformation, directions for automatic approaches […]

The WeVerify and SoBigData (http://www.sobigdata.eu/index) projects co-organized a summer school on misinformation analysis in London. The event took place at King’s College at the end of June 2019. NLP (natural language processing), machine learning and data science researchers, PhD students and journalists gathered over four days to share advances in misinformation detection. Overall, it was […]

In late 2018, in the context of Deutsche Welle’s various verification projects and activities, I talked to Dhruti Shah of the BBC’s User Generated Content and Social Media Hub. Originally intended for internal purposes only and to canvass views of experts in the industry, I decided to make the interview public here and now – […]

In late February 2019, I (Jochen Spangenberg) conducted an exclusive interview for WeVerify with Sam Dubberley, an acknowledged expert in the verification sphere. Sam works as a manager for Amnesty International’s so-called Digital Verification Corps, which is part of Amnesty’s Crisis Response Team / Evidence Lab. He is furthermore a research consultant at the Human […]

The recent so-called “deep fake” circulating on Instagram involving Mark Zuckerberg allegedly telling the ‘truth’ about privacy on Facebook was another episode of the fearful future of disinformation. Potentially, any celebrity can be caught in an awkward situation or say any kind of unexpected statements, through artificial intelligence (read machine learning) manipulated media content. So […]

The 7th edition of the Alexandria Media Forum (AMF) was hosted for the first time by the American University in Cairo, in collaboration with Adham Center for Television and Digital Journalism. The forum, attended and covered by most of the Egyptian media TVs as well as Arab and Egyptian newspapers, attracted some 500 attendees from […]

This year saw the 19th edition of the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. The five-day event brings together thousands of journalists and media people in the Umbrian town to discuss present (and pressing) media issues, as well as the future of journalism. Our Jochen Spangenberg (Deutsche Welle) and Alexandre Alaphilippe from EU DisinfoLab, were […]

From 09 till 11th of March, our WeVerify project was featured prominently alongside its predecessor InVID in the famous South-By-Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW2019) at Austin, Texas. Markos Zampoglou from CERTH and Denis Teyssou from AFP were there to present both projects and their verification tools and attend the public at the European house, thanks to […]

In April, the ITES Innovation summit invited us to give a speech in Deauville, Normandy, on new technology and disinformation. Around 350 professionals attended this yearly gathering of the French computer industry. During 20 minutes in the plenary session, we got the opportunity to present the WeVerify concepts and roadmap. We showcased how to retrieve […]

“Disinformation, lies, hoaxes, propaganda, false news are legion”, warned recently the French National Library (Bibliothèque nationale de France). This French institution organized a one-day Disinformation-proof democracies conference on the 20th of March 2019 in Paris. The event was part of the Press at school week on information literacy. The whole video of the conference is […]

If you are interested in the topic of digital content verification, the role of social networks for the democratic process and such like, and you have 1 hour  and 18 minutes to spare, you may want to watch a video of this panel discussion in which Jochen Spangenberg of Deutsche Welle participated in late January […]