- Priority Area Supporting Research into Media, Disinformation and Information Literacy Across Europe
- Year 2022, 2023, 2024
- Country Spain, United Kingdom
- Project Status Completed
The main objective of DISINFTRUST project is to understand better the mechanisms that make citizens believe in misleading content, as well as, through an innovative methodology, test the real impact of disinformation narratives in diverse societal groups in different target countries. Based on cooperation with key media industry actors, the project aims to cluster fact-checks at the EU level to detect disinformation narratives, testing their impact through a survey research methodology. This part of the project will allow us to better understand the real impact of disinformation, researching also for the impact on different societal groups, especially those targeted by the different disinformation content identified as part of similar narratives. Secondly, our goal will be to establish the conditions, correlates and interactions of causal mechanisms related to trust in misleading content, as well as to understand the relationship between trust and its effect on people’s actions, such as believing, sharing, or checking misleading content. This second part will allow us to understand better how trust mechanisms work in relation to misleading content, taking as a reference the previously detected disinformation narratives. Thirdly, based on research results, the project intends also to contribute with an AI content scoring tool that can automatically detect the distrustful signals of different disinformation-related content. Such a tool will allow us to assess the capacity of specific content to be trusted by certain societal groups, facilitating the construction of counter-narratives and understanding the higher spreadability of certain messages and kinds of content. By testing the tool with different societal groups and disseminating it to key stakeholders such as fact-checkers or civil society organisations and NGOs, the project aims to empower groups fighting disinformation and reduce the impact of disinformation campaigns.
