• Priority Area Supporting Research into Media, Disinformation and Information Literacy Across Europe
• Year 2024, 2025, 2026
• Country Luxembourg, United Kingdom
• Project Status Ongoing

The project aims to scrutinise and mitigate the fake activity market ecosystem prevalent across Europe. It proposes an inclusive, cross-disciplinary, data-driven, and transnational approach to bridge the knowledge gap and enhance comparability of fake activity patterns across member nations. The project addresses critical situations and topics of public interest such as Influencer Marketing Fraud, Phishing Spcams & Financial Fraud, and Counterfeit Product Sales. It engages targeted groups like Social Media Platforms, Regulatory Authorities & Policymakers, Academic Researchers, Marketing Agencies, and the General Public, offering specialised tools to each group.

The project’s objectives include developing new methodologies to address disinformation, expanding research dissemination in media, disinformation, and information literacy. It employs a cross-disciplinary approach, merging methodologies from empirical computer science, cybersecurity, human-computer interaction, social and business sciences, law, ethics, and media studies. The core methodology involves creating a publicly accessible, continuously updated map that details the online activities of Fake Activity Shops (FAS) across Europe.

The proposal is strategically designed to advance knowledge across multiple disciplinary frontiers while addressing the project’s objectives. These include creating LLM-powered automated systems for monitoring and analysing the European disinformation market, establishing methods to track cross-border transfer of disinformation technologies, building public resources providing data and metrics, gathering evidence, and developing policy recommendations for regulating the market, AI, and technology, and disseminating findings to raise resilience among cybersecurity, legal, social science, public audiences. The project constitutes an expansion of existing activities and a start-up of new fact-checking activities for the applicant or consortium.

In essence, the core research question is: “How can the development and application of automated systems, powered by Large Language Model Agents, effectively identify, monitor, and mitigate the spread of fake activities across various online platforms in Europe, and what impact could these systems have on policymaking, technological advancements, and societal resilience against disinformation?”