• Priority Area Multidisciplinary Investigations on Disinformation in Europe
• Year 2024
• Country Spain, United Kingdom
• Project Status Ongoing

The NERD project (Neutralizing Economic Rewards of Disinformation) focuses on capturing and characterizing the monetization channels of disinformation through ad placements. Understanding how misinformation spreaders fund their activities via advertisements is today an open problem, which has implications in online content moderation, brand reputation and, more broadly, democracy preservation.

In this project, a multidisciplinary team of experts in fact-checking, journalism, communication and artificial intelligence will work together to meet the following objectives: identify misinformation spreading websites and creating a comprehensive database of news stories and their accompanying ads, and additional metadata. This database will be analyzed to explore correlations between variables, including demographics, trust indicators, and advertised products and brands. This analysis will be powered by combining traditional statistical techniques with the use of advanced AI tools, such as multimodal large language models.

The context and timing of this project is unique, as this is a politically notable year, with elections being held around the world, crucially the EU Elections, which will cover all EU member states. We will also aim to estimate the revenue generated by misinformation-spreading websites. The main findings of this project, both from technical and misinformation perspectives, will be disseminated in different media, from peer reviewed publications to regular media