Increasing evidence shows that disinformation spreading has non-negligible impact on our society at individual and
collective levels. From public health to climate change, it is of paramount importance to timely identify emerging
disinformation signals such as content from known unreliable sources and new narratives, especially from online
social media, to provide media professionals and policy makers with trustworthy elements to extinguish disinformation
outbreaks before they run out of control. However, monitoring and analysing large volumes of online content is well
beyond the capacity of human ability only. In fact, regardless of the socio-psychological and behavioral reasons behind
information forging, the rate at which disinformation is produced is much larger than the rate at which it can be analysed
and its effects adequately mitigated.
AI4TRUST will provide a hybrid system, where machines cooperate with humans, relying on advanced AI solutions
against advanced disinformation techniques to support media professionals and policy makers. Our system will monitor,
in nearly real time, multiple online social platforms, filtering out social noise and analysing multimodal (text, audio,
visual) content in multiple languages (up to 70% of coverage in EU) with novel AI algorithms, while cooperating in an
automated way with an international network of human fact-checkers who will be periodically triggered and who will
frequently provide validated data to update our algorithms. The resulting quantitative indicators, including infodemic
risk, will be inspected under the lens of social and computational social sciences, to build the trustworthy elements
required by media professionals to create customisable and reliable data reports.
We expect that the AI4TRUST’s system, based on a human-centred approach to technology development that is
aligned with European social and ethical values, will be integrated in the standard toolbox of data analysts working on
disinformation.