Irish researchers lead European disinformation battle

'Often you can see the seeds of it [disinformation] in the popular sites', said Trinity-based project co-coordinator Professor Owen Conlon. Picture: Dominic Lipinski/PA

Irish researchers are leading a project aimed at training European policing authorities in new technologies and methods of tackling online disinformation.

The technologies will seek to tackle the rise in online hate speech and disinformation perpetuated by extremist and violent movements.

Researchers from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and University College Dublin (UCD) are leading the €4m, 36-month project to equip police with advanced technologies to detect and analyse disinformation.

The project known as ‘Vigilant’ will engage with academia, industry experts, government research centres, and four European police authorities to combat what it calls a “threat to societal cohesion and democracy”.

The project will initially work with authorities Spain, Greece, Moldova and Estonia, with an option for others to join in the future. However, An Garda Síochána was approached to join the project but did not accept the offer, researchers said.

Trinity-based project co-coordinator Professor Owen Conlon said the team “would be very pleased to work with the gardaí”.

“Manipulated images are quite common in disinformation”, said Professor Brendan Spillane, Vigilant’s co-coordinator and ADAPT researcher at UCD. 

He said most police authorities don’t have a dedicated team and often have an officer scrolling through social media for potential threats. The project aims to give police the tools to analyse large amounts of data much quicker.

Vigilant will develop tools to measure threat analysis, allowing authorities to act when what could be considered “normal” negative chatter about and individual or group “turns towards violent chatter”, he said.

Among common areas of disinformation are false medical cures, trafficking of migrants, and false information designed to target marginalised groups.

“It’s very common you get a far-right organisation that loves to stir up things against [the marginalised],” he said.

Among the most pertinent questions for the researchers is whether this chatter is found on more popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit, or is it on more niche sites.

“Often you can see the seeds of it in the popular sites,” he said, and added that more dangerous chatter tends to move to more private modes of communication.

The velocity at which information warfare can be weaponized is extreme... humans are often lazy in seeking out the fundamentals behind [an article online].

Vigilant aims to assist police authorities in detecting online hate speech, violent nationalist or separatist movements, radicalization and extremist groups, incels, and lone wolves.

The project will consist of a development phase, a police training and implementation phase, followed by the establishment of a support network for cross-border operations.

The group gathered for the first time last week in Trinity where discussions were held with partner policing authorities.

Joachim Fassbender of the German Police University, one of Vigilant’s partners, said: “Disinformation poses increasing challenges to police forces and society, especially when it is spread in a coordinated campaign. 

In times of political, economic, and social instability, disinformation is able to discredit state institutions, spread hatred, and trigger subgroups of the population to pursue their own political, social, or economic objectives in an inadmissible or unlawful way. The result is a destabilisation of society and state order. 

"It is therefore important to detect and analyse disinformation at an early stage and to develop appropriate preventative or prosecutive response options.”