Joint research project: Identifying, verifying, and stopping concealed propaganda attacks via online media - Sub-Project: Coordination of simulation, identification, and defense against concealed propaganda attacks (PropStop)

Basic data for this project

Description

Nowadays, people worldwide discuss and comment societal and political developments on the Internet, for instance on social media platforms or on news websites. Not only journalists rely on social media as a source for ‘trending topics' or offer their users the possibility to state their opinion publicly on the Net. Beyond the desired space for free expression of public opinions, such Internet offerings also provide options for large-scaled concerted manipulations. Semi- to full automatized systems, so-called ‘propaganda-bots' or ‘social-bots' (mis-)use the easy access to the (technical) infrastructure in order to covertly disseminate certain public opinions 'en masse'. Such propaganda attacks can result in a distorted image of the digital public opinion. This distorted image could then influence the single user, societal debates, and coverage and therewith finally cause severe damages. Throughout the project an interdisciplinary team of statisticians, communication scientists, IT-security researchers, journalists and IT-security companies works together to identify and verify such attacks via online media.