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From COVID-19 to Ukraine-related misinformation: Are Platforms Doing Any Better?
By Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield
The COVID-19 pandemic and related infodemic uncovered a wide range of weaknesses in their policies and actions towards tackling viral and harmful misinformation on COVID-19, which ranged widely from false cures to anti-vax narratives.
Specifically, our research (available from our COVID-19 Resource Hub) in the past two years uncovered a number of issues:
Failure of platforms’ content moderation actions, in breach of their own policies, where we reviewed Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp.
Inadequate enforcement of platform policies in smaller countries and non-English languages, where we studied France, Bulgaria, and the Philippines, as well as making cross-country/language comparisons.
Research is a core part of what we do. It involves identifying, uncovering, and explaining disinformation campaigns and networks, using open source investigation techniques (OSINT) and social media network analysis methodologies. We disseminate our findings via our partnerships with the media and leading experts in the field.
Check out all our investigations below
ALL Publications
- Blog Posts
- November 21, 2022
By Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield
The COVID-19 pandemic and related infodemic uncovered a wide range of weaknesses in their policies and actions towards tackling viral and harmful misinformation on COVID-19, which ranged widely from false cures to anti-vax narratives.
Specifically, our research (available from our COVID-19 Resource Hub) in the past two years uncovered a number of issues:
Failure of platforms’ content moderation actions, in breach of their own policies, where we reviewed Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp.
Inadequate enforcement of platform policies in smaller countries and non-English languages, where we studied France, Bulgaria, and the Philippines, as well as making cross-country/language comparisons.
- Blog Posts
- November 17, 2022
This blogpost looks at how recurrent hoaxes can help the counter-disinformation community predict and tackle the next infodemic through the lens of the monkeypox hoaxes – which are mostly a repackaged version of the COVID-19 infodemic.
- Studies
- November 14, 2022
The VUB and EU DisinfoLab have joined forces under the EDMO BELUX project to publish its second investigation, “The disinformative ecosystem”, about the link-sharing behaviour of a subset of 30 Dutch-speaking Telegram far-right and conspiracy communities and to understand the information-sharing habits of controversial channels that gather thousands of members and to gain insight into the broader media sphere to which they pertain and on which they feed.
- Technical Documents
- October 12, 2022
This Technical Document offers a short and practical toolbox of what should be considered when speaking of gender-based disinformation.
- Blog Posts
- October 11, 2022
This blogpost inputs into the debates on the Directive on combating violence against women and domestic violence proposed by the European Commission in March. While putting forward interesting initiatives to protect victims, the Directive does not consider the impact of harmful content, notably gender-based disinformation.
- Studies
- September 27, 2022
How Doppelganger, an operation linked to Russian-based actors,
cloned legitimate media outlets from multiple European countries to spread disinformation designed to undermine the support to Ukraine.
- Blog Posts
- September 22, 2022
This blogpost provides an analysis of ‘disinformation entrepreneurs’, i.e., YouTube users that have found the fastest way to grow their accounts by spreading pro-Russian disinformation on the war in Ukraine.
- Blog Posts
- September 19, 2022
Amidst the rush to organise the snap Italian elections on September 25, here’s the review of the handful of initiatives that have been put forward by stakeholders to protect the vote from disinformation and foreign interference.
- Technical Documents
- September 2, 2022
This Technical Document by CORRECTIV.Faktencheck digs on the learnings from 5 years of monitoring of disinformation during the German elections, and provides the key takeaways from the 2021 German Federal Elections.
- Blog Posts
- August 31, 2022
This piece draws on a 2022 RightsCon session co-organised by EU DisinfoLab and the Dangerous Speech Project. It brought together disinformation experts from Greece, Poland, and Sri Lanka to share their own experiences debunking mis/disinformation, focusing on how such content can contribute to intergroup violence.
- Blog Posts
- July 22, 2022
This blogpost investigates the main disinformative trends circulating between January and June 2022 in France, Germany, and Spain.
- Technical Documents
- July 22, 2022
Thanks to this technical document, you will get access to the codebook guiding the work of the EU DisinfoLab Research Team.