Alto Analytics (2019). Public digital debate ahead of EU parliamentary elections

Data analysis company Alto Analytics conducted a study to understand the public debate at the time of the 2019 elections. Themes such as immigration, Islam, Brexit, and the Yellow Vest Movement, were among the pressing issues. 

Avaaz (2019). Far-right Networks of Deception

Avaaz uncovered that far-right and anti-EU groups had weaponised social media to spread false and hateful content. The study led to the taking down of dozens of Facebook pages around Europe, which were seen over half a billion times over the election campaign period.

EU DisinfoLab for the European Parliamentary Research Service (2019). Automated tackling of disinformation

This study maps and analyses current and future threats from online misinformation, alongside currently adopted socio-technical and legal approaches. The challenges of evaluating their effectiveness and practical adoption are also discussed. 

Fallis (2015). What is Disinformation?

This paper surveys the various analyses of the concept of disinformation that have been proposed by information scientists and philosophers.

Innes (2019). The Internet Research Agency in Europe 2014-2016

This report documents the scale of Russian interference in European democracies and is evidence of the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency’s long-term interest in European politics and elections.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (2019). 2019 EU Elections Information Operations Analysis: Interim Briefing Paper

This paper addresses the groups and parties behind the malign influence operations active in the 2019 EU elections and analyses the techniques they use. It also assesses the record of the tech companies in addressing these threats to electoral integrity

Konstantinovskiy et al. (2018). Towards automated fact-checking: developing an annotation schema and benchmark for consistent automated claim detection

In an effort to assist fact-checkers in the process of fact-checking, the authors tackle the claim detection task, one of the necessary stages prior to determining the veracity of a claim. The authors develop an annotation schema and a benchmark for automated claim detection that is more consistent across time, topics and annotators than previous approaches.

Marwick and Lewis (2017). Media manipulation and disinformation online

The study analyses how internet subcultures take advantage of the current media ecosystem to manipulate news frames, set agendas, and propagate ideas.

McNamee (2019). ‘Zucked – Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

The New York Times bestseller about a noted tech venture capitalist, early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook investor, who wakes up to the serious damage Facebook is doing to our society – and sets out to try to stop it.

Polyakova and Fried (2019). Democratic Defence Against Disinformation

This paper analyses the rapid development of policy responses of governments and social media companies to the challenge of disinformation.

Ramsay and Robertshaw (2019). Weaponising news: RT, Sputnik and targeted disinformation

The report comprises of a comprehensive analysis of how Russian state-linked news outlets play a variety of roles in different situations, ranging from coordinating damage-control messaging to amplifiers of Russian prestige and aggregators of negative content about Western domestic politics.