Murmuras launches project to detect fake news in mobile apps

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Fake news in social media apps has been difficult to detect so far.

Disinformation poses a central threat to the political process and social cohesion. It influences elections and induces people to engage in nonsensical or even terrorist behavior. Platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram in particular play a major role in this and could could take many preventive measures, but do not necessarily have the corresponding corresponding incentives - because more activity on the platform leads to more advertising revenue. Also even though current efforts, especially by Twitter, show countermeasures, these are not sufficient to limit the spread of fake news across the board. Therefore Murmuras’ DeFaktS project seeks to empower actual users to better reflect on news and social media posts and thus limit the spread of false information. The DeFaktS project (Recognizing and Revealing Factors and Stylistic Devices of Disinformation Campaigns) runs from 2022-2024 and is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Murmuras is working on fake news detection together with the University of Marburg, the FZI - Forschungszentrum Informatik Karlsruhe and Liquid Democracy.

Murmuras goals

The core tasks of Murmuras in this project are the development of an app to capture screen content that is analyzed for Fake News and the extension of this app with the AIs (Fake News detection and XAI) and feedback methods of the academic partners (University of Marburg and FZI - Forschungszentrum Informatik Karlsruhe). App with the AIs (Fake News detection and XAI) and feedback methods of the academic partners (University of Marburg and the FZI - Forschungszentrum Informatik Karlsruhe). The resulting demonstrator app is to be further developed to market maturity following the project. Since such an approach is being developed and researched for the first time for the German-speaking area, the project has an important benefit for Germany’s economy and society. [Further information on the project can be found here]. (https://www.forschung-it-sicherheit-kommunikationssysteme.de/projekte/defakts)