Project: COVID disinformation and negative impact on ability to prevent pandemic

A joint project of the  CSAP (Center for Security Analysis and Prevention), Czech Republic, Robert Schuman Institute, Hungary, Visegrad Insight, Res Publica Foundation, Poland, and Univerzita Mateja Bela, Slovakia, to uncover and eliminate disinformation around COVID-19 in V4.

Disinformation has become part of a hybrid war and it is omnipresent in our lives. As both the social and traditional off-line media are disseminating disinformation across the wider public, the opinion pools illustrate that majority of the public considers at least some disinformation to be true or relevant. There have been many attempts to map disinformation sources and tackle them from the rational point of view but nothing worked well. Why these did not work? Mostly because these approaches are based on fact checking and trying to tackle disinformation in a very rational way, which is critically important, but inefficient when most of human behaviour is non-conscious and absolutely not rational.

The main aims of the project are intended to: 

1) Raise awareness about spreading of fake news. Demonstrate that disinformation become omnipresent in human lives, and it touches all aspects of public policy. Focus on COVID-related misinformation and show how it limits ability to drive preventive actions

2) Identify dissemination strategies in terms of:

• Sources: Demonstrate the potential to identify initial sources of disinformation utilizing social listening and artificial intelligence based on natural language processing,
• Content: Identify different types of disinformation, and demonstrate how their mechanics are anchored in ‘behavioral biases‘, which drives both their impact and dissemination. Demonstrate how disinformation is polarizing society.
• Touchpoints: Identify touchpoints relevant for vulnerable groups (media, transportation, offices)
• Amplifiers: Potential of technology and social media to disseminate disinformation through utilizing of AI algorithms that identify target audience.

3) Prevention via proposing strategies and tactics to minimize the impact of disinformation in V4 countries anchored in human behavior and particularly media consumption patterns.

For more details on the project and events connected to the project on our website (http://stratcom.cbap.cz/), or on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CoviddisinformationV4/?ref=page_internal