SocialTruth Project Approach to Online Disinformation (Fake News) Detection and Mitigation

The extreme growth and adoption of Social Media, in combination with their poor governance and the lack of quality control over the digital content being published and shared, has led information veracity to a continuous deterioration. Current approaches entrust content verification to a single centralised authority, lack resilience towards attempts to successfully "game" verification checks, and make content verification difficult to access and use. In response, our ambition is to create an open, democratic, pluralistic and distributed ecosystem that allows easy access to various verification services (both internal and third-party), ensuring scalability and establishing trust in a completely decentralized environment. In fact, this is the ambition of the EU H2020 SocialTruth project. In this paper, we present the innovative project approach and the vision of effective online disinformation detection for various practical use-cases.