The researcher and PhD candidate Catherine Sotirakou presented the research of the laboratory in the framework of the European project “CALYPSO – Collaborative AnaLYsis, and exPosure of diSinfOrmation“, at the HCII2022 conference.
The presentation is based on the research article presenting the preliminary results of the CALYPSO project, which aims to create a crowdsourcing ecosystem for the voluntary contribution of citizens in the fight against fake news.
CALYPSO is a European cooperation aiming to create a crowdsourcing environment for citizens to combat disinformation by participating in a game for good. The project combines the respective strengths of the general public, journalists, editors, experts, and fact-checkers. The latter collaborate to early detect and fact-check suspected cases of disinformation, exposing disinformation campaigns and messages in real-time, and quickly restoring the truth to minimize the impact of fake news on society.
Disinformation campaigns in this project are understood as defined by the European Commission in the Action Plan against Disinformation “as verifiably false or misleading information that is created, presented and disseminated for economic gain or to intentionally deceive the public, and may cause public harm. Public harm includes threats to democratic processes as well as to public goods such as Union citizens’ health, environment or security.” Thus, in this Action, satire, parody, commentary or clearly identified partisan news are not perceived as disinformation content. The main goal of CALYPSO is to foster the creation of independent multidisciplinary teams established at national level to increase the capability to detect, analyse, and promptly expose disinformation campaigns, to “bolster resilience against hybrid threats”, and, at the same time, promote news verification training activities targeted to journalists and media literacy campaigns at a national level.
CALYPSO is a pilot project awarded in response to the DG Connect/2020/5464403 call “EU grants for small-scale online media: supporting high-quality news products and tackling fake news”.
