Fake news is false or misleading information that is deliberately disseminated in order to manipulate opinions or promote certain interests. They jeopardise democracies by undermining trust in the media and institutions and distorting public opinion. In January 2024, the Austrian Armed Forces presented the 2024 risk picture for Austria, stating that disinformation campaigns are one of the greatest threats to Austria's security as part of hybrid threats. The potential threat posed by disinformation campaigns is exacerbated by the emergence of bots and fake news networks on the internet, which can be created very effectively and with little effort with AI support.

Although disinformation campaigns represent a massive problem for the future, their negative effects are underestimated by the general public. Even in research, the level of knowledge about fake news networks and their technological implementation is low, as massive technological advances have taken place in the last year that make such fake news campaigns possible in the first place through automatically generated text, image and video content.

In order to counteract fake news networks, the TruthGuard project is the first to analyse both sides of fake news, namely the generation as well as the identification of fake news. By analysing both sides, a holistic system can be researched that both improves state-of-the-art methods and can be used for awareness-raising measures. The project's activities will be supported by an Oversight Board with external partners, which will deal with ethical and legal issues relating to the project and whose considerations will be incorporated into the scientific and technical developments. The partner SME will draw up a comprehensive commercialisation plan and the scientific results will be disseminated internationally. The scientific and technical objectives of TruthGuard are listed below:

• Research into methods for the effective regulation of generative models to combat fake news, including the identification of weaknesses in the implementation of ethics guidelines and the safeguarding of the integrity of these models.
• Research into new, fully automated methods for identifying fake news and bots based on data from various social media networks.
• Integration of a generating and an identifying tool of fake news in a demonstrator application for specific deployment scenarios in a TRL 4 test environment, which are tested with the user as well as with other stakeholders. The scenarios were determined in a structured manner using scientific frameworks at the beginning of the project.
• Investigation of target group-specific challenges and platform-specific problems that lead to the development of targeted measures to promote the critical handling of information in order to strengthen the resilience of the civilian population against disinformation.

Project Lead
FH-Prof. Dr. Clemens Havas, Fachhochschule Salzburg GmbH

Partners
Austria Institut für Europa- und Sicherheitspolitik
Austrian Institute of Technology
Bundesministerium für Landesverteidigung
neke-neke GmbH
Österreichisches Institut für angewandte Telekommunikation (ÖIAT)

Contact
FH-Prof. Dr. Clemens Havas, Fachhochschule Salzburg
Urstein Süd 1, A - 5412 Puch/Salzburg
Telefon: +43-50-2211-1261
clemens.havas(at)fh-salzburg.ac.at 
https://realities.fh-salzburg.ac.at/ 
https://realities.fh-salzburg.ac.at/de/projects/truthguard