VAMPIRE

Social media channels and video platforms like TikTok are popular among young people and are therefore an attractive target for disinformation campaigns. Short TikTok videos spread extremely quickly. As a result, false or misleading information reaches many people – especially young people – in a very short time. This is because young people in particular often no longer use traditional news channels but instead turn to platforms like TikTok, which makes them especially vulnerable to fake news.

Interdisciplinary Team

In the VAMPIR project – Video Use in Adolescence: Manipulation, Propaganda, Information, and Resilience – an interdisciplinary team is developing measures to detect and curb disinformation on TikTok. The project brings together technical, media-psychological, communication science, and legal perspectives to comprehensively address the challenges posed by disinformation in video content:

From a technical perspective, researchers at Fraunhofer SIT are analyzing how disinformation and deepfakes spread from niche platforms like Telegram to mainstream services like TikTok. By analyzing large volumes of data from these platforms, the team aims to identify typical patterns of dissemination and develop automated detection methods. In addition, Fraunhofer SIT researchers will develop AI-supported methods for detecting deepfakes, manipulated videos, and images. To this end, they are examining the metadata of image and audio data and analyzing images, videos, and audio data using data-driven and model-based methods from the fields of computer vision and audio processing.

Researchers in media psychology and communication sciences are investigating how image-based disinformation differs from text-based disinformation and what specific effects fake images and videos have on young people. Building on this, the researchers are developing strategies to strengthen media literacy among young people without fostering blanket distrust of all media.

Finally, the legal perspective complements the project: What rules are already in place, such as those under the Digital Services Act or the European Union’s AI Regulation? Where are there gaps in the protection of young users?

Objectives of VAMPIR

The project’s goal is to develop a comprehensive toolkit: Technical methods for detecting disinformation can be made available to platform operators; the psychological findings and educational measures developed are aimed at media regulatory authorities, youth protection organizations, schools, and other educational institutions. The legal recommendations are intended for policymakers and are applicable to other areas of digital information dissemination. The project also plans to hold workshops – for example, for journalists and lawyers – and to collaborate with civil society initiatives.