BMFTR Project SOURCE: European research infrastructure to combat disinformation campaigns on the web

A team led by data scientist Professor Michael Granitzer from the University of Passau is developing a Europe-wide infrastructure to detect manipulated information at an early stage as part of the new BMFTR collaborative project SOURCE.

Disinformation on the internet poses a growing threat to democratic processes, social cohesion and trust in digital media. At the same time, the enormous volume of online content, the use of generative artificial intelligence and reliance on commercial search engines make systematic investigation difficult. This is where the SOURCE collaborative project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR), comes in. It is developing a research and analysis infrastructure that can be used across Europe to detect manipulated or coordinated information campaigns on the web at an early stage and investigate them in a traceable manner.

Open database for disinformation artefacts

The aim of SOURCE is to automatically collect large volumes of web and social media data, analyse it using modern AI methods, and make potential disinformation artefacts available in an open database. This is intended to better enable researchers, fact-checking organisations, the media, civil society and public authorities to identify problematic content, understand its origins and develop countermeasures.

SOURCE combines content analysis – for example, to identify AI-generated text, verify facts or investigate manipulative language patterns – with origin-based methods that reveal dissemination pathways, temporal dynamics and the networks of actors involved. A powerful high-performance computing and cloud infrastructure ensures that these analyses are also feasible at web scale. This is complemented by close collaboration with industry partners and communities who test and further develop the tools in real-world application scenarios.

Strengthening Europe’s digital sovereignty

“What makes our project particularly innovative is the combination of open European web infrastructure, novel AI methods and collaborative validation by experts,” explains Professor Michael Granitzer, holder of the Chair of Data Science at the University of Passau. Together with his team, he acts as coordinator of the joint project. “SOURCE thus strengthens Europe’s digital sovereignty and creates a sustainable foundation for research, business and society to effectively tackle the phenomenon of disinformation in the long term.”

In this project, the University of Passau is collaborating with the University of Kassel, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the non-profit organisations Open Search Foundation e.V. and Alliance4Europe. The Open Search Foundation is working on concepts for a collaborative, open and distributed internet search in Europe. Alliance4Europe is committed to protecting democracy and fundamental values in Europe. The kick-off workshop took place in Passau on 27 April 2026, led by Professor Granitzer.

The researchers are building on the results of a previous project. As part of the EU project OpenWebSearch.EU, a team headed by Professor Granitzer and the Open Search Foundation e.V. developed a prototype for an open, European web index as the basis for alternative search technologies.

The German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) is funding the project with €2,500,000 over a period of three years.

This text was machine-translated from German.