At first glance, Chinese international media outlets may appear to be ordinary news websites, but they are not independent media organizations simply based in China. The Communist Party of China (CPC) strictly controls who is allowed to communicate with the world from China and within China. It decides which topics can be discussed and how.

SHIFT is dedicated to addressing disinformation beyond detection. In 13 European countries, this interdisciplinary project investigates the impact of disinformation on social trust and tests scalable countermeasures to strengthen social resilience and contain already disseminated narratives at an early stage.

Disinformation spreads across all platforms and languages, and also affects Turkish- and Russian-speaking communities within Germany. Existing AI systems still do not adequately capture linguistic and cultural nuance. The kuKI project aims to develop a monitoring system for Telegram, YouTube, and TikTok, an AI pipeline for narrative detection, and a disinformation knowledge graph to visualize topics, actors, and campaigns.

When states deliberately spread disinformation, it undermines and, in the worst cases, destroys social cohesion. How can we protect ourselves? We need an integrated approach that combines different strategies. In the CeMAS research paper "United Against Manipulation", Lea Frühwirth outlines such a model for dealing with foreign opinion manipulation.

The research paper German Users Within the Terrorgram Network: A Dark Field Study on the Activity of German Users in Militant Accelerationism provides the first empirical results on the involvement of users with a local connection to Germany in the transnational right-wing terrorist Terrorgram network on the Telegram platform.