Research Team Meeting of the Project Biography of Disinformation

On 17–18 September 2025, the first meeting of the entire research team of the project Biography of Fake News with a Touch of AI: A Dangerous Phenomenon through the Prism of Modern Human Sciences took place at the Campus of the University of Ostrava. The meeting provided a forum for presenting the results achieved so far in the individual research plans, and for discussing their future directions and goals (programme).

The particular contributions revealed the diversity of research approaches to the issues of the emergence, dissemination, reception, and impact of disinformation on society. The opening block of the first day focused on the distinctive features of disinformation texts and on the question whether cross-linguistic comparison can uncover transcultural strategies of disinformation texts, followed by presentations on the foundations and methodology of research into trust in multimedia content generated by large language models (LLMs) and on possibilities of studying it from the perspectives of psychology, sociology, and media studies.

Furthermore, ample space was devoted to logical and argumentative perspectives, including new approaches to working with inconsistent information, modelling the meaning of generalized quantifiers, and reflecting on the role of artificial intelligence as both help and a danger in the fight against disinformation.

The first day’s programme was crowned by a lecture by Marie Koldinská and Oldřich Bruža entitled Stratcom 2024–2025. A Situation Report on the State of Strategic Communication in the Czech Republic Amid of the Information War.

The introductory lecture block of the second day was dedicated to efficient language models for the analysis of large text corpora, the process of disinformation dissemination on social networks, comprising its specific features and methods based on text content analysis. The social dimension of the issue of disinformation was subsequently emphasized by papers on research into information behaviour in segregated neighbourhoods and on the role of social work in the cultural policy of a neoliberal state. Since the whole project operates with the modern concept of Open Science, a reminder of the principles required by the adherence to open science practices was included as well.

The meeting demonstrated that the work on the individual research plans is in full swing and offered an inspiring cross-disciplinary and cross-perspective discussion. At the same time, it showed that it is, above all, their interconnected ness which opens the route to a deeper understanding of the disinformation phenomenon.

Updated: 06. 10. 2025