Objectives
Platform
VIGILANT is an end-to-end solution built around a disinformation toolbox containing more than thirty state-of-the-art tools that will help police authorities combat disinformation and other forms of harmful content.
Text
VIGILANT will include advanced tools from FP7 and H2020 projects for text analysis, adapted, and tailored for PAs for the context of disinformation linked to criminal activities. The project will innovate by building new tools in response to police authorities needs identified in co-design workshops. The text analysis tools will help police officers to detect coordinated disinformation campaigns, identifying fabricated content, machine-generated text, extremism, and organised networks sharing the same or similar false narratives multiple times.
Image/Video
The VIGILANT platform will include advanced image and video analysis tools to enable police officers to detect tampered images and videos, reverse search on billion-level size databases of known fake images and videos, object identification and classification, symbol identification, and multimodal search.
Network
Disinformation can also be detected through the identification of coordinated networks. The disinformation toolbox will include tools that can identify and track coordinated link-sharing, user mentions, hashtags, and temporal information to uncover networks of accounts that share and promote disinformation. The VIGILANT project will innovate by developing new tools that will combine textual similarity with temporal coordination in sharing behaviour to help uncover disinformation networks.
Training
The VIGILANT project includes extensive training for its partner police authorities on the use of the platform and its individual tools. It will also train police authorities about coordinated disinformation campaigns and how to identify their intended effect. By understanding the social drivers, goals, motivations, psychological dispositions and actions of individuals sharing and consuming disinformation linked to criminal acts, it will enable police authorities to counter their effects.
Network
The project will also establish a peer-to-peer sustainable support network for European police officers to share their experience and knowledge long after the project has finished. Often disinformation and other forms of harmful content linked to criminal activities found in one jurisdiction are reused by other criminal networks in other jurisdictions. A network of police officers and units will enable knowledge sharing and coordinated responses to campaigns and criminal activities.