One of the FERMI project’s key goals was to develop a set of tools that enable law-enforcement agency (LEA) end-users to mitigate disinformation-induced crime. Recent developments have shown that disinformation spread by domestic extremists can motivate individuals and groups to engage in violence. The sudden uptick in conspiracy theorist-rooted terrorist attacks in the midst of the Covid pandemic is a case in point. Apparently, those were largely driven by a disinformation campaign suggesting that Covid was caused by 5G technology, which would explain why 96% of said attacks were aimed at telecommunication infrastructure.
Accordingly, three out of five core objectives set by the FERMI project aimed at developing an integrated FERMI platform, including “Key Technology Offerings” that facilitate 1) investigations of disinformation-induced crimes spread in the form of social media messages, 2) threat assessments regarding the offline crime landscape, and 3) impact assessments, including proposing counter-measures, if necessary. More specifically, the FERMI platform can grasp how a social media message has travelled and what accounts have shared and discussed it and assess the influence of all said accounts and their origins (bot-operated vs. human-operated accounts); it can distinguish between different social media posts‘ sentiments and estimate the future crime landscape; and it can calculate the likely costs of disinformation-induced violence and recommend counter-measures on this basis.
All of these tools have been successfully validated in two iterations centred around three use cases. Proper validation was the fourth core objective set by the project and it could be implemented along the conceptual lines of use cases 1) on violent right-wing extremism covering crucial steps required to facilitate an investigation into human-operated accounts; 2) on violent Covid-related extremism covering an in-depth threat assessment, including grasping the overall atmosphere surrounding the disinformation campaign and estimating the likely crime landscape; 3) on violent left-wing extremism addressing the assessment of the criminal activities’ ramifications by estimating the crimes’ impact (in terms of cost) and identifying proper counter-measures.
The validation efforts were guided by a detailed experimentation protocol. Feedback was fully in line with pre-defined end-user expectations paving the ground for exploiting the results, which is part of the last core objective that concerned the consortium’s outreach efforts. Accordingly, an exploitation strategy guided post-project commercialization with a focus on the jointly developed platform. 3 viable commercialization scenarios have been identified: (1) Exploiting the FERMI platform as a Service, (2) forming a licensing pool of modules and (3) providing consulting and customization services.
Insights from social sciences and humanities guided the legal and ethics scope of the project, for example by delineating the role of LEAs in the fight against disinformation and the constraints the law places on them. All of FERMI’s research complied with an Ethics Protocol signed by all partners. Besides the contributions of the legal and ethics advisors (KU Leuven and VUB), BIGS developed a model to calculate the costs of disinformation campaigns (see above), whereas CONVERGENCE organised training activities for the general public. Three such external webinars disseminating project insights were held and recordings as well as material have been available on the FERMI website.
