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The new vera.ai project (VERification Assisted by Artificial Intelligence), which officially started on Thursday 15 September, follows on from the previous InVID (2016-2018) and WeVerify (2018-2021).

These two European “innovation actions” enabled the AFP Medialab to develop the InVID-WeVerify verification extension with its technological partners. This plug-in, which is freely available on the Chrome store, currently has more than 75,000 active users per week in 225 countries.

The vera.ai project aims to improve existing tools and build new ones with algorithms and artificial intelligence methods to fight misinformation on any type of content (text, photo, video, audio) and across a variety of languages.

The ambition of vera.ai project is to prototype and test its developments  in close collaboration with “fact-checkers in the loop", including AFP’s 130 digital investigative journalists covering 85 countries, to develop more effective software tools.

This new technology project will also work closely with the various anti-disinformation programmes in which AFP participates in Europe, under the aegis of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO).

Along with AFP, the EBU (Switzerland) and the German international channel Deutsche Welle are vera.ai’s media partners. The project is coordinated by the Mever (Media Verification) team of the Informatics Research Institute ITI-CERTH in Thessaloniki, Greece. Other participants are the University of Sheffield (UK), the Universities of Urbino Carlo Bo and Naples Federico II (Italy), the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), the Fraunhofer Institute (Germany), the Borelli Centre of the École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay (France), the Kempelen Institute of Technology (Slovakia), the IT services companies Sirma AI (Bulgaria), the Athens Technology Centre (ATC), and the NGO EU DisinfoLab (Belgium).