Combating Disinformation Five Free And Open Source Digital Tools For

Bonisiwe Shabane
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combating disinformation five free and open source digital tools for

Brazilian Journalism Institute Unveils Open-Source Toolkit to Combat Disinformation The fight against online disinformation has received a significant boost with the launch of five innovative open-source digital tools by Brazil’s Institute for the Development of Journalism (Projor). These tools, developed by Brazilian media outlets under Projor’s Innovation Fund to Combat Disinformation (Codesinfo), are freely available to any journalistic organization worldwide, marking a collaborative effort to bolster journalistic integrity and public trust... Projor is actively promoting these tools internationally by translating its website into English and Spanish and supporting networking initiatives for the participating media outlets. The tools aim to empower civic journalism by enhancing authorship transparency, facilitating fact-checking, providing reliable climate information, simplifying video production, and ensuring up-to-date context within news reports. Capí: An AI-Powered Chatbot for Climate Clarity

Developed by Ambiental Media, Capí is an artificial intelligence chatbot designed to provide accurate and accessible information on climate change. Leveraging Google’s Gemini large language model and a curated database of scientific reports, including those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Capí addresses user queries with reliable, science-backed answers. While still in beta, Capí utilizes retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to minimize inaccuracies and tailor responses to specific contexts. The chatbot learns from user interactions through prompt tuning while maintaining user privacy. Its infrastructure is hosted on Google Cloud servers optimized for minimal environmental impact. Ambiental Media emphasizes Capí’s role in supporting journalistic research, fact-checking, and brainstorming, acknowledging the ongoing development and potential for refinement inherent in beta AI technology.

Check-up: Scrutinizing Healthcare Advertising for Misinformation Several news outlets across Brazil are participating in the Codesinfo project to produce digital tools to fight disinformation. Image: Screenshot, Codesinfo Brazil’s Institute for the Development of Journalism, or Projor for its initials in Portuguese, launched the second phase of the Innovation Fund to Combat Disinformation (Codesinfo), focused on the dissemination of five open-source digital... Developed by Brazilian media outlets in late 2024, the solutions are available free of charge to any journalistic organization inside and outside Brazil. To reach international media outlets, Francisco Belda, Projor’s director of operations and coordinator of Codesinfo, said that the Codesinfo website is being translated into English and Spanish and the partner media outlets that created...

“We believe that the five tools strengthen civic journalism in general,” Belda told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). “This is due to their role in valuing the concept of authorship (Quem Disse? tool), fact-checking (Check-up), scientific evidence in environmental and climate change coverage (Capí chatbot), production of short videos based on textual reports (Mosaico) and in the provision of updated contextual information (Xarta).” Capí is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Ambiental Media that was launched in beta version in November 2024. The tool’s purpose is to provide clear, up-to-date, and reliable answers to users’ questions on climate issues. The Codesinfo project by Projor (Institute for the Development of Journalism) begins its second phase to expand the use of tools to combat disinformation and disseminate them to national and international media outlets.

Brazil’s Institute for the Development of Journalism, or Projor for its initials in Portuguese, launched the second phase of the Innovation Fund to Combat Disinformation (Codesinfo), focused on the dissemination of five open-source digital... Developed by Brazilian media outlets in late 2024, the solutions are available free of charge to any journalistic organization inside and outside Brazil. To reach international media outlets, Francisco Belda, Projor's director of operations and coordinator of Codesinfo, said that the Codesinfo website is being translated into English and Spanish and the partner media outlets that created... "We believe that the five tools strengthen civic journalism in general," Belda told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). "This is due to their role in valuing the concept of authorship (Quem Disse? tool), fact-checking (Check-up), scientific evidence in environmental and climate change coverage (Capí chatbot), production of short videos based on textual reports (Mosaico) and in the provision of updated contextual information (Xarta)."

Capí fights environmental and climate disinformation through an AI-powered chatbot (Disclosure/Codesinfo) In the digital age, misinformation proliferates online, making fact-checking and the dissemination of reliable information essential for citizens. To address this growing challenge, free, open-source tools are proving invaluable. These tools allow journalists, citizens, and educators to better understand and combat misinformation. In this article, we will examine five of these innovative digital tools and their impact in the fight against misinformation. Online misinformation represents one of the greatest contemporary challenges, particularly in the run-up to elections or during health crises.

False information spreads rapidly, reaching a wide audience even before it is verified. To better understand this phenomenon, let’s examine some of the causes and consequences of misinformation. Misinformation can manifest itself in several forms, ranging from unfounded rumors to manipulation campaigns orchestrated by influence groups. Here are some crucial issues: The harmful effects of misinformation are felt on several levels: To address this reality, it is imperative to have tools available to detect, verify, and counter disinformation.

Deepfakes and disinformation have the ability to move financial markets, influence public opinion, and scam businesses and individuals out of millions of dollars. The Semantic Forensics program (SemaFor) is a DARPA-funded initiative to create comprehensive forensic technologies to help mitigate online threats perpetuated via synthetic and manipulated media. Over the last eight years, Kitware has helped DARPA create a powerful set of tools to analyze whether media has been artificially generated or manipulated. Kitware and DARPA are now bringing those tools out of the lab to defend digital authenticity in the real world. Kitware has a history of building various image and video forensics algorithms to defend against disinformation by detecting various types of manipulations, beginning with DARPA’s Media Forensics (MediFor) program. Building on this foundation, our team expanded its focus to include multimodal analysis of text, audio, and video under the SemaFor program.

For additional information about Kitware’s contributions to SemaFor, check out the “Voices from DARPA” podcast episode, “Demystifying Deepfakes,” where Arslan Basharat, assistant director of computer vision at Kitware, is a guest speaker. DARPA has recently announced two initiatives related to the SemaFor program: AI FORCE and Analytic Catalog. The AI Forensics Open Research Challenge Evaluations (AI FORCE) are a series of publicly available challenges aimed at developing defensive, forensics techniques related to generative AI capabilities. The Analytic Catalog is a collection of open source tools available for the research community and the industry to advance the state-of-the-art in digital forensics. In keeping with Kitware’s open source software heritage, we have made significant contributions to launching the Analytic Catalog with several detection and attribution analytics from our team related to images, video, text, and multimodal... We plan to add additional cutting-edge techniques for combatting disinformation to this catalog in the future.

For instance, one of these analytics can help detect AI-generated images, such as those created by Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) algorithms. Recently we have also developed methods for more modern AI-generation techniques like the Diffusion generators. In addition to our work on photos and video, our team members have also contributed to the development of tools for detecting and analyzing other forms of disinformation, such as synthetic audio as well... These tools are crucial for combating the spread of false information and propaganda on social media and other digital formats. Prior to the implementation of Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024, this report documents young people’s views. Social media is described as integral to their wellbeing, education and relationships, despite recognised risks.

Respondents express doubts about the under‑16 restriction, cite inadequate consultation and identify limited assistance for the transition beyond December 10, 2025. A searchable database of every student newspaper in the USA. Each entry has basic details including links to the home website. Maintained by University of Vermont Center for Community News, the College Media Association, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Collegiate Press, the Student Press Law Center and the Foundation for Individual Rights and... Nearly three years after ChatGPT’s launch, the generative artificial intelligence landscape remains in rapid flux. Using high-frequency website traffic data from Semrush, this paper tracks global adoption patterns for the 60 most-visited consumer-facing generative artificial intelligence tools through mid-2025.

Five key findings emerge. First, fierce competition drives continuous innovation: two of 2025’s top five tools—DeepSeek and Grok—are new entrants, and development is rapidly diversifying into multi-modal capabilities, reasoning, and specialized applications. Second, ChatGPT maintains dominance despite competition, accounting for 77 percent of traffic to the top 60 tools in April 2025. Third, usage of generative artificial intelligence has exploded since mid-2024: ChatGPT traffic grew 113 percent year-over-year, driven by 42 percent user growth and 50 percent increased visits per user, with session duration doubling. Fourth, high-income countries are pulling decisively ahead, creating stark global divides. While 24 percent of internet users in high-income countries use ChatGPT, penetration drops to 5.8 percent in upper-middle-income countries, 4.7 percent in lower-middle-income countries, and just 0.7 percent in low-income countries.

Regression analysis confirms that gross domestic product per capita strongly predicts adoption growth. Fifth, localization shapes competitive advantage: non-U.S. tools concentrate heavily in home markets, with Le Chat drawing 69 percent of traffic from Europe and several Chinese tools exceeding 90 percent domestic usage. These patterns reveal an artificial intelligence landscape characterized by intense innovation, persistent market leadership, accelerating growth, and deepening global inequality, underscoring the need for inclusive policies as generative artificial intelligence becomes central to economic... This study looks at the role of news media and media representation in fostering social participation and a sense of belonging among multilingual communities in Australia. It found that representation, both in news and in media more broadly, is linked to building a sense of belonging among multilingual audiences.

The research also investigated the drivers to belonging, including age and residency status, in addition to English language confidence and length of stay in Australia. It found that age and residency status in Australia are significant drivers that foster a sense of belonging. Multilingual communities with Australian citizenship feel more at home in Australia and are more likely to experience a sense of membership within their community than permanent or temporary residents. The Rise of Codesinfo as a Collaborative Combat against Disinformation Brazil’s Institute for the Development of Journalism (Projor), formerly associated with the open-source initiative known as Codesinfo, is delving into its second phase of innovation funding to combat disinformation. As a free and accessible platform for journalists worldwide, this initiative hinges on five open-source digital tools designed to enhance civic journalism and foster a culture of fact-checking and transparency.

Led by Francisco Belda, the project’s operations team, Belda played a pivotal role in launching the second phase of Codesinfo. The tools developed by Projor are available for download without cost, accessible to any journalist, regardless of origin. The project relies on contributions from legal and administrative sectors to establish user-friendly platforms, showcasing a collaborative approach that bridges research institutions and journalistic organizations. The five open-source tools developed by Projor each serve a unique purpose, contributing to a comprehensive approach to civic journalism. These include tools focused on authorship, fact-checking, scientific evidence in environmental and climate change contexts, the production of promotional content like mosaics, and contextual updates. Each tool is rooted in established principles of accountability and transparency, intended to empower journalists with powerful tools that align with broader democratic principles.

Gary Price, a renowned figures in the field of information technology, provided invaluable insights during the launch of Codesinfo. As a librarian, technologist, consultant, and conference speaker, Price’s tenure at Ask.com and his educational background in Wayne State University’s massively open online courses (MOOCs) established him as a leader in online information services. Known for his commitment to retr一條 gü划和中国的科技创新, Gary Price respectfully shared his expertise on the initiative, highlighting the collaborative potential of the project. Given the potential for AI to spread misinformation, it is critical to equip organizations with tools and strategies that counteract false narratives, especially when it comes to AI-generated content like deepfakes. Below is a comprehensive list of tools to help identify and mitigate misinformation and disinformation. Click the title to expand.

Snopes: Verifies a wide range of claims, rumors, and misinformation. (snopes.com) PolitiFact: Focuses on political claims and rates their accuracy. (politifact.com) FactCheck.org: Non-partisan project analyzing political statements. (factcheck.org)

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