Strengthening the ecosystem collaboration for societal resilience against disinformation and disinformation-fuelled crime

What is a project cluster?

Project clustering refers to an alliance created by projects with related subjects or complementing interests, which can encompass partnerships for communication and dissemination activities, participation in meetings of common interest, joint capacity building activities and workshops, among other examples.

The European Commission incentivises the clustering of Horizon Europe projects in order to enhance the impact of financed projects. By forming or joining a cluster, projects can better collaborate and support each other through knowledge sharing and benchmarking project outcomes, hence creating synergies and facilitating the achievement of the proposed impacts.

The Hybrid Threats Cluster

Hybrid threats, a combination of tactics including diplomatic, military, economic, technological, have long been used to destabilise adversaries. Large-scale online disinformation campaigns for instance are used to shape the political narrative and subsequently hinder democratic processes. Countering these constantly evolving challenges by enhancing resilience, and detecting, preventing and responding to hybrid threats is a key priority for the European Union and its member states. In light of  this, a cluster of innovative projects has been created to increase societal resilience to disinformation, misinformation and hybrid threats by strengthening cross-stakeholder collaboration. Knowledge sharing, upskilling and alignment on activities, enables the cluster participants to enhance the efforts and maximise the impact of their respective projects.

The projects involved in the cluster include:

FERMI – Fake News Risk Mitigator

ATHENA – An Exposition On The Foreign Information Manipulation And Interference

RESONANT – Interdisciplinary Research Project on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference

TENACITy – Travel Intelligence Against Crime And Terrorism

TENSOR – Reliable biomeTric tEchNologies to asSist Police authorities in cOmbating terrorism and oRganized crime

Vera.aI – VERification Assisted by Artificial Intelligence

VIGILANT – Vital Intelligence To Investigate Illegal Disinformation