AI4TRUST in Brussels: Artificial Intelligence Against Disinformation

The AI4TRUST project, coordinated by Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) and funded by the Horizon Europe programme, recently took centre stage in Brussels with two events focusing on the role of artificial intelligence in combating disinformation and strengthening trust in the media.

AI4TRUST aims to combat misinformation and disinformation in the European Union by creating a trust-based environment that integrates the automated monitoring of social and news media with advanced AI-based technologies, in order to enhance the work of human fact-checkers.

The conference “AI and disinformation – How can Europe safeguard trust in the media?”, organised by Euractiv and supported by AI4TRUST, represented the first opportunity for discussion and took place on 4 February 2026. The event explored how artificial intelligence can strengthen Europe’s response to disinformation while safeguarding media freedom and trust. Following an introduction by Riccardo Galotti, Head of the FBK DigiS Complex Human Behaviour unit and lead of the AI4TRUST project, a panel of experts discussed the role of AI in fighting disinformation, focusing on how AI-based tools can complement human fact-checking, improve the detection of disinformation across platforms and languages, ensure transparency, accountability and ethical use through appropriate policy frameworks, and foster collaboration between researchers, media professionals and policymakers to build a resilient information ecosystem. The discussion also addressed the role of European initiatives such as the AI Act, the Democracy Action Plan and the European Media Freedom Act in supporting these efforts. 

Gina Neff, Executive Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy  at the University of Cambridge and member of the AI4TRUST consortium, highlighted the importance of the AI4TRUST solution: “The tools that we have developed are not supposed to supplant European regulation around healthy information environments, but to be powerful tools in the hands of people who communicate on the side of truth, on the side of democracy, on the side of science, on the side of facts, knowing that there are very powerful people who want to use facts against us as weapons”.

The event was successful in terms of both the quality of the discussion and the level of participation.

The second event brought together the AI4TRUST partnership for the fifth and final in-person Consortium meeting, held on 5 February 2026 at the venue kindly provided by the Brussels Representation of the European Region Tyrol–South Tyrol–Trentino. The meeting represented an important moment of synthesis for the project, which will conclude at the end of February 2026, during which the project’s results and outcomes were presented and discussed, also in view of the final project review by the European Commission, scheduled to take place in the coming months.