New Third-Party Funded Project SynDIKAT (BMFTR) launches at the OCL
A major new research initiative has launched at the Online Communication Lab (OCL), based at the University of Münster's Institute of Communication Science. Since May 2026, the team has been working on the collaborative project “SynDIKAT” (“Synthetic Disinformation Data, Infrastructure for Collaboration and Analysis Toolbox for Social Media Research”). Supported with 1.6 million Euros in funding, the project runs until April 2029 and is backed by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) as part of its initiative “Disinformation – Detect, Understand, Defend”.
The project investigates disinformation on social media, specifically addressing the challenges arising from restricted access to platform data. Currently, a major hurdle in research is the lack of shared datasets and standardized benchmarks, which prevents methods for detecting and combating disinformation from being reliably compared and evaluated.
This is where SynDIKAT comes in: The project aims to develop a framework that facilitates secure research data sharing while strictly respecting data protection and licensing requirements. Additionally, the team will use Large Language Models (LLMs) and agent-based simulations to generate synthetic social media data, providing realistic and diverse datasets for the research community. In the long term, SynDIKAT seeks to establish a national—and eventually international—data-sharing community to foster greater transparency, comparability, and robustness in disinformation research.
The project is led by Christian Grimme (University of Münster, Department of Information Systems), Thorsten Quandt (University of Münster, OCL), Dennis Aßenmacher (GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences), Johannes Breuer (Center for Advanced Internet Studies), and Tobias Gostomzyk (TU Dortmund University, Chair of Media Law). Consortium coordinator is Christian Grimme.
At the Online Communication Lab, Paula Philine Jung and Malin Richter have joined the team to drive the project’s research efforts.
Contact person public relations:
Dr Stephan Völlmicke
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