Battling Misinformation with Public Data

Misinformation—the spread of false or misleading information —and, especially, its subtype, disinformation, spread with a deliberate aim to deceive, is a growing issue. It even raises public-safety concerns, prompting UK MPs to warn that we could see riots on the back of the spread of incorrect, harmful materials. This isn’t the only way it’s negatively impacting society, with elections, wartime propaganda, and health being just some of the other areas in which misinformation has a huge influence. It is no surprise that governments are waking up and seeing this as a major national threat. However, sometimes bans and takedowns feel like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted—the issue has already progressed beyond such measures.

The institutions taking steps to tackle this issue have relied in the past on hotlines and tip inboxes, legacy media monitoring, manual OSINT, and platform APIs. These are useful approaches, but the rapid growth of misinformation is outpacing them.

When you add in technologies, such as AI, which make it easier for anyone to generate misleading content, it’s clear that a change is needed. Ultimately, organizations need to integrate approaches that match the scale of the problem, putting them ahead of the issue, rather than behind it.

The misinformation landscape of today

The spread of disinformation and misinformation is a rapidly growing concern in the digital age. One familiar example relates to the COVID-19 vaccination, where recent studies have shown that incorrect information had an effect on vaccine uptake and ultimately the lives lost in Japan.

This isn’t going unnoticed by the general public. According to research by The Alan Turing Institute, 90% of the UK population has reported witnessing misinformation online. Similarly, research from the Pew Research Center found 72% of adults across 25 nations say the spread of false information online is a major threat to their country. The problem is already spreading globally, and there will be an expectation from those within these countries that their governments do something to combat this.

There is also the argument for prioritizing this issue from the perspective of protecting the democratic process, with more studies showing that ‘fake news’ can affect election results. There have been some government efforts to ban platforms such as TikTok to curb the spread of disinformation, but such sweeping motions might be misguided and ineffective. Institutions will be expected to take on a considered, methodical, and nuanced approach to finding and analyzing information to remove harmful content.

Previous methods of keeping the truth front of mind

While the scale of misinformation and disinformation is higher today, it is not an inherently new phenomenon. As such, a number of institutions globally – both government-supported and independent – have been established to tackle the spread of misinformation and mitigate its societal impacts. For example, both the United Nations and the European Union have published reports outlining the next steps to minimize the impact of fake news.

Traditional approaches that have been used include:

• Media monitoring
• Manual review of open source intelligence
• Hotlines
• Platform tools and APIs

These techniques have played a part in beginning to tackle the spread of existing misinformation; however, they come with limitations. They can be very time-consuming, limited in terms of the information that can be accessed, or reactive in the case of hotlines. With the boom in misinformation in 2025, efforts to stop it are being outpaced by the scale of the issue.

Taking on a new approach for a new era

Like so many things in today’s society, there is no silver bullet for organizations looking to pivot and begin to get ahead of misinformation. However, there are a variety of new, innovative methods being used by institutions, some of which I have come to know through our Project 4β initiative. By taking a look at the different ways they have begun to adapt in order to overcome, we start to see a blueprint for how future misinformation prevention could shape up. For example:

Civic Resilience Initiative (Lithuanian non-profit, non-governmental organization)

This organisation is focused on mitigating societal disinformation by gathering insights into a range of public-interest issues. This can include anything from political propaganda to authoritarian influence via its Disinformation Monitoring project. They have begun using web scraping solutions to advance fact-checking by automating the collection of publicly available data. From this, the team at CRI has been able to collect data at a pace from a much wider range of sources, including both public social media and news portal channels. As a result, they have been able to publish weekly reports and filter through a much wider net of content to ensure no relevant piece of information is missed.

Debunk.org (an organisation dedicated to countering online disinformation and state-sponsored internet propaganda)

The team at Debunk aims to fight malicious actors who attempt to deceive the public through research and fact-checking of publicly available information. Geographically diverse IP addresses are crucial for this process because much content is geo-restricted—accessible only with specific geo-specific IPs. Thus, without extra IPs, much of the content remains inaccessible, rendering analysis incomplete and inaccurate. By implementing the use of proxy IPs, Debunk can collect data on a global scale and capture as much as possible.

The use of public web data collection tools is clearly playing a part in advancing the goals these institutions are working towards. When these tools are made available to them, they are able to tackle the sheer quantity of content on the internet and start to get ahead of misinformation once more.

The spread of misinformation may be a growing problem, but there is also a growing base of methods to tackle it. Common patterns amongst those who do it successfully include the prioritization of approaches that facilitate the collection of public web data from hard-to-access sources, automated monitoring and the establishment of clear audit trails.

Combating misinformation to gain back public trust and mitigate devastating societal consequences is critical. The work of these organizations signals that there is hope.