The Thessaloniki edition of the Researchers’ Night was held on September 27 and tried to bring researchers closer to society and inspire more young people to get involved with research.

A large crowd of people of all ages attended the event and more than 100 of them were interested in the hot topic of misinformation. The Media Verification team of CERTH-ITI was there to demonstrate tools for media verification developed within the InVID and WeVerify projects.

The Context Aggregation and Analysis tool which aims to assist the verification of User-generated videos posted on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter gained the attention of the visitors who reported that they use these three platforms almost daily and were impressed with the idea that they could use the tool themselves and filter out dubious content. Μost interesting were the examples where we showed how valuable the comments which are left below the video are and how users can use them to evaluate the veracity of a video.

The second tool that was demonstrated, namely the Image Verification Assistant, focused on the problem of tampered image detection and how the user can find whether there are any suspicious areas in an image. There have been several conversations with visitors around this tool and most of them ended up having a discussion about the popular topic of deep fakes. MeVer is currently working on this topic and we hope to present a new tool focused on this new type of misleading content in next year’s Researcher’s night.

Ιn conclusion, it was a constructive event offering opportunities for exchange with both professionals from the journalism community and citizens who are not in the area of research or journalism. All attendants showed increased interest in using these tools to avoid misinformation in their daily lives.