The Truth and Trust Online conference achieved its mission to bring together people with different backgrounds, levels of seniority, origin and also from various disciplines. It covered a wide range of issues around the challenge of misinformation and the 257 participants had two days of amazing talks from people of well known companies, universities, media organizations, NGOs, such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, BBC, Full Fact and others.

Several conversations focused on how vital is the help of automatic algorithms in the verification of news items. As stated “we are NOT replacing fact checkers with AI”, but there was a lot of conversation of how fact checkers could benefit from AI. A strong recommendation for collaboration between journalists and media experts was a major outcome of the conference. Moreover, breaking news is spreading at a dizzying speed across all media, and cross-platform knowledge was strongly discussed as a means of aiding the verification of disinformation.

Olga Papadopoulou from Web Media Verification (MeVer) team with Danai Tsabouraki (ATC), Zlatina Marinova (ontotext) and Carolina Scarton (USFD) were there to present our work in the WeVerify project. During the poster session, the WeVerify poster attracted people due to its focus (among others) on deep fake detection technologies which is a hot field but still rapidly evolving and not yet ready for deployment in real-world settings.

During the second day presentations, it was an honor for us that the InVID-WeVerify plugin, where our team contributes with backend services (context aggregation and analysis and image forensics), was presented by Judy King, Director of Innovation at BBC monitoring team, as a technology which is used by her team to verify video.

The outcomes of the TTO conference were fruitful for all participants and offered new multidisciplinary perspectives on the subject, analyzed from all points of view by experts from the areas of AI, journalism, fact checking, and social media platforms. We hope that TTO will become an annual conference to provide the opportunity to researchers and professionals working on the challenge of disinformation to meet, exchange ideas, present new technologies and mostly allow interactions among people coming from different fields into a broader and more nuanced understanding of the field.