Kick-off meeting to launch the WIEGE project

On 8 May 2026, the kick-off meeting for the WIEGE collaborative project (“Wiederholt getäuscht? Identifikation, Wirkung und Abwehr plattformübergreifender politischer Desinformation im Alltag von Jugendlichen und Heranwachsenden”) took place at the Haus der Universität in Düsseldorf. On this day, project participants from the various partner institutions came together to mark the official launch of the project, agree on key working structures and plan the next steps in the collaboration.

The meeting focused on the presentation of the individual work packages, organisational and technical coordination, and discussions on common goals and interfaces within the project consortium. In addition, initial milestones, issues relating to internal and external project communication, and potential cooperation and dissemination activities were discussed. 

The WIEGE collaborative project investigates how political disinformation is disseminated across different platforms, what effects it has, particularly on young people and adolescents, and how effective countermeasures can be developed. The focus is on how young people perceive, process and evaluate political disinformation on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Telegram or X. The aim of the project is to strengthen the resilience of adolescents and young adults to political disinformation and thereby contribute to the protection of the democratic public sphere.

To this end, WIEGE combines approaches from communication studies, computer science and educational research. Plans include the creation of an open database on cross-platform political disinformation, the development of AI-supported methods for detecting disinformation patterns, and studies on impact, perception and countermeasures. This is complemented by practice-oriented transfer and educational programmes, which are developed and tested in collaboration with partners from the field.

The initiative for the project originated at the Düsseldorf Institute for Internet and Democracy (DIID), with which several of the participating researchers are affiliated – including crossinstitutional boundaries. Accordingly, the DIID also played a central role in bringing the consortium partners together and developing the project network.

At the outset of the meeting, there was a high level of motivation and a sense of optimism among all those involved. The project partners from academia and industry – including researchers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, as well as the industry partners tech & teach and funk – are looking forward to working together over the next three years and making innovative contributions to the research and defence against political disinformation.

The project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) as part of the funding programme “Trust in Democracy and the State: Recognizing and Countering Digital Disinformation”. The project will run from February 2026 to January 2029. The total budget for the collaborative project is around 2.1 million euros.

You can find more information about the project here.