Fake news is becoming more and more prominent now that social media allow for an endless stream of unfiltered content to reach us. But what happens if we can no longer distinguish the truth from the lie?

How can theories about modern disinformation help to understand how Roman documentary fictions functioned?

With the emergence of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, it’s easier than ever to share information. Including disinformation. During his PhD computer scientist Xueqin Chen developed a new way to recognise fake news and predict how messages spread within online social networks…

LUC historian Jacqueline Hylkema unmasks forgeries from the early modern Dutch Republic in the research project

By spreading fake news via TV spots and Twitter with the use of Social Bots, Pascal professor Heike Trautmann is investigating the characteristics of fake news. She is calling on Leiden researchers to cooperate in the project.

Leiden master's students of Journalism and New Media are going to help Facebook bar fake news from the social medium.

Dr Mark Leiser, Assistant Professor in Law and Digital Technologies at eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University, has won a grant for research on fake news.

BrainTrain: an initiative from Leiden University in which a team of students visit high schools to make adolescents more resilient against disinformation on the news and on their socials. In an interactive two-hour guest lesson, high school pupils discover how easily their brains can be tricked into…

Fake news a new phenomenon? Not according to Rens Tacoma and Indira Huliselan. In an NWO project, the associate professor and PhD student will delve into the twisting, scheming and tampering with facts that went on thousands of years ago.

Lecture, PCNI Research Seminar

Alumni event

Dutch and Flemish partners, including Leiden University, are joining forces as the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) in the fight against the spread of fake news, and have received the support of the European Commission.

FactRank is a new online tool that automatically detects ‘checkable’ claims made by politicians in parliamentary debates or tweets, and therefore enables fact-checkers to work much faster. Alexander Pleijter, a researcher and lecturer in Journalism and New Media, helped develop FactRank.

The fact-checking initiative Nieuwscheckers has won the Dutch round of the European Citizens Award. This prize is awarded annually to projects and initiatives that deliver an exceptional performance within the EU.

What do people wonder about on social media? University lecturer Matthijs Westera is the recipient of an NWO grant to investigate what people are curious about online.

The government, the people and the country were in desperate straits. This about sums up the state of affairs in the Disaster Year of 1672. It was 350 years ago, and to mark the occasion PhD candidate Roosje Peeters collaborated on a series of letters to and from a key political figure Johan de Witt,…

Leiden AI Week

With over 200 participants, the first day of the Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media (MISDOOM) was a great success. With researchers and practitioners from communication science, media studies, computer science, data science, and journalists and online media…

If a forged Vermeer or Rembrandt is discovered, it is world news. Yet tracing fakes has long been a low priority in art history. University lecturer Anna Tummers will receive an ERC grant of almost two million euros to change that.

Misinformation spreads easily and fast. It gets presented as news, whereas actual news gets dismissed as fake. Conflicting streams of information allows all sides to cherry-pick whatever is most comfortable, boosting degrees of confidence and confusing the deliberation of both politicians and voters.…

From fake news to COVID-19 conspiracies, debates about truth claims have become more prominent during the past decade. Taking a global, comparative perspective, the minor Disinformation and Strategic Communication in Global Media focuses on the broad spectrum of contested narratives subsumed under the…

For years, the Dutch National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV) has collected and shared privacy-sensitive information about citizens. Experts say this is in breach of the law.

The EU proposal for a regulatory framework on artificial intelligence will not prevent the dangers of cybercrime or the spreading of fake news using ChatGPT. Cyber criminals can use the new technology to write harmful software, phishing mails and fake news.

This book considers the porous relationship between legality and illegality in Brazil, a country that presages political and societal changes in hitherto unprecedented dimensions.

In films kunnen de meest wonderlijke acties plaatsvinden. Maar zijn die acties in de 'echte' wereld ook mogelijk? En in hoeverre houden filmmakers ons voor de gek? Tijdens het Leiden International Film Festival komen film en wetenschap samen.

In this year in review we show you various projects we're very proud of. Driven by our values at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences.

A European cooperation project on disinformation and fact-checking training empowering current and future media and media education professionals, to identify, prevent, and combat fake news spread over digital networks.

Misinformation spreads easily and fast. It gets presented as news, whereas actual news gets dismissed as fake. Conflicting streams of information allows all sides to cherry-pick whatever is most comfortable, boosting degrees of confidence and confusing the deliberation of both politicians and voters.…

LIACS is a partner in RISE_SMA, an interdisciplinary, international network combining excellent scholars and practitioners to enable vigorous knowledge sharing and to develop solutions for contemporary challenges for Social Media Analytics (SMA).

Together with two other authors, Jaroslaw Kantorowicz from ISGA investigates the susceptibility to believing in misinformation.

The Leiden Ancient History specialization concentrates on the study of the economies, societies and cultures of the large empires of the Graeco-Roman world, starting with the empires of Alexander the Great and his successors.

People can be easily mislead with graphs. But they don’t necessarily stay misled, the research shows.

Leiden University College The Hague is an institute of Leiden University, located in the City of The Hague. This small and highly international community brings together passionate and motivated staff and students, who want to study and tackle the global challenges that face humanity. The intensive…

Do you have to be able to say everything on Twitter and Facebook? Is Instagram morally obliged to remove photos from attacks? Should we allow the terrorist group to recruit new members on the internet?

Since 2006, HJD has made an important contribution to shaping diplomatic studies as an international academic field. Our new HJD Diplomacy Reading List presents a diverse collection of analyses categorized into forty-five topics published in HJD over the years. We hope these lists prove a valuable resource…

Children find that both dinosaur fossils and replicas belong in a museum, but they appreciate the real objects more. This is shown by research from Leiden University and Naturalis Biodiversity Center. 'Children look beyond superficial looks and attach great value to less obvious characteristics, such…

A new special issue on translation and the cultural Cold War sheds light on the understudied and yet important role of translation in cultural transfer.

In the track Cybersecurity Governance, you will be familiarized with the breadth, depth and complexity of cybersecurity challenges. This track seeks to provide you state-of-the art with knowledge of governance and regulatory strategies available to address these challenges.