Synthetic Disinformation Data, Infrastructure for Collaboration and Analysis Toolbox (SynDIKAT)

The SynDIKAT project addresses a core bottleneck in social media disinformation research: restricted platform data access and the lack of shared, comparable datasets. Without a common basis for evaluation, methods for detecting and studying disinformation—including its spread and impact—remain difficult to compare and scientifically opaque.

Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) as part of the initiative “Disinformation – Detect, Understand, Defend,” the project runs from May 2026 to April 2029. It is a collaboration between the University of Münster, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS), and TU Dortmund University.

Goals

• Develop a framework for privacy- and legally compliant data sharing among researchers, accounting for data protection and licensing constraints
• Generate realistic synthetic social media datasets with large language models and agent-based simulations, providing a robust basis for benchmarking detection algorithms
• Lay the groundwork for a national—and later international—data-sharing community to improve transparency, comparability, and robustness in disinformation research

Consortium

• University of Münster — Prof. Christian Grimme (consortium coordinator, Information Systems) and Prof. Thorsten Quandt (Online Communication Lab)
• GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences — Dr. Dennis Assenmacher
• Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) — Prof. Johannes Breuer
• TU Dortmund University — Prof. Tobias Gostomzyk (Chair of Media Law)