DYNAMO (Dynamiken der Desinformation erkennen und bekämpfen) was a €1.6-million project financed entirely by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (AGIL 4 line) which ran from Sept. 2021 – August 2024. It was coordinated by Fraunhofer SIT in Darmstadt with three academic partners: the Universities of Duisburg-Essen and Kassel and Stuttgart Media University. The consortium studied how false or manipulative content travels through closed messenger services such as Telegram or WhatsApp. Work packages scraped publicly accessible channels, classified narrative patterns, analysed user-to-user forwarding behavior and evaluate “prebunking” messages to warn users before allegedly deceptive items gain traction. A cross-disciplinary team – computer science, psychology, journalism, law – assessed technical detection tools alongside questions of data protection and proportional regulation.
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DYNAMO project
German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)...See all
German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) See less
Fraunhofer Institute, University of Duisburg-Essen, University of Kassel, Stuttgart Media...See all
Fraunhofer Institute, University of Duisburg-Essen, University of Kassel, Stuttgart Media University See less
Commentary:
DYNAMO reflects Berlin’s recipe for counter-disinformation: fund short, interdisciplinary consortia that map problem spaces and pilot technological fixes. Focus is on messenger services. The project foregrounded "prebunking," yet its own policy paper conceded that evidence for messenger-specific effectiveness is scarce. Because funding was entirely public, Fraunhofer and the universities were free from direct platform entanglements, but the policy brief stressed new legal duties for providers without equally weighing privacy trade-offs for bulk monitoring. This technical framework however conceals an ideological and political mission of shaping public discourse by reaching down into the individual communications of the citizenry, in an operation openly compared to a clinical intervention.
DYNAMO reflects Berlin’s recipe for counter-disinformation: fund short, interdisciplinary consortia that map problem spaces and pilot technological fixes. Focus is on messenger services. The project foregrounded "prebunking," yet its own policy paper conceded that evidence for messenger-specific effectiveness is scarce. Because funding was entirely public, Fraunhofer and the universities were free from direct platform entanglements, but the policy brief stressed new legal duties for providers without equally weighing privacy trade-offs for bulk monitoring. This technical framework however conceals an ideological and political mission of shaping public discourse by reaching down into the individual communications of the citizenry, in an operation openly compared to a clinical intervention.
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