Date: 6pm, November 10th, 2025

Location: Building S3|12 on 6th Floor| Department Identitätsmanagement| Residenzschloss 1

Moderation: Prof. Dr. Andreas Kaminski (department 2)

This event is fully booked. Please send any requests for a place on the waiting list directly to fif@fif.tu-….

Away from the usual environment and outside conventional academic circles, the experimental, open format of the space is intended to reveal the full breadth of the topic. We hope this will lead to a variety of research perspectives and lively discussion.

Can technology combat disinformation?

We rarely realize the extent to which our own beliefs depend on what others tell us. But even in the area we consider to be our knowledge (and not merely our own opinions), trust in others is at least an important pillar of that knowledge. Very few of us can say, based on our own experience or logical reasoning, whether it is true that viruses exist, that Japan is a group of islands, that computers process binary states, or who won the last election.

If so much of what we consider to be our own knowledge is based on trust in others—trust in science, trust in journalism, in the media, or, more personally, trust in friends who tell us something, a doctor who explains a treatment to us, a podcaster who tells us about a court decision—then this dependence and potential trust is a vulnerable point that disinformation seeks to exploit. Disinformation makes open societies more vulnerable than authoritarian ones — the latter are better at exploiting mistrust and controlling the flow of information. This is the background that we encounter and are moved by in many forms in the news, especially at the moment.

For this reason, we would like to meet with you in a DenkRaum. We don't want to think about how to “create” trust, because mistrust can be reasonable, especially when dealing with untrustworthy sources. Instead, we want to ask a hopefully somewhat provocative question: Can information technology combat disinformation? We are deliberately framing the question in such a narrow way so that the potential solutions for dealing with disinformation become more visible. We would like to invite you to join us in exploring this question in the DenkRaum.

The sixth FiF Thinking Space will take place “Under the Roofs of Darmstadt” in the lounge of the Science Communication Center in the Residenzschloss.