• Funding: KIC (Knowledge and Innovation Covenant); more than 25 societal partners. 

Online imitation, where organizations or individuals are convincingly impersonated by others, plays an important role in misinformation campaigns, phishing, fraud, reputational harm, and digital insecurity. This undermines trust in legitimate sources and has direct consequences for sectors such as government, healthcare, finance, and public communication. AuthentiMark develops innovative digital watermarking technology to authenticate online content and help distinguish legitimate content from imitation. The project combines technical innovation with research into use, acceptance, implementation, and societal support. It investigates not only how digital watermarking solutions can be developed, but also how organizations can implement them effectively and how citizens can benefit from them in everyday digital decision-making.  

AuthentiMark is an interdisciplinary consortium led by researchers at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research at the University of Amsterdam, in collaboration with Radboud University, Amsterdam UMC, and a broad network of nearly 30 partners from policy and practice. The consortium includes stakeholders from technology, government, healthcare, finance, municipalities, public communication, libraries, youth organizations, fraud prevention, and digital identity infrastructures. 

• Theme (4C): Countering 
• Principal investigators: Jessica Piotrowski, Guda van Noort and Christian Burgers
• Other MiRA researchers involved: Sandra Jacobs, Ulrike Klinger, Hilde Voorveld, Alain Starke, Marina Tulin, Olga Eisele, Tom Dobber, Paula Klemm, Estelle Coelingh, Mattice Suetens
• Partners & collaborators: Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Amsterdam UMC, Verify, Yivi, SURF, KPN, ING Bank, Nederlandse Vereniging van Banken, Microsoft, Fides Labs, Stichting Privacy by Design, Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid, Gemeente Amsterdam, Gemeente Alkmaar, Gemeente Purmerend, NH Veilig, Gemeentelijke Gezondheidsdienst Amsterdam Amstelland, Nederlands Jeugdinstituut, Nationaal Ouderenfonds, Vereniging Nederlandse Gemeenten.  
• Runtime: 2026 - 2031

• Funding: Dutch Research Council (NWO), ORC (Open Research Consortium) 

An essential element for effective political-administrative responses to crises and societal transitions is politicians’ democratic moral craftsmanship, i.e. the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and practices that enable them to perform their duties with integrity and in accordance with democratic norms. Crises and major societal transitions like the climate crisis, migration, and international conflicts inherently evoke highly complex conflicts between moral values, opposing interests, and fundamental disagreements about what constitutes ‘good’ governance. Inadequate political responses to these normative challenges in transitions and crises erode citizens’ trust and the perceived legitimacy of government. In turn, this creates a downward spiral of societal and political-administrative instability. Democratic moral craftsmanship is needed to ensure institutions can respond adaptively to crises and transitions while remaining resilient in upholding democratic and moral norms.   

The DeMoCraft project aims to help politicians recognize, reclaim, and reinforce their democratic moral craftsmanship. To this end, it clarifies central concepts around democratic moral craftsmanship, which are currently inconsistent, incomplete and/or misunderstood. Second, DeMoCraft systematically maps factors, mechanisms and circumstances of politicians’ craftsmanship at local, regional and national governmental levels, in three key arenas in which they operate: that of (1) democratic politics (e.g., the role of political socialization), of (2) political-administrative relations (e.g., the role of civil-servant activism), and of (3) interactions with citizens, networks, and organizations (e.g., the role of commercialized media). Third, DeMoCraft uses these insights to co-design and co-create cohesive, evidence-based sets of actionable interventions (e.g., training, tools, structures, work routines) that facilitate and institutionalize democratic moral craftsmanship in everyday practice. It thereby proactively invests in the long-term resilience of political office holders and their institutions by increasing their adaptiveness to grand societal transitions and polycrises, improving the quality and integrity of their decision-making and policy processes. This subsequently enhances citizen perceptions of justice, legitimacy, trust, and social cohesion. 

• Themes (4C): Causes, Consequences and Countering 
• Team: Principal investigator: Leonie Heres (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). MiRA researchers involved: Christian Burgers, Sandra Jacobs, Britta Brugman, Jeroen Jonkman, Mary Evans 
• Partners & collaborators: Avans Hogeschool, CAOP, Gemeente Amsterdam, Gemeente Den Haag, Gemeente Eindhoven, Gemeente Rotterdam, Gemeente Utrecht, Kennispunt Lokale Politieke Partijen (KLPP), Logeion, Nederlands Genootschap van Burgemeesters (NGB), Nederlandse Vereniging van Raadsleden (NVVR), Provincie Utrecht, Provincie Zuid-Holland, STAT, Stichting Beroepseer, StatenlidNu, Tilburg University, Transparency International Nederland, Universiteit Leiden, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Vereniging van Gemeentesecretarissen (VGS), Vereniging Nederlandse Gemeenten (VNG), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Vereniging van Griffiers (VvG), Wethoudersvereniging 
• Runtime: 2026-2033  

• Funding: Dutch Research Council (NWO), NWO Open Competition (M grant). 

Online misinformation is a crucial challenge for our society. However, the negative impact of misinformation can differ across specific individuals and messages: not everybody is equally vulnerable to every misinformation message. In this project, we investigate which groups are most vulnerable to which types of misinformation. In addition, we will develop and test new intervention methods to increase the resilience to misinformation among these at-risk groups. 

• Themes (4C): Consequences and Countering 
• Team: Christian Burgers, Toni van der Meer, Alexandra Schwinges, Niklas Fritsche 
• Runtime: 2026-2031

• Funding: NWO Open Competition (XS grant). 

The study investigates how people form perceptions of war threats in eight European countries with varying conflict contexts and disinformation resilience. It explores the role of uncertainty, declining institutional trust, and misinformation in how individuals evaluate geopolitical dangers.  

• Themes (4C): Content and consequences 
• Team: Toni van der Meer & Alexandra Schwinges 

• Funding: NWO Open Competition (L grant). 

Adolescents heavily use synthetic content – AI-generated text, audio, images, and video. However, given their still developing cognitive skills, they may also be least equipped to deal with synthetic content. This project investigates how synthetic content reshapes how adolescents develop knowledge. We propose a novel framework that links synthetic content to adolescents’ increased doubt about what can be reliably known (epistemic uncertainty) and their diminishing capacity to form beliefs independently (epistemic agency). Epistemic uncertainty and reduced epistemic agency, in turn, may lead to a collapse of shared norms of knowledge, distrust in epistemic authorities, and declining intellectual engagement (epistemic anomie).  

• Team: Jochen Peter & Toni van der Meer 
• Themes (4C): Consequences and countering 

• Funding: EU-funded; a consortium of more than 25 academic and societal partners. 

This project brings together scholars and practitioners working on misinformation and disinformation, and studies the effects of different types of interventions across different forms of mis- and disinformation. The EU-funded consortium brings together fact-checkers, journalists, media literacy educators and researchers.  

• Themes (4C): Content and Countering 
• Team: Michael Hameleers, Teresa Weikmann 
• Partners & collaborators: Belgian and Dutch academic and fact-checking partners, such as University Leuven, University Leiden, Bellingcat, Nieuwscheckers, Beeld en Geluid, deCheckers, Textgain and Mediawijs   
• Outputs: See https://benedmo.eu/. 

• Funding: RPA Fair and Resilient Societies Midsize Grant, Conflict & Society Research Priority Area, NWO Veni 

Invisible information projects study knowledge that is missing or marginalized - and hence invisible - in our increasingly digitized lives, including what this invisibility means for fairness, equity, and the nature of human knowledge. This research spans modern computational methods and community-driven research initiatives, ultimately to make the invisible visible and actionable for a more informed and inclusive society. 

• Themes (4C): Content, Causes, Consequences, Countering 
• Team: Saurabh Khanna, Olga Eisele, Wende Tufa, Chei Billedo, Lauren Taylor, Sindy Sumter, Irene van Driel 
• Partners & collaborators: Stanford University (SILICON & Public Knowledge Project), University of Oxford (Pembroke College & Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science), Simon Fraser University (Scholarly Communication Lab), Wikimedia Foundation, Institute of Language Logic & Computation 

Outputs

• Khanna, S. (2025). Knowing Unknowns in an Age of Information Overload. arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.10413. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.10413 

• Khanna, S., Ball, J., Alperin, J. P., & Willinsky, J. (2022). Recalibrating the scope of scholarly publishing: A modest step in a vast decolonization process. Quantitative Science Studies, 3(4), 912–930. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00228 

More at invisible.info.