Lisboa, 27 mai 2026 (Lusa) - Portugal's coordinator of the European FAMA project, an initiative empowering informed citizens, said the growing ability of artificial intelligence (AI) to create "increasingly sophisticated" fake content worsened a context of "overinformation", making it harder to distinguish between information and manipulated content.
“Fighting disinformation requires more than fact-checking. It requires training analytical, aware citizens who can understand the invisible mechanisms that shape the information they consume,” said the project's national coordinator, Tiago Lapa.
Speaking to Lusa at the launch of the European FAMA initiative, "Empowering Informed Citizens | Empowering European Democracies", the researcher at CIES-Iscte, a Lisbon-based sociological research centre, said AI and algorithms had "increased the speed, sophistication and scale of disinformation."
“Nowadays, it is possible to create highly convincing fake content in text, image, audio or video, and spread it extremely quickly through digital platforms,” he said.
However, he said that work to combat and resist this reality had to focus on people and not merely technology.
He said the project aimed to promote media and digital literacy training programmes to help citizens understand “how algorithms, platforms, the cognitive and emotional mechanisms of disinformation and new AI tools worked.”
“We believe that when people better understand the digital ecosystem where they produce and circulate information, they become more analytical, more autonomous and more resistant to manipulation,” he added.
He also warned of the current context of "overinformation" or an "excess" of content, which made it difficult to distinguish between credible information and manipulated content.
“The main problem is no longer just the existence of 'fake information', but above all the enormous abundance and speed of content circulation in the digital environment,” he said.
He believed AI had “worsened this scenario”, making it possible to create increasingly sophisticated, personalised fake content that was difficult to distinguish from reality.
He said the greatest risk of disinformation was not only misleading citizens on specific topics, but causing “a widespread erosion of trust in experts, the media, institutions central to the functioning of society, science and even the very idea of a shared truth.”
“When citizens live in a communication environment where permanent doubt, polarisation and the feeling that 'you can no longer believe anything' dominate, it creates a very vulnerable ground for manipulation, extremism, radicalisation and the weakening of democratic debate,” he explained.
He also said that digital platforms frequently privileged “more emotional, polarising or sensationalist” content because this generated “more attention, more interaction and more time spent online”.
When asked about the European response, he said the European Union (EU) had “sought to take a relatively pioneering position in regulating the digital space”, highlighting instruments such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
However, he cautioned that “the speed of technological transformation is much higher than the speed of regulation” and added that “regulation alone does not fully solve the problem.”
Portugal's FAMA project launches on Wednesday with the seminar “Disinformation in the New Digital Era” at Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon.
The EU funds the initiative, which brings together partners from Portugal, Italy and Greece, and plans to hold workshops, webinars, public debates and a final conference in the three participating countries.
PYR/LYT // AYLS
Lusa
