Fake News Festival 2026 — Workshop Collaboration with Viadrina

Bringing knowledge on disinformation to a wider, younger audience

Disinformation has become one of the most powerful forces shaping modern society. In January 2026, a prominent group of researchers from institutions including Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley published a warning in Science about a new escalation: malicious AI swarms — coordinated fleets of AI-controlled personas that autonomously infiltrate communities, fabricate consensus, and manipulate public opinion at unprecedented scale. These systems mimic human social dynamics so convincingly that they are increasingly difficult to distinguish from real people.

The technology already exists. Early forms of AI-powered influence operations have been observed in elections in Taiwan, India, and Indonesia. As heise online reports, the technological barrier is frighteningly low — powerful language models are freely accessible, and simulating human-like behavior at scale no longer requires sophisticated infrastructure.

Against this background, it is crucial to bring knowledge about disinformation out of the academic discussion and into reality. And what could be a better format than a festival — open, free, and near Berlin — that invites students, families, and the general public to engage directly with the people researching these threats?

The Fake News Festival

The Fake News Festival is an initiative of Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), organized by researchers and students at the university. Running from June 18 to 20, 2026, it brings together science, practice, and the public to explore how artificial intelligence is transforming the creation and spread of disinformation — and what we can do about it.

The festival is free, open to all, and designed to make complex topics accessible. Through talks, workshops, and collaborative formats, participants — whether students, researchers, journalists, or curious citizens — can get in touch with leading researchers, technologists, and practitioners and playfully explore disinformation, experience inoculation techniques live, and build real media literacy skills.

Keynotes and Talks

Among the confirmed keynote speakers:

• Dr. Romy Jaster — Philosopher and disinformation researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, speaker of the DFG Priority Programme Rethinking Disinformation, and author of Die Wahrheit schafft sich ab — Wie Fake News Politik machen
• Max Fröhlich — Mathematician and doctoral researcher at the Weierstraß-Institut and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, known for making complex AI topics accessible on social media as @max.froehlich

Scientific talks present new research findings and results in focused sessions with space for questions and discussion.

Workshops

The workshops are the heart of the festival. Hands-on and participatory, they let attendees try things out rather than just listen. Topics revolve around recognizing fake news, understanding AI-generated content, and developing practical strategies against manipulation. No prior knowledge is needed — just curiosity.

Beyond the Programme

Film screenings, a party, and overnight options round out the programme, creating space for meeting people, exchanging ideas, and unwinding between sessions.

Our Contribution

The festival is run by the Viadrina team — Prof. Dr. Charlotte Köhler (Junior Professor of Business Analytics and Vice President for Digitalisation) and Simone Marxand. We support it and co-organize workshops on fact-checking and AI-driven verification. Anton Gollwitzer (BI Norwegian Business School / Max Planck Institute for Human Development) is among the speakers.

From Research Labs to Festival Tents

Much of the current work on disinformation happens behind closed doors — in research labs, at academic conferences, in papers that few people outside the field will ever read. The tools being developed to detect AI-generated content and verify claims are powerful, but they mean little if the public never encounters them.

The Fake News Festival flips that dynamic. It takes the kind of research that institutions like ours pursue through the Climate and Political Fact-Checking Collaboration — building verification systems, studying how misinformation spreads, developing AI-powered detection tools — and puts it in people’s hands. Workshop participants do not just hear about inoculation theory; they experience it. They do not read about deepfakes; they try to spot them.

That matters, because the disinformation challenge will not be solved by technology alone. Detection algorithms improve, but so do the techniques used to evade them. What endures is a population that understands the mechanics — that recognizes when consensus is manufactured, when sources are fabricated, when emotional triggers are being pulled deliberately. A festival near Berlin that gets students, families, and the curious public into that conversation is exactly where research needs to go.

Programme Overview

Festival Details

Further Reading

• How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy — The Science paper behind the warning
• How Cyborg Propaganda Reshapes Collective Action — When real people become the distribution channel for AI-optimized influence
• Climate and Political Fact-Checking Collaboration — Our ongoing fact-checking research
• The Fact-Checking Paradox: When Truth Wins But Society Loses — Research on why fact-checking alone is not enough