Fake news is becoming more and more prominent now that social media allow for an endless stream of unfiltered content to reach us. But what happens if we can no longer distinguish the truth from the lie?

How can theories about modern disinformation help to understand how Roman documentary fictions functioned?

With the emergence of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, it’s easier than ever to share information. Including disinformation. During his PhD computer scientist Xueqin Chen developed a new way to recognise fake news and predict how messages spread within online social networks…

By spreading fake news via TV spots and Twitter with the use of Social Bots, Pascal professor Heike Trautmann is investigating the characteristics of fake news. She is calling on Leiden researchers to cooperate in the project.

BrainTrain: an initiative from Leiden University in which a team of students visit high schools to make adolescents more resilient against disinformation on the news and on their socials. In an interactive two-hour guest lesson, high school pupils discover how easily their brains can be tricked into…

Alumni event

Leiden AI Week

Misinformation spreads easily and fast. It gets presented as news, whereas actual news gets dismissed as fake. Conflicting streams of information allows all sides to cherry-pick whatever is most comfortable, boosting degrees of confidence and confusing the deliberation of both politicians and voters.…

From fake news to COVID-19 conspiracies, debates about truth claims have become more prominent during the past decade. Taking a global, comparative perspective, the minor Disinformation and Strategic Communication in Global Media focuses on the broad spectrum of contested narratives subsumed under the…

This book considers the porous relationship between legality and illegality in Brazil, a country that presages political and societal changes in hitherto unprecedented dimensions.

In films kunnen de meest wonderlijke acties plaatsvinden. Maar zijn die acties in de 'echte' wereld ook mogelijk? En in hoeverre houden filmmakers ons voor de gek? Tijdens het Leiden International Film Festival komen film en wetenschap samen.

In this year in review we show you various projects we're very proud of. Driven by our values at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences.

A European cooperation project on disinformation and fact-checking training empowering current and future media and media education professionals, to identify, prevent, and combat fake news spread over digital networks.

Misinformation spreads easily and fast. It gets presented as news, whereas actual news gets dismissed as fake. Conflicting streams of information allows all sides to cherry-pick whatever is most comfortable, boosting degrees of confidence and confusing the deliberation of both politicians and voters.…

LIACS is a partner in RISE_SMA, an interdisciplinary, international network combining excellent scholars and practitioners to enable vigorous knowledge sharing and to develop solutions for contemporary challenges for Social Media Analytics (SMA).

Since 2006, HJD has made an important contribution to shaping diplomatic studies as an international academic field. Our new HJD Diplomacy Reading List presents a diverse collection of analyses categorized into forty-five topics published in HJD over the years. We hope these lists prove a valuable resource…

Together with two other authors, Jaroslaw Kantorowicz from ISGA investigates the susceptibility to believing in misinformation.

People can be easily mislead with graphs. But they don’t necessarily stay misled, the research shows.

The Leiden Ancient History specialization concentrates on the study of the economies, societies and cultures of the large empires of the Graeco-Roman world, starting with the empires of Alexander the Great and his successors.

Leiden University College The Hague is an institute of Leiden University, located in the City of The Hague. This small and highly international community brings together passionate and motivated staff and students, who want to study and tackle the global challenges that face humanity. The intensive…

Do you have to be able to say everything on Twitter and Facebook? Is Instagram morally obliged to remove photos from attacks? Should we allow the terrorist group to recruit new members on the internet?

Children find that both dinosaur fossils and replicas belong in a museum, but they appreciate the real objects more. This is shown by research from Leiden University and Naturalis Biodiversity Center. 'Children look beyond superficial looks and attach great value to less obvious characteristics, such…

A new special issue on translation and the cultural Cold War sheds light on the understudied and yet important role of translation in cultural transfer.

In the track Cybersecurity Governance, you will be familiarized with the breadth, depth and complexity of cybersecurity challenges. This track seeks to provide you state-of-the art with knowledge of governance and regulatory strategies available to address these challenges.

Nieuwscheckers, a team of journalist fact-checkers from Leiden University, received the Mr. K.J. Cath Prize at the opening of the academic year on 5 September. This biennial prize is awarded to students or staff who have enhanced the University’s good name.

If an algorithm has to learn to understand language, simply having a lot of data doesn’t help much. Like us, a computer has to learn the language in interaction with others. Tessa Verhoef is fascinated by how this interaction works.

The Leiden Ancient History specialization concentrates on the study of the economies, societies and cultures of the large empires of the Graeco-Roman world, starting with the empires of Alexander the Great and his successors. The appearance of these empires led to the development of an interaction network…

Digital technology is changing academia and society at lightning speed. LIACS is in the midst of this with groundbreaking research into data processing and artificial intelligence (AI). It conducts a unique combination of fundamental and applied research into major issues facing academia and society…

From now on, the Master's Vitality and Ageing will be called Health, Ageing and Society. In terms of content, the programme of this international interdisciplinary Master's at Leiden University remains the same. The new name better covers the content of the programme and thus enhances recognition for…

A selection of news from Leiden University.

In the globalised world of today, traditional definitions of national Self and national Other no longer hold. The unmistakable transformation of German and Dutch societies demands a thorough rethinking of national boundaries on several levels.

A film and quiz at the Old Observatory, a film whose ending you decide or a political satire in The Hague. These are some of the options at Science & Cinema, the 444 edition, a special programme during LIFF, the Leiden International Film Festival.

Pathogenic bacteria are increasingly resistant to today’s antibiotics. Professor Gilles van Wezel seeks new forms of antibiotics in good bacteria that live in the soil.

Misinformation spreads easily and fast. It gets presented as news, whereas actual news gets dismissed as fake. Conflicting streams of information allows all sides to cherry-pick whatever is most comfortable, boosting degrees of confidence and confusing the deliberation of both politicians and voters.…

There are thousands of stories to tell about our alumni. How they experienced their student days. Where they ended up and what they still dream about. We provide an overview of Leiden alumni with our newsletters and the alumni magazine Leidraad.

Gubbens

Political scientist Luzia Helfer (Leiden University) empirically tested claims about media-politics relatiopns using unique data from experimental studies with elected politicians and political journalists in Switzerland and the Netherlands.