Fighting against disinformation while ensuring the right to freedom of expression
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See in 5 min if you're eligible for Fighting against disinformation while ensuring the right to freedom of expression offering max €26.0M funding💰 Funding Details
Funding Description
1. Programme Snapshot
* Framework / Pillar / Destination: Horizon Europe – Cluster 2 “Culture, Creativity & Inclusive Society”, Destination “Innovative Research on Democracy & Governance (2025)”
* Call Identifier: HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-DEMOCRACY-09
* Topic Title: “Fighting against disinformation while ensuring the right to freedom of expression”
* Type of Action: HORIZON-RIA (Research & Innovation Action) – Lump Sum Model Grant Agreement (HORIZON-AG-LS)
* Indicative EU Contribution per Grant: up to €26 million (lump-sum)
* Total Topic Budget (EC indicative): normally 1–3 projects funded; check final Work Programme for exact envelope
* Opening Date: 15 May 2025
* Deadline (single stage): 16 September 2025 – 17:00 CET (Brussels time)
* Project Duration Guidance: 36–48 months
2. What the Grant Funds
The action finances collaborative research and innovation that:
* Analyses the drivers, formats and impact of mis- and disinformation (incl. gender-based, LGBTIQ-related, astroturfing) across digital media ecosystems.
* Designs, prototypes and validates tools, methodologies, legal safeguards and policy recommendations to counter disinformation without undermining freedom of expression & media pluralism.
* Co-creates and pilots solutions together with key stakeholder groups (media organisations, mediators, dissemination hubs, fact-checkers, civil society, signatories of the Code of Practice on Disinformation, entities under DSA/EMFA, libraries, archives, education & security practitioners).
* Produces FAIR-compliant datasets, educational material, trust indicators and comparative analyses of regulatory options.
* Builds on, clusters with and scales outputs of past EU-funded projects in the democracy, media and security domains.
3. Eligibility Essentials
* Consortium: Minimum 3 legal entities from 3 different EU Member States or Horizon Europe Associated Countries, each independent of the others (General Annex B).
* Who can apply: Any legal entity (universities, RTOs, SMEs, NGOs, media companies, broadcasters, public authorities, international organisations, etc.).
* Third-country participation: Allowed; automatic funding only for countries listed in Annex B. Others join with own funds unless national opt-in applies.
* Ethics & Security: Proposals involving personal data, vulnerable subjects or potentially harmful content must include robust ethics, GDPR and dual-use compliance sections.
4. Funding Model – Lump Sum
* Lump-sum grant: the EU fixes a single amount per proposal covering 100 % of eligible direct costs + 25 % flat-rate indirect costs.
* Applicants must submit a detailed cost breakdown (provided template) at proposal stage; payments will be linked to achievement of work-package-level milestones/deliverables, not to real costs.
* No financial reporting of actual costs is required during or after the project; however, technical progress must be demonstrated for each payment.
5. Key Compliance Points
* Embed Open Science practices (open-access publications, open data via EOSC repositories, data-management plan, citizen-science elements where relevant).
* Address gender & intersectionality dimensions in research design, consortium composition and impact pathways.
* Detail exploitation pathway (policy uptake, standardisation, commercialisation, public service, education).
* Provide IPR & Data-sharing agreements tailored to multi-stakeholder pilots.
6. Complementary Funding & Synergies
Proposals should plan links with:
* Horizon Europe projects (e.g. DEMOCRACY-01-05/06/07, CL3 FCT-01-03).
* CERV, Erasmus+, Digital Europe (EDICs, European Digital Media Observatory), Technical Support Instrument, DEP data spaces.
* National/regional funds for testbeds or media innovation hubs.
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📊 At a Glance
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🇪🇺 Strategic Advantages
EU-Wide Advantages & Opportunities for the call “Fighting against disinformation while ensuring the right to freedom of expression” (HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-DEMOCRACY-09)
1. Single Market Access (450+ million citizens)
• Pan-European testing ground: Pilots can be launched simultaneously in multiple Member States, generating statistically robust evidence across linguistic, cultural and media-system varieties.
• Commercial scalability: Trust-indicator tools, media literacy curricula, fact-checking services and AI detection software developed under the project can be marketed across the entire EU without tariff or data-localisation barriers, leveraging the Digital Single Market rules.
• Procurement pull: EU institutions and 27 national governments are explicit target users in the topic text; successful prototypes can feed into EU-level service contracts (e.g., EDMO network, DIGIT framework contracts).
2. Cross-Border Collaboration & Knowledge Exchange
• Consortia composition rule (≥3 countries) gives natural access to diverse academic traditions (e.g., Scandinavian media studies, Central-European extremism research, Southern European fact-checking hubs).
• Data pooling: Cross-border datasets (news archives, social-media crawls, web archives) increase AI model accuracy and reduce national bias.
• Piloting legislative sandbox: Comparing implementation of DSA and EMFA across Member States allows evidence-based policy recommendations otherwise impossible at national scale.
3. Alignment with Key EU Strategies
• Digital Europe Programme: Project outputs (misinformation detection tools, AI transparency standards) dovetail with DEP objectives on trustworthy AI and advanced digital skills.
• European Democracy Action Plan & Code of Practice on Disinformation: Direct policy uptake pathway; results can feed next revisions of both instruments.
• European Green Deal & Health Union: By safeguarding evidence-based debate on climate and public-health policies, the project becomes an enabling action for core EU priorities.
• European Education Area 2025: Media-literacy curricula developed can be mainstreamed through Erasmus+ teacher-training actions.
4. Regulatory Harmonisation Benefits
• Digital Services Act (DSA): Provides a uniform compliance baseline for Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs); project can co-create standardised risk-assessment templates usable EU-wide.
• European Media Freedom Act (EMFA): Harmonised safeguards for editorial independence ease deployment of “media dissemination hubs” solutions across borders.
• GDPR & Data Spaces: Common data-protection framework lowers transaction costs for sharing sensitive datasets (political ads libraries, user-reporting data) within the consortium.
5. Access to Europe’s Innovation Ecosystem
• Research Infrastructures: Easy linkage to CESSDA archives, ESS survey waves, EOSC nodes for hosting FAIR datasets on disinformation.
• EDMO Hubs & EDMO-Europe network: Immediate outreach platform in 30+ countries for validation and dissemination.
• Innovation clusters & EIT Culture & Creativity KIC (launched 2024): Pathway to accelerate market uptake of trustworthy-content tools.
6. Funding Synergies & Leveraged Instruments
• Digital Europe (DEP): Follow-up deployment grants for scaling software/services developed.
• CERV & Erasmus+: Financing roll-out of educational materials and civil-society engagement activities after RIA phase.
• InvestEU & EIB: Debt/equity financing for start-ups spawned by the project (e.g., SaaS fact-checking platforms).
• Interreg Europe & ESF+: Regional authorities can co-fund pilots in media-literacy or local news sustainability.
7. Scale, Impact & Sustainability
• EU policy feedback loops: Horizon RIA results feed directly into Commission impact assessments required under Better Regulation guidelines, magnifying policy relevance.
• Replicability toolkit: Common methodological standards (e.g., astroturfing detection metrics) ensure quick replication in accession and neighbourhood countries, supporting EU external-action goals.
• Network effects: The more Member States adopt project outputs, the greater the data volume and accuracy—creating a virtuous circle unattainable at national level.
8. Strategic Value Unique to EU-Level Operation
• Critical mass vs. global adversaries: Coordinated EU action essential to counter foreign information manipulation that transcends borders.
• Diversity as stress-test: Multilingual, multicultural environment is ideal laboratory to ensure tools respect freedom-of-expression nuances and minority-language rights.
• Standard-setter advantage: EU-wide guidelines produced by the project can become de-facto global norms (as occurred with GDPR), giving European researchers and SMEs first-mover benefits.
Bottom Line: Leveraging EU-level instruments, regulatory harmonisation, and a 450-million-citizen market dramatically amplifies the scientific, policy and commercial impact of any proposal under this call, making pan-European collaboration not just advantageous but indispensable for success.
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