CrossOver

Started in 2021, this project aims to monitor, investigate, expose and respond to the spread of dubious and nefarious content on big platforms, including YouTube, TikTok and Google Search (formerly Twitter, Reddit and Google News, among others).

The core idea is to simulate users of big platforms either by browsing these services, or looking up keywords and collecting the search results. Both these approaches give us accurate data on what content is displayed to users. The strength of CrossOver lies in the fact that data collection occurs from residential addresses and not from data centers as most research is typically conducted from. This allows our data collection to be less noticeable, if at all, by platforms and mitigates risks of the platforms altering the results of our data collection.

The project is currently active in about 15 countries throughout Europe and Africa.

A joint effort to monitor disinformation operations

The first part of the project was led during 15 months thanks to funding from the European Union. The geographical scope of this pilot project was Belgium, with monitoring conducted both in French and Dutch. The overall aims of the projects were:

• monitoring and investigating disinformation operations working with the media to expose malicious actors;
• responding to and strengthening vulnerable communities;
• planning and developing sustainable actions against disinformation in Belgium.

The initiative brought together EU DisinfoLab, the Dutch-language media outlet Apache, the French media education association Savoir Devenir, and the Finnish start-up CheckFirst, all of which specialise in developing solutions and methodologies to combat disinformation.

What do we do in the CrossOver project?

CheckFirst’s main task is to develop dashboards of automated content spread in targeted countries. This means that we are developing tools to monitor social media platforms, starting with Google search’s auto-complete and Twitter trends, and observing which content they recommend to their users. This data are publicly available, as well as the full methodology, so that anyone can see which topics appear to be the most recommended algorithmically.

CheckFirst also conducts open source intelligence investigations together with media partners and NGOs, providing our skills to support their quality journalistic work.

History

• 2021-2022: In 2021, CrossOver received funding from the European Union’s Pilot Projects and Preparatory Actions financing programme in the field of ‘Communications Networks, Content and Technology’, under grant agreement LC-01682253. EU DisinfoLab led this project, with the participation of CheckFirst, Apache and Savoir Devenir.
• 2022-2023: In 2022, CrossOver received the support of the Mozilla Technology Fund to expand into seven new French speaking regions and countries. The pilot project ended in early 2023. Later in 2023, CrossOver Finland was funded by EMIF to enable the monitoring of public discourse during two major electoral events: the Finnish presidential race and the 2024 EU elections.
• 2024: The first CrossOver-based reports have been delivered in March, in May and in July 2024.
• 2025: While investigating the Pravda network, we used CrossOver to monitor tweets promoting Pravda websites. We also published the beta of the third version of CrossOver.