MEDIALAB
Research & Development
AFP Medialab is a small multi-disciplinary team aimed to boost innovation at AFP. It takes part in innovation and R&D projects funded in France and across Europe.
It is the main developer of the InVID-WeVerify-VeraAI browser extension, one of the leading tools for debunking disinformation, according to the Poynter Institute.
As of December 2025, this toolkit is used by more than 159,000 journalists, fact-checkers, researchers, educators, and human rights defenders in 224 countries.
ONGOING PROJECTS
Currently, the Medialab continues to develop its verification plugin and is involved in the work of DE FACTO 2, the French observatory on disinformation and EDMO's (European Digital Media Observatory) French hub.
In 2017, the AFP Medialab released a browser extension (usable on Chrome and Opera) as part of the European InVID project (2016–2018). It enables journalists, fact-checkers, human rights activists, educators, and the general public to verify false images and videos circulating online, particularly on social media.
It is a toolkit comprising several services designed to verify both still and moving images. This plugin is used by leading newsrooms engaged in fact-checking worldwide. Today, the extension has more than 67,000 active users per week across 222 countries.
Two verification methods are employed:
the first, an endogenous approach, allows for closer examination of an image or digital file using tools such as a magnifying glass, a metadata reader, or “forensic” filters;
the second, an exogenous approach, consists of retrieving contextual information from the web and carrying out image similarity searches to check whether the images have previously been published and indexed by one of the major image search engines.
The plugin uses Google Images, Bing, Yandex, TinEye, Baidu, and Karma Decay.
Once the InVID project concluded at the end of 2018 after three years of activity, the Medialab and its European partners were once again selected by the European Union for a new project: WeVerify (2018–2021). This project made it possible to double the number of tools available within the verification extension, now called InVID-WeVerify, particularly in the field of social media analysis, as well as in optical character recognition in images and through a user-guidance assistant.
The plugin has won in 2021 the first prize of the US Paris Tech award from US State of department GEC and Atlantic Council DFRLab.
Coordinated by AFP, DE FACTO brings together a multidisciplinary team of journalists, researchers and education professionals, including 20 Minutes, Libération, Les Surligneurs, franceinfo, Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas, Fondation Descartes, CLEMI, Entre Les Lignes, MediaConnect and XWiki SAS.
Through a wide range of content and key data, the DE FACTO platform enables everyone to better understand the current challenges of disinformation by offering multiple formats:
debunking of fake news by specialist newsrooms,
research activities analysing the mechanisms and impacts of disinformation,
tutorials and explanatory videos designed to foster critical thinking,
educational resources for teachers and media professionals.
To make this initiative a genuine civic project, the DE FACTO collective also relies on field-based actions, including study days, training programmes for teachers, school outreach activities, and public awareness campaigns.
Recent Projects
vera.ai - AI versus disinformation
vera.ai is a research and development project aimed at analysing disinformation and developing artificial intelligence–based verification tools and services. Within this project, the Medialab was responsible for innovation management, the collection of user needs and functional specifications, the evaluation of prototypes, and the enhancement of the InVID-WeVerify plugin.
This project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101070093.
Disinfo Archiving
Disinfo Archiving is an archiving feature designed for fact-checkers, enabling them, through several methods, to preserve evidence of disinformation as well as debunking arguments.
Past Projects
EnVisu4
EnVisu4 improves the usability of analytical tools for detecting image manipulation and has developed a new tool, CheckGIF, which enables the creation of an animated image in GIF format to visually reveal all the manipulations applied to a tampered image.
WeVerify
WeVerify aims to address the complex challenges of verifying content on the web, particularly on social media. It relies on a participatory approach, open-source algorithms, human-centred machine learning, and intuitive visualisations.
Social media and web content are analysed and contextualised within their online ecosystem to expose manipulations across all formats, through social network analysis, targeted debunking, and a public database of known falsehoods.
The WeVerify platform enables collaborative and decentralised verification, monitoring, and debunking of misinformation.
This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme.
YouVerify!
The European YouVerify! project aims to tackle the challenges posed by misinformation and to help young people develop both the knowledge and skills needed to distinguish, on a daily basis, between authentic and manipulated images and videos.
YouVerify! builds on the results of the previous European project YouCheck! (2019–2021), which focused on visual literacy through hands-on activities and experimentation. It also adapted the InVID-WeVerify extension—used by thousands of journalists and fact-checkers for verifying photos and videos—for Media and Information Education.
This media and information literacy project received funding from the European Union.
YouCheck!
YouCheck! is a media education project funded by the European Union. It aims to raise awareness among the general public, as well as educational and media communities, about misinformation, which poses a real threat to democracy.
This media education project provides European citizens with the means to benefit from the latest advances in image and video verification to tackle fake news.
YouCheck! has adapted the InVID-WeVerify browser extension—already used by thousands of journalists and fact-checkers for verifying photos and videos—for media education purposes.
InVID - Video Verification
InVID is a European project funded by the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme.
Launched in January 2016, InVID was a three-year innovation project aimed at helping journalists detect manipulated videos and protect the reputation of media outlets.
InVID operates across three main areas: professional management of usage rights, verification of the integrity of digital files, and contextual verification of images on social media.
ASRAEL - Datification of Events
ASRAEL is a project focused on the analysis and structuring of media events within information streams, funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR).
ASRAEL is an event search engine that allows users to formulate queries (for example, an earthquake, using attribute filters such as location = Turkey and/or magnitude > 7). The project employs natural language processing technologies and semantic web tools.
AFP Transcriber - Speech Transcription
AFP Transcriber is a tool for transcribing speech from videos in around twenty languages, allowing the text to be synchronised with the images.
Interactive Content Generation
AFP 4W is a media event search engine that enables the creation of web pages, geographic mashups, timelines, and e-books in just a few clicks.