The European research project titled POLINOCULATE (Inoculating and Coaching Policymakers to Resist Disinformation) (HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-DEMOCRACY-09) involves five leading higher education institutions (University of Turku (coordinator), Eötvös Loránd University, University of Sheffield, University of Bristol, and University of Passau) and one NGO (Globesec) are participating. The project’s total budget is 1.4 billion forints (3,500,000 EUR). In the three-year project launching in September 2026, Gergely Gosztonyi will serve as the work package leader for legal research on behalf of ELTE.

The rise of online disinformation undermines trust in institutions and threatens the integrity of democratic processes; moreover, policymakers often lack the appropriate tools and training to effectively identify these issues. Although the EU has made progress in the field of digital regulation (DSA, DMA, EMFA, AI Act, DORA, NIS2), its effectiveness is unclear, so more proactive action is needed to build more sustainable resilience against disinformation.

Building on its previous successful projects, our consortium is developing CounterCoach in this research project—a freely accessible, reliable AI-based coaching tool that employs psychological immunization techniques to teach policymakers how to recognize, resist, and combat information manipulation.