The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) aims to develop software that can spot fake news stories as well as fake audio, images and video (deepfakes) in order to combat “large-scale, automated disinformation attacks.”

Over a period of 48 months the DARPA initiative, called the Semantic Forensics (SemaFor) program, will work on technologies that can “help identify, deter, and understand adversary disinformation campaigns.” More specifically, SemaFor will develop and train an algorithm that should ultimately be able to identify 5,000 fake items hidden among 250,000 news articles and 250,000 social media posts. While the Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election was one of the main reasons for launching this initiative, SemaFor will not be ready in time to block disinformation campaigns aimed at the 2020 election.

Read more: US Unleashes Military to Fight Fake News, Disinformation