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Project Partner Challenge: Call for collaboration on analysing, building, and piloting resilience strategies to enhance online content moderation systems

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Overview

The project partner challenge grant scheme is designed to enable a SPRITE+ Expert Fellow to work on a research challenge. The scheme operates through three phases.

  1. Potential partners submit expressions of interest and, if chosen, they then work with the SPRITE+ director to set their challenge.

  2. SPRITE+ Expert Fellows express interest in that challenge by submitting an application.

  3. The successful Expert Fellow then works with the project partner to develop a full proposal which then goes to the SPRITE+ management team for review.

For this Project Partner Challenge, we invite applications from researchers to collaborate with Freedom2hear in co-developing a Project Partner Challenge Grant proposal on resilience strategies to enhance online content moderation systems.

  • Funding available: £52,000 (at 80% FeC)

  • Eligible applicants: UK-based academic researchers

  • Outcome: Co-developed full proposal submitted by 26 June 2026

  • Project topic: Analysing, building, and piloting resilience strategies to enhance online content moderation systems.


Background

Living in Moderated Platforms

Freedom2hear develops proprietary emotion-based AI tools that intelligently filter hateful content online, including text, emojis, and videos, in real time. As online platforms face an explosion of user-generated content, current moderation systems are increasingly vulnerable to systemic risks such as adversarial manipulation, model drift, bias, and opaque decision-making. Empirical evidence shows that hateful content harms platforms by deterring advertisers, reducing user engagement, and damaging platform reputation.

This Project Partner Challenge Grant aims to combine Freedom2hear’s expertise in LLM/NLP and image-based moderation with SPRITE+’s focus on digital trust and usable security. Together, the project will analyse resilience strategies and develop transparent and reliable moderation tools suited to today’s online environment.

The aims of this Project Partner Challenge Grant are to investigate:

  • Which systemic risks most threaten trust in moderation platforms over time.

  • What resilience strategies are most effective (e.g. feedback loops, human oversight, transparency dashboards, retraining schedules).

  • How trust, fairness, and reliability can be measured and monitored in these systems.


Objective

SPRITE+ is currently inviting applications to co-develop a framework with Freedom2hear, focused on analysing, building, and piloting resilience strategies to enhance online content moderation systems.

The successful applicant will:

  • Create taxonomies for online moderation risks and a metrics framework for moderated platforms

  • Train auditable multi-modal moderation models (offline), prototype online drift detection tools and training feedback loops, and transparency dashboards

  • Pilot an evaluation of resilience interventions

  • Provide policy recommendations and engage in stakeholder engagements via workshops

  • Produce written outputs, including reports, whitepapers and academic papers on the findings of the project


Resources:

The successful applicant will have access to:

  • Synthetic and public datasets relevant to online content moderation, including text and images.

  • Risk simulation frameworks (adversarial attack and drift scenarios) developed by Freedom2hear.

  • Taxonomy and baseline metrics already defined from prior moderation work, proxy datasets, and controlled simulations of live platform moderation logs.

  • Expert guidance and technical resources from Freedom2hear specialists.


Application deadline: Friday 8th May 2026

Download the call document:

Download the application form:


Timeline:

  • Call for applications sent out: March 23rd, 2026 

  • Applications deadline: May 8th, 2026

  • Applicants informed of outcome: May 22nd, 2026 

  • Full proposal to be submitted by June 26th, 2026 

  • Projects to start no later than October 1st, 2026 

  • Project to complete by no later than 1st March 2027 


Funding:

Maximum total grants size is £52,000.

Funds will be awarded at 80% FEC in accordance with normal UKRI practices. In practical terms, this means that SPRITE+ will fund 80% of the total costs outlined in successful proposals. We will provide a maximum of £52k to the successful applicant, so the budget requested can be over this amount. Funds awarded will be subject to standard UKRI grant terms and conditions, which are non-negotiable.

The duration of work funded by this project will be no longer than 12 months commencing no later than 1st October 2026 and finish no later than 1st March 2027.

Eligible items for funding:

  • Replacement salary costs of the Expert Fellow

  • Costs of research assistance for the Expert Fellow

  • Costs of workshops/meetings

  • Travel and subsistence expenses

  • Sundry research costs


Further information:

If you have any queries, please get in touch with us at spriteplus@manchester.ac.uk


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