Barcelona Tenders €402.284 Contract to Track Online Fake News

The Ajuntament de Barcelona (the city council) has put out a tender for an outside company to monitor social networks and digital news outlets for false or misleading content about municipal activity, according to Metrópoli Abierta, which reviewed the tender documents. The contract is valued at 402.284 euros for 2027 and 2028.

It can be extended for another 24 months, which would bring the total to 804.568 euros. Metrópoli reports that the figure reaches 885.025 euros if the 20% expansion margin written into the tender terms is counted.

What the company would monitor

The service would cover Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, Bluesky, Threads and digital media, around the clock and every day of the week. It would read comments in both Catalan and Spanish, and the council wants a mention detected within 15 minutes of being published.

The council expects more than 100.000 mentions a year to be analyzed. Because of that volume, the tender adds an artificial intelligence agent, which the documents describe as giving the system a speed that people working alone could not reach.

Four steps from detection to removal

According to the report, the company would work in four stages.

• Detection: software scans for mentions and sends automatic alerts when keywords appear in significant volumes.
• Classification: each mention is sorted by sentiment (positive, neutral or negative), by municipal topic such as security or paperwork, by how often it recurs and by type of falsehood, including false, misleading, decontextualized or manipulated images.
• Verification: the findings are checked against a council database of official public data. The AI system acts as a first filter, and a person gives the final verdict.
• Action: once content is labeled false, misleading or decontextualized, the company applies a pre-agreed plan, either removing the mention automatically or requesting a correction, depending on what an advisory team proposed.

The study behind the plan

The council cites its own study from the second half of 2025. It found 44.000 mentions in six months, and 20% of them (8.800) were negative in tone. The study recorded 111 distinct narratives, of which 31 were relevant, harmful or persistent enough to justify an action plan to refute the claim and ask for its removal or correction.

Why it matters for people in Barcelona

The contract gives the city a paid, standing system for challenging posts and articles about its own work, with removal or correction requests as the end point. Both the AI filter and the human review sit inside the contractor’s process, and the council’s own data decides what counts as false.

In its justification document, the council calls disinformation a serious problem for coexistence, trust and the city’s international reputation, and says it wants to move from a reactive stance to an active one. It describes social media as especially fertile ground for false news that can manipulate people, violate fundamental rights and spread hate speech.

Part of a wider anti-disinformation push

The tender belongs to the new Pla de Foment del Pensament Crític i Sensibilització sobre la Desinformació entre els Infants, Adolescents i Joves de la Ciutat, 2026-2030 (a plan to promote critical thinking and awareness of disinformation among the city’s children, teenagers and young people). That plan centers on media and information literacy.

Mayor Jaume Collboni said in May that the council was working on a tool against false news about municipal activity. At the Premios Ortega y Gasset de Periodismo (a journalism awards ceremony), he announced an Observatorio contra la Desinformación (observatory against disinformation). He had earlier said Barcelona would be the first city in Spain with an anti-hoax unit. Collboni said the body was meant to “combatir las mentiras y proteger la democracia” (fight lies and protect democracy).

Source: Metrópoli Abierta