Civic Tech Field Guide
Sharing knowledge and productively growing the fieldThe Tech > Media > Fight disinformation - (473)
Disinformation campaigns by states, economic opportunists, and the misinformed themselves threaten to erode the common understandings, shared identities, and empirical bedrock that underlies our collective decisionmaking. While disinformation campaigns have used mass media to spread for many years, social media platforms have proven an exceptionally hospitable environment for the proliferation of falsehoods. Those looking to limit disinformation’s effect on society and bolster truth in media have likewise turned to technology to help keep up with the volume and precision of constantly evolving disinformation campaigns.
Suggested reading:
- Matt Stempeck's research into how the Code for All network has advanced its strategies for fighting disinformation in different contexts around the world (2022)
- Digital Disinformation and Vote Suppression, The Brennan Center for Justice (2020)
- Virus Experts Aren’t Getting the Message Out Renée DiResta in The Atlantic (2020)
- Safeguarding Democracy Against Disinformation Report by the German Marshall Fund of the United States (2020)
- Browser Plug-ins That Spot Fake News Show The Difficulty Of Tackling The ‘Information Apocalypse’ Can software that spots Photoshopped images help stem the tide of misinformation? The Verge (2018)
- Can an AI Fact-Checker Solve India’s Fake News Problem? An Indian startup is using an AI tool to curb misinformation. But India poses unique challenges for the technology. Undark (2019)
- Factchecking, a Quartz Daily Obsession media collage (2019)
- Fake news and fact-checking: 7 studies you should know about, a roundup from Journalist’s Resource (2020)
- The children’s storyteller helping Taiwan sort fact from fiction, a helpful deep dive into disinfo-fighting tech (and misappropriation through national ‘fake news laws’) in Asia. Al Jazeera (2020).
- CivicSpace.tech guide to Disinformation, including its relevance to civic space, opportunities, risks, and case studies (2020)
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This report examines the impact of five popular chatbots and text-based AI services on the UK's information supply chain and democracy in real time.
Claude's elections data integration
BrooklynIn the US and Brazil, Claude sends users asking about elections to trusted civic sources
PulsivaHub
Cape TownPulsivaHub is an African civic AI companion that answers questions about democratic rights and helps people verify potentially manipulated or AI-generated media.
Evidence
New York City (NYC / New York, NY)What if every AI analysis of public data came with a verifiable evidence record?
Fractured reality: How democracy can win the global struggle over the information space
Belgium (België / Belgique / Belgien) 🇧🇪The report examines the evolving impact of digital technologies on European democracy.
Social Media Lab
TorontoThe Social Media Lab is an interdisciplinary research laboratory at Toronto Metropolitan University that studies how social media is changing the way people communicate, disseminate information, conduct business, and form communities.
Deepfakes Tracker
TorontoThe portal is designed to serve as a comprehensive resource for policymakers, researchers, journalists, the public, and other stakeholders to monitor the prevalence of deepfakes and understand their potential threats to society.
Russia-Ukraine ConflictMisinfo
TorontoThe portal is a resource for analysts, researchers, and members of the public who are interested in understanding the nature and scale of online misinformation and disinformation about the Russia-Ukraine war.
Meta Community Notes
Facebook, Hacker Way, Menlo Park, CAMeta announced it was introducing a community notes program and ending its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S. The company indicated it would refine community notes before making it available for users outside the U.S.
Continuous data about provably false narratives spreading online — built for false claim detection at scale.
VIGINUM
France 🇫🇷VIGINUM est le service technique et opérationnel de l’État chargé de la vigilance et de la protection contre les ingérences numériques étrangères.
HKS Misinformation Review
Harvard Kennedy School, John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge, MAWe publish high-quality, interdisciplinary research that examines misinformation from different perspectives—from its prevalence and impact to the effectiveness of possible interventions—employing a fast-review process designed to publish articles within one to three months of entering peer review.
HiveMind Courses
435 Brannan St, San Francisco, CaliforniaJoin Hive Mind courses and certify not just your knowledge but your readiness to shape the future. Your journey to expertise starts here.
Disinformation Summer Institute (DSI)
Washington stateThe summer institute is intended primarily for advanced PhD candidates, advanced law and medical students, post-docs, assistant professors and early career researchers seeking to better understand and address disinformation, but more senior scholars and practitioners who have recently moved into this domain are also encouraged to apply.
The AI-powered truth aggregator.
We can predict what you are wrong about. We have asked thousands of important fact-questions to lots of people and identified the most common misconceptions.
OpenOrigins delivers pixel perfect content authentication at the source.
BirdXplorer
TokyoBirdXplorer is a tool for combating disinformation that uses Community Notes data from X (formerly Twitter).
Disint.ai
Netherlands (Nederland, Holland) 🇳🇱disint.ai - a narrative intelligence and social listening platform for YouTube.
Global Fact-Check Bot
Poynter Institute for Media Studies, 3rd Street South, St. Petersburg, FLA pioneering AI platform that empowers fact-checkers and citizens worldwide to verify information accuracy with just a few clicks. Fighting misinformation across 50+ languages, powered by 60+ trusted organizations.
European Democracy Shield
BrusselsThe European Democracy Shield and the EU Strategy for Civil Society present measures to protect the key pillars of our democratic systems: free people, free and fair elections, free and independent media, a vibrant civil society and strong democratic institutions.
The toolkit is a set of best practices that help Member States’ regulators in their work with VLOPs and VLOSEs to address risks like hate speech, online harassment, and manipulation of public opinion, including those involving artificial intelligence-generated content and impersonation.
Indicator Academic library
United States of America 🇺🇸This is a regularly updated collection of academic studies and industry reports about digital deception. It currently includes short descriptions of 55 academic studies and systematic reports.
We find that Go Viral!, a novel five-minute browser game, (a) increases the perceived manipulativeness of misinformation about COVID-19, (b) improves people’s attitudinal certainty (confidence) in their ability to spot misinformation and (c) reduces self-reported willingness to share misinformation with others.
Level up your defenses! Learn to build resistance against manipulation.
A Practical Guide to Prebunking Misinformation
New York City (NYC / New York, NY)This guide was developed for practitioners interested in defending against misleading and manipulative information
Through our Global Fact-Checking Program, we work with more than 20 IFCN-accredited fact-checking organizations who assess the accuracy of content on TikTok in over 60 languages and 130 markets across the world.
The Cranky Uncle game uses cartoons and critical thinking to fight misinformation.
Indicator
North AmericaIndicator is your essential guide to understanding and investigating digital deception.
Combining humor and gamification to build student resilience against climate misinformation
Psychological inoculation improves resilience to and reduces willingness to share vaccine misinformation
Stanford University, Serra Mall, Stanford, CAOur findings suggest that a short, low-cost, gamified intervention can increase resilience to vaccine misinformation.
We provide initial evidence that people’s ability to spot and resist misinformation improves after gameplay, irrespective of education, age, political ideology, and cognitive style.
Footnotes will draw on the collective knowledge of the TikTok community by allowing people to add relevant information to content on our platform.
Arab Fact-Checkers Network
Amman, JordanThe Arab Fact-Checkers Network (AFCN) is a grassroots network that works towards fostering transparent and impartial fact-checking in the Arab region.
FactBot by Snopes
United States of America 🇺🇸Snopes is using an AI model combined with Snopes Archives to answer questions
HEAT (Harmful Environmental Agendas & Tactics) is a unique cross-border investigation run by Logically and EU DisinfoLab uncovering how harmful climate narratives are deliberately seeded and amplified in Germany, France, and the Netherlands.
Japan Fact-check Center
TokyoJapan Fact-check Center (JFC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to fact-checking and promoting media information literacy
BU Platform Governance Lab
Boston UniversityCombating misinformation in digital marketplaces through gamified behavioral experiments. We design two-sided platforms to study and prevent misleading claims that harm consumers and democracy.
Aláfia Lab
SalvadorLaboratório de pesquisa independente e multidisciplinar de política digital
Thraets
KampalaConfronting digital threats to Democracies.
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Civic Tech Field Guide