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)
Showing 473 Results
Digital Access (Cameroon)
Cameroon (Cameroon, Cameroun) 🇨🇲Digital Access is a non-profit social enterprise that aims to promote digital opportunities for young people.
Deep Fake Transformers
Mozilla, East Evelyn Avenue, Mountain View, CAFakespot is working on a foundational model for detecting deep fake content on the web
SynthID Detector
Mountain View, CAIdentify content made with Google’s AI tools
SynthID
Mountain View, CAA tool to watermark and identify content generated through AI
CIB Mango Tree
Washington, DCWe are a collaborative and open-source project to develop software that tests for coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) in datasets of online activity.
Adobe Content Authenticity Beta
San Jose, CAApply secure metadata with information about yourself and your content preferences, directly to your files with Content Credentials.
Red teaming large language models (LLMs) for resilience to scientific disinformation
United States of America 🇺🇸The red teaming event brought together 40 health and climate postgraduate students with the objective to scrutinise and bring attention to potential vulnerabilities in large language models (LLMs1 ).
A report by the Royal Society on the impact of the internet on our information environment, and on misinformation relating to scientific issues
OSP
Armenia (Hayastán) 🇦🇲A fact-checking website designed to provide critical support to investigative journalists, fact-checkers, and data journalism experts by simplifying access to information from Armenian open sources.
Sunstorm Foundation
ParisWe are seeding a future in which truth is a shared asset, and trust between citizens in Europe is fostered by transparency in the digital sphere.
Telegram offers verification for public figures and organizations so that users can easily identify official sources.
Telegram allows public figures and organizations to become verified, so users can quickly identify official sources of information. To further improve transparency on Telegram, official third-party services are now able to assign extra verification icons to user accounts and chats.
Dokopalsya!
Russian Federation 🇷🇺Dokopalsya! (which playfully means "got to the bottom of it" in Russian), leverages large language models to serve as a rapid fact-checking assistant in Russian. When users share claims or news snippets, the bot identifies key assertions and checks them against reliable sources, providing evidence-based verification with links to authoritative references.
Naskvoz
Russian Federation 🇷🇺"Naskvoz" (meaning "seeing through" in Russian), analyzes news texts for emotional manipulation techniques and propaganda markers.
“I always want to do good with my platform:” Evaluating Influencer Experiences Participating in PGP’s Influencer Programs
United States of America 🇺🇸A survey composed of 21 questions designed to collect qualitative and quantitative data on influencers' experiences working with PGP and their respective influencer-led programs.
Lessons Learned From Monitoring Spanish-Language Vaccine Misinformation During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Erika Bonnevie, Valeria Ricciulli, Megan Fields, Ruth O’Neill, 2023
PGP Monitoring Lab
New York City (NYC / New York, NY)PGP’s Monitoring Lab employs several commercially available media monitoring systems that collect and organize publicly available information sources.
Trusted Messenger Program
New York City (NYC / New York, NY)PGP’s health care professional networks, health care professional training program, and its significant health communications infrastructure form one program: the Trusted Messenger Program.
YouTube: ‘Captured with a camera’ disclosure
Mountain View, CAHelp article explaining how to enable comments on YouTube videos and livestreams.
FEMA Hurricane Rumor Response
Washington, DCThe US government's emergency response department has taken to the internet to fight an unprecedented amount of information about 2024 hurricanes.
Rhetorical Labs
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland 🇬🇧We are a research collective dedicated to providing public communication campaigns with rigorous, state-of-the-art tools for message development. Our methodology combines machine learning, crowdsourcing, and adaptive randomized controlled trials.
An open database of conversations ChatGPT had with people who believe in a variety of conspiracy theories, which can be filtered by the efficacy of the conversation in changing beliefs.
Skeptic Reader
Spain (España) 🇪🇸Your personal bullshit🤌 detector for the Internet.
Gali Fakta
IndianaA new kind of media literacy game specifically tailored for an Indonesian audience.
This book explores the challenges that disinformation, fake news, and post-truth politics pose to democracy from a multidisciplinary perspective
Microsoft's program to "preserve, protect, and advance the fundamentals of democracy by safeguarding open and secure democratic processes, promoting a healthy information ecosystem, and advocating for corporate civic responsibility."
有据 (China Fact Check)
China (Zhong Guo) 🇨🇳China's first independent fact-checker, verifying international news
Weibo Community Notes feature (社区“附注”功能上)
China (Zhong Guo) 🇨🇳Like X and YouTube, China's Weibo platform instituted community notes annotations to fight disinformation on the platform.
Democratic Shield
France 🇫🇷The Shield initiative united a set of actions for institutions and civil society, aimed at safeguarding the integrity of the elections.
Misinformation Combat Alliance
India (Bhārat) 🇮🇳The Misinformation Combat Alliance is a cross-industry alliance bringing companies, organizations, institutions, industry associations and government entities together to combat misinformation and fake news and create an enlightened and informed society.
BridgeBot
GlobalMeet BridgeBot, a new chatbot which helps social media users bridge differences and build trust and understanding online.
A training program for digital community stewards (online group moderators and admins) focused on building social cohesion in online communities, and creating inclusive, engaging, and safe digital experiences within their online groups.
Hashtag Generation
Colombo, Sri LankaHashtag Generation is a non profit organization and movement led and run by a group of young tech-savvy, socially conscious Sri Lankans advocating for the meaningful civic and political participation of youth, especially young women and young people from minority groups
The Project AISLE
Batticaloa, Sri LankaProject AISLE is a hate speech monitoring tool in Tamil and Sinhala developed using Artificial Intelligence.
Get the Trolls Out
EuropeA campaign that harnesses the power of social media to disseminate innovative media outputs and generate dialogue in order to deliver a powerful counter-narrative against diverse forms of hate speech, including antisemitism, anti-Muslim hate, anti-Christian sentiment.
The Impact and Opportunities of Generative AI in Fact-Checking
Washington statePaper by ROBERT WOLFE and TANUSHREE MITRA, University of Washington, United States
Democracy Capital
OregonAdvising, Educating, Investing and Partnering in solutions that promote ecosystems we can trust…through information integrity, quality, and transparency (IQT)
Alliance4Europe is operating an information sharing and analysis centre (ISAC), to identify and defend against disinformation threats and to enable scalable collaboration with those who want to defend democracy.
Guidance for Policymakers, Civil Society, and Development Cooperation
The Internet & Democracy Initiative will study problems that have widespread information and social media implications.
the EU’s largest interdisciplinary network to counter disinformation.
Tech company signatories of the voluntary EU Code of Practice on Disinformation report relevant data on disinformation on their platforms
Turning Wikimedia into a news-site credibility tool
United States of America 🇺🇸My new WikiCred project is aimed at making Wikidata/Wikipedia a more effective indicator of news-site credibility.
ElectoFacts
Canada 🇨🇦ElectoFacts is a resource that Canadian electors can use to easily check whether information they come across about Canada's federal electoral process is true or not.
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