How to Combat Disinformation Targeting Black Communities

Civic and advocacy groups fight disinformation targeted at Latinx voters and conduct voter registration and education outreach. Voto Latino encourages young people to help older relatives spot disinformation and trained its staff to spot and report it to the watchdog group, Disinfo Defense League. Social media posts then flag the information as false. Personal relationships are an effective way to counter disinformation and also help encourage people to vote. Voto Latino alone has registered over 500,000 voters since mid-2019, more than the total amount since the organization began in 2004.

Many entities are working with social media companies to flag election-related disinformation. The California Secretary of State emails voters about how to report false information so the state can flag it and the Arizona Secretary of State verifies official accounts with social media companies. In the private sector, the startup VineSite uses artificial intelligence to identify and flag false information and the nonprofit Mitre has an app used by 160 election officials to report social media disinformation. Officials have a good relationship with social media companies, but there is room for improvement.

Teaching students to fact check encourages resilience and builds resistance to the post-truth phenomenon. In Finland, a school curriculum implemented at the national level equips elementary and high school students with a digital literacy toolkit geared toward recognizing disinformation online. In addition to specific exercises spotting fake news on social media platforms, a critical thinking curriculum is built into all subjects. Finland's success in fostering a social resilience against disinformation also draws on lessons from the country's oftentimes fraught history with its eastern neighbor.

To combat the spread of mis- and disinformation online, Singapore passed the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, which allows the government to order that corrections be added to posts containing false information or even block access to certain content. So far, 152 orders have been issued under the act, with most of the flagged content relating to public health, public order, or trust in government functions.

Following a fraudulent election and violent backlash against demonstrators, activists in Belarus used open source photographs and documents, as well as those submitted by journalists and citizens, to expose police and state actors participating in human rights violations via a secure Telegram channel.

In an effort to fight government corruption, an initiative called Tracka monitors public spending allocations and holds town hall meetings in communities across Nigeria to educate residents about the budgeting process. The organization has engaged 967 communities and helped hold officials accountable for projects that were funded but never completed, such as an electricity substation in Kawu.

The CitizenApp allows Zimbabweans to anonymously report instances of government corruption, which are then made available to law enforcement officials and investigative journalists. The app has attracted 580 users since its launch in March 2023.

The Election Registration Information Center allows states to check for duplicate voter registrations across state lines and identify voters who have moved or died. At one time, a total of 33 states participated in the database, but several have since left the partnership as a result of disinformation about how the effort is funded.

Michigan is among the states that participate in the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a program that cross references voter registration and Social Security death data across state lines to help local officials identify and address duplicate registrations. Over the past four years, the state has canceled the registrations of more than 400,000 voters who died and more than 170,000 whose residency changed.

In an effort to minimize disruptions from impassioned poll watchers, one Texas county enhanced transparency by offering tours of the elections office, installing large TV screens to broadcast the tabulation process, publicly posting often-requested information online, and hosting workshops to walk residents through every step of election procedures. The county has been praised for its approach and the 2022 midterm election went off without any outbursts from voting activists.