Civic Tech Field Guide
Sharing knowledge and productively growing the fieldThe Tech > Media > Fight disinformation - (418)
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 418 Results
PBS youth media literacy effort. "This is a pilot – a test – with Ruff Ruffman videos looking at the red-hot topic of how kids can and should use media and technology."
"The Hypothesis Project is a new effort to implement an old idea: A conversation layer over the entire web that works everywhere, without needing implementation by any underlying site."
The index compiles news sites with low factual-reporting levels, as determined and documented by Media Bias/Fact Check.
Iffy Quotient
University of Michigan, South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI, USAThe Iffy Quotient is a metric for how much content from “Iffy” sites has been amplified on Facebook and Twitter.
Image Verification Assistant
Greece (Ellas, Ellada)We are a joint team of engineers and investigators from CERTH-ITI and Deutsche Welle, trying to build a comprehensive tool for media verification on the Web.
Social Media Hoax Slayer
Mumbai, Maharashtra, IndiaIn the last few years, the Social Media having a wider reach and faster, started polluting human minds by anti-social elements, wrong doers, pranksters etc.
The Hamilton 2.0 dashboard, a project of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, provides a summary analysis of the narratives and topics promoted by Russian, Chinese, and Iranian government officials and state-funded media on Twitter, YouTube, state-sponsored news websites, and via official diplomatic statements at the United Nations.
Republic of Georgia's “Ethical Principles of Candidates of 28 October 2018 Presidential Elections”
Georgia (Sakartvelo)The purpose of the “Ethical Principles of Candidates of 28 October 2018 Presidential Elections” was to establish guidelines for presidential candidates during their election campaigns.
GhanaFact
GhanaGhana’s first full-time fact-checking organisation signatory to the International Fact-checking Network (IFCN) Code of Principles.
The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) brings together the technology industry, government, civil society, and academia to foster collaboration and information-sharing to counter terrorist and violent extremist activity online.
Global Network Initative
1325 G Street NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20005GNI helps companies respect freedom of expression and privacy rights when faced with government pressure to hand over user data, remove content, or restrict communications.
First Draft News resources
Columbia University, New York, NY, USAThese online courses, toolkits and resources are designed to help both journalists and the public build expertise and stay one step ahead of misinformation.
A report analyzing how gendered, online harassment of female journalists translates in the physical world.
Fakey
IndianaThis game aims to teach media literacy and study how people interact with misinformation.
Fato ou Fake
Brazil (Brasil)Fato ou Fake is a news literacy project that vetted more than 700 pieces of information ahead of the elections.
FactsMatterNg
NigeriaThe ICFJ Knight Fellowship programme in Nigeria is working with influencers and media partners to combat misinformation and fake news in the Nigerian digital media space.
Factly
HyderabadFactly strives to cultivate civic participation and engaging citizens in accessing, understanding, and using important government data/information at various levels
Facebook Digital Literacy Library
United States of America (the)The Facebook Digital Literacy Library is hosted by Facebook and currently includes learning resources made available by Youth and Media at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
Fact Check Initiative Japan
Japan (Nihon or Nippon)FIJ is a non-profit organization for the promotion of Japanese fact-checking aimed at protecting society from mis/disinformation.
A global map ranking countries by their Freedom of Information laws
An open technical standard providing publishers, creators, and consumers the ability to trace the origin of different types of media.
MisinfoDay is an annual event co-hosted by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP) and Washington State University’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication.
Fact Checks for Internet Archive Wayback Machine Pages
San FranciscoThe Internet Archive has started to surface some of these annotations for Wayback Machine users.
"The aim of The Good Information Project is to claim back and own the inform in information."
Take on Fake debunks claims you’ve seen or shared online to show you how to stay informed. Host Hari Sreenivasan follows the Internet rabbit hole of misinformation, reading beyond a single headline to find credible sources to uncover the truth.
Discover how deepfakes work and the visual clues you can use to identify them. We are a group of communication designers that have created this project to demonstrate our research into making our own deep fake, and to communicate the signs you can spot to identify them.
a free online game funded by the State Dept. that helps fight #disinformation, now playable in 6 different languages
Tech, Media & Democracy course
New York CityThrough a unique pan-university course, NYC universities partner to explore challenges and opportunities & build prototypes at the intersection of technology, media and democracy
FactStream
The Washington Post, K Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USAThe FactStream iOS app brings together the work of three of the largest U.S. fact-checking organizations, The Washington Post, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org.
MediaReview
Duke University, Durham, NC, USAA sibling to ClaimReview that allows fact-checkers to identify whether a video or image has been manipulated.
Public Editor
Berkeley, CA, USAWe’re an online community of critical thinkers vetting the most-shared news articles on the Internet.
Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch)
San FranciscoTwitter's community-based approach to misinformation
Centre for Information Resilience
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the)CIR is a non-profit social enterprise dedicated to countering disinformation & exposing human rights abuses.
The Reporters’ Lab
Duke University, Durham, NC, USAThe Reporters’ Lab is a center for journalism research in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Our core projects focus on fact-checking, but we also do occasional research about trust in the news media and other topics.
(Mis)informed
St. Petersburg, Florida, USAThe International Fact-Checking Network is releasing a limited-run podcast about fact-checking and fake news.
Disinfo Defense League
Media Democracy Fund, Connecticut Avenue Northwest, Washington, DC, USAThe Disinfo Defense League (DDL) is a distributed national network of organizers, researchers and disinformation experts disrupting online racialized disinformation infrastructure and campaigns that deliberately target Black, Latinx, Asian American/Pacific Islander and other communities of color.
RT and Sputnik's Role in Russia's Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem
Russian Federation (the)US State Department report on state-funded misinformation
Doublethink Labs
Taipei City, TaiwanDoublethink Lab was founded in 2019 to strengthen democracy through enhancing digital defenses. Our work focuses on researching malign Chinese influence operations and disinformation campaigns and their impacts via the digital tools and methodologies we have developed.
Journal of Online Trust and Safety
Stanford University, Serra Mall, Stanford, CA, USAThe Journal of Online Trust and Safety is a cross-disciplinary, open access, fast peer-review journal that publishes research on how consumer internet services are abused to cause harm and how to prevent those harms.
211CHECK
Juba211CHECK is a fact-checking and information verification platform that works on countering misinformation and disinformation in South Sudan.
Doublethink Lab's Disinfo Walkthrough
Taiwan (T'ai-wan)A collection of easy to use resources for identifying misinformation and its psychological tricks
Chequeado
ArgentinaChequeado is a non-profit, non-partisan independent media organisation and Latin America's first fact-checking site.
Correctiv
EssenCorrectiv is a German non-profit newsroom that investigates injustices and abuses of power, and runs educational programs on journalism and media literacy.
Get email updates
Helpful Links
Reach Out
A project of
With support from
National Endowment for Democracy
Founding Organization
Civic Hall
Technology partner
Civic Tech Field Guide