THE FIGHT AGAINST DISINFORMATION IN THE U.S.A.

Institutional Initiatives

1. The Information Disorder Project at The Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School (The Information Disorder Lab (IDLab funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Ford Foundation, and the U.S. Open Society Foundation. The ID Project’s international efforts and research are being funded by grants and gifts from the Gates Foundation, Google and Facebook).
2. The Truthiness Collaboration at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (USC)).
3. The NewsCo/Lab at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University (Funds from both Google and Facebook).
4. Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University (Funded by the Ford Foundation, The AI Fund, and the Open Society Foundation).
5. Media Cloud at the MIT Media Lab ( The International Hate Observatory and the News Provenance Project)
6. Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media  (A collaboration between the Indiana University Network Science Institute and the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research).
7. Duke Tech and Check Cooperative (Part of Duke University’s Reporters’ Lab).
8. Trusting News at the Missouri School of Journalism (Collaboration with 53 newsrooms).
9. The Trust Project at Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University. (Participants include the Washington Post, the Economist, the Globe and Mail, Zeit, Facebook, Google, and Twitter (X) ).
10. Center for Media Engagement at University of Texas at Austin (Supported by NII, Google News Initiative, Knight, Facebook, The Coral Project, Democracy Fund, Hewlett Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, and more).
11. The Oxford Internet Institute Computational Propaganda Lab (Funded by the Ford Foundation and housed at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford).

Upstart Initiatives

1. First Draft (Coalition of nine organizations, established and supported by Google News Lab, that worked in verifying information that circulates online. After the 2016 U.S. election, First Draft shifted to address mis- and disinformation online by developing experimental projects, researching those projects and creating training materials based on project research).
2. Data & Society (Based in Brooklyn, began with funding from Microsoft. Today, it counts close to 50 funders backing its work, including Twitter co-founder Eve Williams and his wife Sara’s foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Arthur P. Sloan, and a number of well-known foundations.  Their own lab for projects around civil society is called the Disinformation Action Lab launching two pilot projects – The Data Integrity Project and the  Data Voids.
3. NewsGuard (A for-profit startup with $6 million in funding researching and rating thousands of news sources, licensing these findings to social media platforms and search engines in order to inform readers about the news content they’re consuming).
4. Deepnews.ai (Created by Stanford students Deepnews.ai  uses deep learning algorithms and machine learning to assess articles’ journalistic merit in real time. Funders included Stanford’s JSK Fellowship, Google’s Digital News Innovation Fund, the Knight Foundation, Knapyse SAS France, Feedly, Diffbot, The Guardian, the Reynolds Journalism Institute, the Trust Project, the Credibility Coalition, and Mather Economics.
5. The Credibility Coalition (An interdisciplinary community that began as a prototype with a small Knight Foundation grant but now has grown  growing with funding from Google News, the Facebook Journalism Project, Craig Newmark Philanthropies and private donors).
6. RoBhat Labs (Now RoBhat Labs has launched a disinformation tool – a free browser extension called SurfSafe).
7. Witness on AI  (One of its main offerings to the disinformation solution is its focus on resources to sourcing, verifying, and contextualizing eyewitness video in order to promote its use in defense of human rights).
8. Harmony Labs on Media Ecosystem (The nonprofit’s central mission is to understand media influence at scale, and experiment with ways that media can be leveraged to support an open, resilient democratic society. It is supported by a long and eclectic list of funders and partners, including Ford Foundation, Google, MTV, DARPA and others).
9. TruthBuzz (Developed by the International Center for Journalists, TruthBuzz aims to optimize fact-checking and “make the truth go viral.” The International Center for Journalists is a nonprofit that describes itself as working from the premise that reliable, trusted journalism is a cornerstone of healthy democracies. The Center has worked with over 100,000 journalists from 180 countries, and TruthBuzz is a small piece of the nonprofit’s broader efforts to help journalists connect more deeply with their audiences. Supported by Craig Newmark Philanthropies, TruthBuzz has expanded to include a fellowship program through which TruthBuzz Fellows embed experts in newsrooms in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and the United States to assist with disinformation efforts).
10. The Alliance for Securing Democracy (Housed at The German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Alliance for Securing Democracy is supported by American private individuals and small family foundations representing diverse political perspectives).
11. The Coral Project (The Coral Project’s mission is to strengthen the connection between journalists and their communities using open-source tools and strategies. The Project breaks this broader mission down into four different goals: supporting public trust in journalism; incorporating a more diverse range of voices and backgrounds into reporting; making the content that journalists produce more relevant to the population for whom they’re writing; and creating a more productive online dialogue overall. The Coral Project is led by the Mozilla Foundation, which is the parent institution of the commercial browser Firefox. The Coral Project was established in collaboration with the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Knight Foundation was the first funder to back the Project, and the Coral Project now receives support from the Rita Allen Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the News Integrity Initiative, and others.

Funders

1. Craig Newmark Philanthropies (Craig Newmark, the founder of craigslist, created Craig Newmark Philanthropies to support and connect organizations and drive broad civic engagement at the grassroots level. One of Newmark’s goals is to strengthen trust in high-quality journalism by supporting institutions and initiatives that are tackling the wide range of issues that affect the news industry. He has been a most ardent supporter of work to combat information disorder. To date, Newmark has donated over $70 million toward trustworthy journalism initiatives such as The Information Disorder Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. The Shorenstein Center is part of a pantheon of journalism organizations that Newmark supports, including Alliance for Securing Democracy, Columbia Journalism Review, Credibility Coalition, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, Data & Society, International Center for Journalists, ProPublica, Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, and the Trust Project at Santa Clara University.
2. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation continues to be at the forefront of innovation for journalism with a strong focus on exploring emerging technologies, strengthening local news, creating revenue models, combating misinformation and helping journalists build trust through reporting, diversity, and deeper engagement in their communities. The Knight Foundation’s grants in this area include a collaboration of funders in support of the News Match campaign for nonprofit news; the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy with the Aspen Institute; Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center Information Disorder Lab; Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University; the Reporters’ Lab at Duke University; the Lenfest Institute; ProPublica; the Tow-Knight Center at CUNY; Data & Society; MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media and Cortico; International Center for Journalists; CrediblityCoalition.org; The Trust Project at Santa Clara University; Trusting News at the Reynolds Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism and the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon.
3. The MacArthur Foundation (The MacArthur Foundation’s Journalism and Media program provides general operating support to nonprofit newsrooms conducting investigative, explanatory and global reporting, including Global Voices, which has long reported on misinformation in global contexts. The Foundation also supports a cluster of media literacy grants aimed at youth to ensure the American public, starting with young people, has the skills and knowledge to effectively navigate and decipher today’s news and media. MacArthur’s Technology in the Public Interest program supports efforts to advance greater transparency and accountability among technology companies for how they manage online content and how that impacts their users. This includes organizations like Data & Society which are undertaking fundamental research and developing new approaches for understanding and mitigating the spread of disinformation and harmful content online).
4. The Ford Foundation Internet Freedom Program (The Ford Foundation is also leading the efforts to combat disinformation with its Internet Freedom program, focused on advancing a range of strong and effective legal, policy, social, and technical protections coupled with increasingly strengthened fields of technologists and social justice organizations working together to ensure that digital technologies are not deployed by corporate or government actors to exploit vulnerable communities or further entrench harmful and oppressive systems (or develop new ones). Ford is supporting Data & Society for the launch of a new Media Manipulation Initiative; the Computational Propaganda Lab at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford which includes three convenings in London, D.C., and Palo Alto; the June 2018 Information Disorder Symposium by the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California; the Pew Research Center and Gallup research along with Knight, OSF, and Gates (with Knight as the lead funder); the Harvard University Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and the MIT Center for Civic Media as a joint initiative to use the Media Cloud platform to study media manipulation; the Columbia Journalism Review new Gatekeeper Project; and Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center to support the Information Disorder Project.
5. The News Integrity Initiative (NII) (Another new funder of note is a collaboration of many of these major foundations called the News Integrity Initiative. The News Integrity Initiative (NII) is both a funder and an initiative. It is a global coalition of partners, from newsrooms and nonprofits to technologists and academics, with a vision for journalism that serves as a force for building trust, empathy, and solutions in our communities. The News Integrity Initiative is a project of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. The initiative is seeded with $14 million from a coalition of partners, which currently include Facebook, Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund, Ford Foundation, AppNexus, Knight Foundation, Tow Foundation, Betaworks, Mozilla, and Democracy Fund).
6. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
7. The Lenfest Institute (The Lenfest Institute for Journalism is the first-of-its-kind organization whose sole mission is to develop and support sustainable business models for great local journalism. The Institute was founded in 2016 by the late cable television pioneer H.F. (Gerry) Lenfest. Lenfest gifted to the Institute an initial endowment of $20 million, which has since been supplemented by other donors, for investment in innovative news initiatives, new technology, and new models for sustainable journalism.
8. Rita Allen Foundation (The Rita Allen Foundation has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars toward promoting democracy and civic engagement through journalism. It has given to the Knight News Challenge on Elections, Prototype Fund Open Call for Ideas to Improve the Flow of Accurate Information, The Coral Project by Mozilla Foundation, News Revenue Hub focused on building local nonprofit news membership models, Improving and Increasing Fact Checking in Journalism by the American Press Institute, along with a number of initiatives around voting including Expanding TurboVote Corporate Partnerships and Voter’s Edge with Maplight.

Other major funders

1. Open Society Foundation funded by philanthropist George Soros,
2. Democracy Fund which is part of the Omidyar Network funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar,
3. Bill and Melinda Gates’ Gates Foundation, and
4. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation focused on building healthy U.S. communities.

Referenced

1. Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University
2. Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University
3. Center for Media Engagement at University of Texas at Austin  
4. Columbia Journalism Review
5. Data & Society  
6. Deepnews.ai
7. Duke Tech and Check Cooperative  
8. Harmony Labs on Media Ecosystem
9. Indiana University Network Science Institute
10. Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media
11. International Center for Journalists
12. MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media
13. NewsGuard
14. Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford
15. ProPublica
16. Reynolds Journalism Institute
17. The Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon.
18. The Alliance for Securing Democracy
19. The American Press Institute
20. The Coral Project
21. The Credibility Coalition
22. The Information Disorder Project at The Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School
23. The Lenfest Institute
24. The NewsCo/Lab at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University
25. The Oxford Internet Institute Computational Propaganda Lab
26. The Pew Research Center and Gallup
27. The Reporters’ Lab at Duke University
28. The Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY
29. The Trust Project at Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University
30. The Truthiness Collaboration at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism  
31. Trusting News at the Missouri School of Journalism
32. Trusting News at the Reynolds Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism
33. TruthBuzz

Schools of Journalism

1. Northwestern University
2. Columbia University
3. Boston University
4. University of Florida
5. George Washington University
6. University of California, Berkley
7. American University
8. University of North Carolina
9. University of Missouri
10. Arizona State University
11. University of Texas at Austin
12. University of Wisconsin
13. Emerson College
14. Ohio University
15. University of Minnesota
16. Indiana University at Bloomington
17. University of Southern California
18. New York University
19. Syracuse University
20. Standford University
21. University of Maryland
22. University of Georgia
23. University of Nebraska
24. The University of Oklahoma