The Hewlett Foundation will spend $10 million over the next two years to take on the problem of fake news. The grants will go to study how social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter were manipulated by Russian bots and hoax peddlers to sow disinformation and sour political discourse — and what can be done about it.
The ability to both flood social-media networks with false information and also microtarget those stories to specific individuals in the months leading up to the 2016 election made it impossible for many voters to distinguish between fact and fiction, said Kelly Born, a program officer at Hewlett who will lead the effort.
The resulting confusion, Born said, allowed fringe viewpoints and outright lies — that the Pope endorsed Trump; that a Washington pizza parlor engaged in child sexual slavery — to bubble to the surface of the national political debate and be accepted as fact.
“You’ve had disinformation and propaganda since the dawn of man,” she said. “But now we have no gatekeepers. Anyone can produce content and disseminate it.”
Congressional Gridlock
The commitment grew out of the foundation’s Madison Initiative, a $50 million effort started in 2014 that was later expanded to a $150 million program, that aimed to eliminate congressional brinkmanship. Born said that following the 2016 election, as it became clear that Russia had manipulated messages on social media, Hewlett believed its efforts to improve a deadlocked Congress would be for naught if American citizens were buried in false information.
Hewlett’s media grants come as foundations take a renewed interest in supporting journalism. Since 2016, grant makers have poured nearly $1 billion into newsrooms, think tanks, and universities that support media research and practice, according to figures compiled by the Foundation Center. Some of the money has been used to beef up newsrooms and improve news gathering. Other grants are targeted at news consumers. By helping readers and viewers develop a critical eye, grant makers hope to create a better informed public.
Teaching news consumers how to discern fake news is critical to a functioning democracy, said Jonathan Anzalone, assistant director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University’s School of Journalism.
“There is basic confusion about whom to trust and what to trust,” he said. “All this information from social media blends in together, whether it’s coming from Smithsonian Magazine or my crazy uncle.”
The center, which in the past has received grants from the Knight, MacArthur, and McCormick foundations, has introduced media-literacy classes at several high schools and offers an online course that has attracted about 4,800 students, Anzalone said.
MacArthur Support
The MacArthur Foundation has devoted resources to media projects for several decades, largely focusing on the production of content. It has supported documentarians and nonfiction storytellers and given general operating support for nonprofit newsrooms to undertake investigative reporting.
Those efforts were redoubled in 2016, when MacArthur announced a five-year, $25 million effort to support nonprofit newsrooms In addition, the Chicago grant maker added a new twist. It would support what it calls “participatory civic media.” The idea is that the internet allows everyone to be a journalist. By training nonprofessionals, especially those from historically marginalized populations, MacArthur hopes to increase citizen engagement in the democratic process. This year, MacArthur has budgeted $26 million for journalism grants.
“Everyone on the street with a cellphone in their pocket is a media maker,” said Jen Humke, senior program officer at MacArthur. “We want to make sure there is a diversity of voices contributing to public debate.”
Different Path
Hewlett has taken a different course.
Instead of supporting “upstream” efforts that aim to improve journalism or “downstream” efforts designed to improve consumers’ news literacy, Hewlett wants to investigate the networks that disseminate the news.
Born said each approach is vital to ensuring trust in the media and a well-informed public. Hewlett chose to focus on social networks because it felt it could have a more immediate impact.
“Changing the practices of hundreds of newsrooms and millions of citizens is much harder than looking at the practices of half a dozen or so social-media platforms,” she said.
As part of the effort, Hewlett has supported the creation of Arena, a program at the London School of Economics committed to addressing propaganda, and has devoted funds to the New York University Social Media and Political Participation Lab.
Born said the remaining grants will go to research.
A social-media legal framework, she said, would likely fall flat because there is little consensus about how to govern in the digital age without becoming a censor.
She said she’d like to split grants among scholars who have historically focused on holding social-media platforms accountable and researchers who have strong ties with, and access to, data compiled by social-media companies.
Participation by those companies remains a wild card.
“Some see this as a problem and are actively looking to address it,” she said. “Others are a little bit in denial.”
Hewlett will support three lines of research, which Born says is necessary before considering a regulatory approach:
- to define the problem and understand how disinformation spreads across social networks and affects people’s beliefs;
- to advance potential solutions by either elevating high-quality content on social-media platforms or testing what actions can be taken to reduce the impact of disinformation on media consumers;
- to explore how to accommodate free speech and privacy while addressing online propaganda.
“Inadequate thinking has been done to tease out all the issues” associated with digital disinformation, said Eileen Donahoe, executive director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at Stanford University.
Donahoe, who previously served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council, said the regulatory debate surrounding social-media sites and their function in society often boils down to whether they should be treated like media companies that are responsible for the content they distribute or simply platforms that allow users to exercise free speech.
Hewlett’s work, she said, could go a long way toward developing a regulatory framework that snuffs out malignant content while preserving rights of expression.
The stakes are high, she said.
“This is the most urgent thing we face as a society,” she said. “It’s a threat to democracy writ large.”
Clarification: This article has been updated to reflect the expansion of Hewlett’s commitment to its Madison Initiative from $50 million to $150 million.
Correction: An earlier version of this article characterized MacArthur’s $25 million, five-year commitment to nonprofit newsrooms as the totality of its media support. The piece has been corrected to include the scope of the grant maker’s media budget.
