President Biden is banning hamburgers. Covid-19 vaccines contain microchips implanted by Bill Gates. Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. Lies like these have always been with us, but now even the most outrageous disinformation is powered and quickly spread by billions of bots and digitally connected humans. They take flight at such a rapid pace that swatting them down can feel like a futile game of whack-a-mole.
Disinformation is effective in part because it preys on the raw emotion of fear and offers easy scapegoats in moments of heightened insecurity and uncertainty. It uses time-tested narratives of racial bias and blame to gain traction in people’s minds and in the public debate. For example, false claims of voter fraud echo old narratives about government corruption and the criminality of Black and brown people. Anti-Asian disinformation about the pandemic relies on racist narratives about Asians as perpetual foreigners and carriers of disease.
The accelerated flow of disinformation has a profound effect on the work of nonprofits and foundations, and fighting it needs to be at the center of all our work. We have a moral and strategic imperative to push back against narratives that continue to marginalize people of color and undermine the efforts of organizations advocating for policies and programs that combat systemic inequities.
Disinformation is misinformation that is intended to mislead. But whether intentional or not, falsehoods spread faster than the truth. So how can we stop them? For the nonprofit world, an effective strategy starts with large-scale philanthropic investment in local and national racial-justice organizations that understand best how disinformation spreads in their communities.
Specifically, these groups need resources to train community members in recognizing disinformation and replacing it with accurate and positive narratives that embrace themes of hope, belonging, and a vision for a better world. This requires partnering with organizations that track disinformation trends and narrative patterns and that can help them design targeted interventions. It also requires developing leaders who can become trusted and charismatic messengers skilled in fighting disinformation.
With the resources in hand to wage war against disinformation, nonprofits should integrate into all their work specific tools and techniques aimed at dismantling falsehoods and replacing them with their own powerful and emotionally evocative messages. Here’s a brief guide to how they can make that happen:
Inoculate staff against disinformation. Nonprofits can draw on a wealth of tools to train staff and stakeholders in how to recognize — and resist the urge to share — misinformation and disinformation. Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy created a Media Manipulation Casebook with examples of disinformation campaigns and how they spread. A Disinfo Defense Toolkit developed by our organization — ReFrame — and PEN America, provides election-specific as well as general tools for building disinformation literacy.
JaNaé Bates, communications director of Isaiah, a faith-based social-justice organization in St. Paul, Minn., uses a Race-Class Narrative curriculum to train organizers, influencers, and members to recognize and respond to racist dog whistles. Bates also started a disinformation alert newsletter called Repugnant, which features a pug dog who calls out disinformation and racially coded dog whistles.
One issue, titled “Don’t use the F word,” advised readers to avoid repeating the word “fraud” when trying to debunk claims of voter fraud because research shows repetition of the word itself directly contributes to election disinformation by increasing the volume of conversation about the issue. Nonprofits need to ensure that staff and stakeholders aren’t unknowingly feeding disinformation to algorithms in the process of trying to expose the lies.
Listen for murmurs of misinformation. Disinformation campaigns often begin as faint whispers within communities before becoming full-blown threats. Nonprofit staff can keep their ears tuned to the tell-tale signs by knowing what to listen for. For example, Florida for All, a statewide coalition supporting progressive candidates and causes, created a Slack channel that allows volunteers to record misinformation and disinformation they hear from community members. Organizations can also add a disinformation tip form to their websites or put out a call for direct messages about disinformation through their social-media accounts. Communications staff might also devote a half hour every day to scanning social-media channels for falsehoods shared by followers and allies.
Tell a more compelling story. The sensationalist nature of disinformation is a major reason it travels faster than factual information. Deep emotional impulses like fear and excitement compel people to share falsehoods. Conversely, the most effective way to undercut disinformation is to develop even more irresistibly compelling — and accurate — narratives.
Rather than prey on fear, these messages should focus on emotions such as joy, rage, humor, and pride. For instance, to spread accurate information about voting, it is more effective to explain how your grandmother plans to vote instead of presenting a dry set of facts about voting in your community, suggests Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center.
The Movement for Black Lives helped break through rampant disinformation and misinformation by using emotion-based narratives in its 2020 get-out-the-vote messages. It deployed videos, for example, that evoked the collective grief faced by Black communities under the Trump administration and the collective power of the estimated 26 million people who rose up in protest against George Floyd’s murder last summer. By connecting the emotions that led people into the streets to the emotions that could lead them to the ballot box, the Movement for Black Lives was able to go beyond the dry facts of voter-fraud disinformation and mobilize people to vote because their lives depended on it.
Shut out disinformation before it starts. Once disinformation is let out of the bottle, it’s hard to push it back in. That means nonprofits need to plan ahead to fill information voids with factual and emotionally compelling narratives that prevent disinformation from flourishing. One of the voids identified by Florida for All during the 2020 election was a lack of information reaching eligible Black voters that both acknowledged historic voter suppression and offered detailed information to help them overcome those obstacles. Unfortunately, what thrived in that void was disinformation about rigged elections that ultimately discouraged some voters from going out to the polls.
Collaborate with others. Much like managing the pandemic, fighting disinformation needs to be an all-hands-on-deck, societywide effort. One hub for collaborative nonprofit action is the Disinfo Defense League, started last year by the Media and Democracy Action Fund to focus specifically on disinformation aimed at communities of color heading into the 2020 election. More recently, the league has advocated for lawmakers to address disinformation on social-media platforms. Organizations interested in collaborating in the fight against disinformation can develop specific partnerships to share research, collaborate on communications, create narrative strategies, and train overlapping constituencies.
The disinformation we’re facing today is a technology-assisted form of soft power and social control. At its core, it is not a content problem but an organizing and power challenge — a challenge we all need to be prepared to meet with every resource available to us. People’s lives, the health and well-being of our communities, and democracy itself are at stake.
