"Why waste a sentence saying nothing?"
~ Seth Godin
Reliable information is essential for making decisions about health, work, education, and civic engagement. Without it, people are vulnerable to manipulation and confusion.
Combating disinformation isn’t just about removing harmful content—it also requires producing accurate, trustworthy, and accessible information. Traditional media models have collapsed under the pressure of digital disruption and consolidation, leaving many communities without reliable local news. Research from the Pew Research Center has shown that community connection and voter turnout are strongly linked to regular local news consumption. While there has been a modest resurgence in print, most Americans—especially younger ones—now rely on online-only sources, which often lack the editorial rigor and community focus of legacy outlets.
Rebuilding the information landscape means investing in local and investigative journalism and expanding their capacity to reach broader audiences; supporting digital platforms that prioritize verification and clarity, and developing public-interest technologies that elevate credible voices. Emerging tools, particularly AI-powered systems for content curation, moderation, and filtering, offer promise in helping users navigate the flood of information more effectively.
Yet the sheer volume of content produced today far outpaces our ability to verify it. Bad actors exploit this dynamic by using noise to bury facts beneath distraction and misinformation. Algorithms designed to maximize engagement instead of accuracy tend to amplify polarizing and low-value content. Journalists and fact-checkers struggle to keep pace, and their work is often undermined by declining public trust and the financial fragility of newsrooms.
While misinformation touches everyone, its impacts are not evenly distributed. Communities of color are disproportionately targeted, especially during times of crisis. These campaigns frequently draw on historical injustices and cultural mistrust. For example, AAPI communities have been targeted with pseudoscientific health claims, Latino populations with false narratives about access barriers, and Black and Native communities with messaging that exploits legacies of medical racism. Effective interventions must be empathetic and culturally aware, engaging with people’s lived experiences while avoiding stereotypes.
"Disinformation is, at its core, meant to be a sort of voter suppression tactic for communities of color. It targets communities of color in a way that feeds into their already justifiable concerns that the system is stacked against them."
~ María Teresa Kumar, founder, Voto Latino
"VLPowerSummit 2017 - María Teresa Kumar" by Yash Mori, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
How Philanthropy Can Help
Philanthropy has a unique opportunity to support what is often overlooked: community-based journalism, multilingual media, public-interest technologies, and creative storytelling. These targeted, time-sensitive investments can be especially valuable where other funders are absent or risk-averse.
- Community-based journalism is a departure from traditional journalism, focusing on reporting for and with a community, instead of on them.
- Multilingual media involves not just making content available in other languages, but thinking about how information is designed and how multilingual operations align with online-offline strategies.
- Public-interest technologies are built to serve the public good, recognizing that commercial technologies often prioritize different goals.
- Creative storytelling is critical because facts alone are not enough to change minds or counter falsehoods—stories shape how people feel, remember, and believe.
Grantmaking in this space should be informed by research that helps us understand how people process and act on information. Traditional measures of accuracy are no longer sufficient. We also need to assess clarity, relevance, and emotional resonance—the qualities that determine whether information is trusted and retained. In other words, what makes information sticky? Research from numerous studies show that information overload contributes to confusion, and that cognitive fatigue leads people to default to emotional reactions, biased reasoning, or familiar but unreliable sources. Engagement metrics like “likes” and “shares” further compound the problem by accelerating the spread of misinformation. These insights underscore the need for thoughtful design, platform accountability, and evidence-based interventions.
Arts projects represent a vital yet underused strategy in countering disinformation. Art has the unique ability to break through noise, prompt emotional insight, and challenge dominant narratives. Whether visual, performative, or digital, creative works can illuminate the human impact of misinformation, elevate marginalized voices, and foster trust in shared experiences. As generative AI becomes increasingly embedded in artistic processes, it raises critical questions about authorship, authenticity, and the manipulation of reality. Supporting artists who explore these issues helps communities engage with the ethical implications of AI and pushes back against the normalization of synthetic or misleading content. Philanthropic investment in the arts can offer both cultural insight and civic value by amplifying truth through imagination.
Production photo from the Malthouse Theatre (Melbourne, Australia) production TRUTH (2025). Photographer: Pia Johnson.
