Model and Strategy
The Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA) is a Latina-led nonprofit founded in 2023 to shape a more participatory, inclusive, and resilient digital democracy for Latino communities in the United States and across Latin America. Its mission is to reduce online harms—disinformation, polarization, and extremism—while ensuring Latino communities can access fact-based, culturally relevant information and participate fully in democratic life.
DDIA operates at the intersection of research, intervention, and capacity building. It studies how narratives and information flow across languages and borders, experiments with countermeasures to online harms that are tailored to cultural contexts, and trains Latino journalists, creators, and civic leaders to strengthen their own communities’ information resilience. The organization seeks to implement three interrelated initiatives over the next one-two years:
- Prebunking and media interventions tailored to different Latino subgroups, tested and delivered by trusted messengers such as comedians for younger men, local journalists for Mexican-American and Caribbean communities, and micro-influencers for Spanish-dominant women. Prebunking—a preventive approach to misinformation—exposes people to common manipulation tactics before they encounter false claims, helping them recognize and resist misleading narratives in advance.
- The Latinos, Media, and Democracy Training Program, which equips Latino journalists, creators, and youth with verification skills, fact-checking methods, and tools to cover elections and civic participation in Spanish and English.
- A retrieval-augmented search resource in Spanish, which will allow journalists, educators, and civic leaders to query a vetted database of election information and fact-checked materials, producing accurate, culturally relevant responses through generative-AI tools. This initiative aims to ensure that Spanish-speaking communities have equal access to trustworthy, contextualized information in the emerging AI landscape.
Beyond these strategies, DDIA also engages in policy and advocacy work, connecting Latino voices to national and international debates on platform accountability, content moderation, and the civic impact of AI. Its goal is to ensure that policies affecting information integrity reflect the lived experience and linguistic realities of the hemisphere’s 600 million Spanish speakers.
“Our communities are too often thought of as monolithic or purely as victims. Very few organizations are fully listening to our communities. For us, understanding why people engage with information—the values, identities, and emotions behind it—is key. Otherwise, you’re just playing content whack-a-mole.” — Roberta Braga, Founder and Executive Director
Impact
Though young, DDIA has already demonstrated measurable impact by equipping Latino communities, journalists, and policymakers with tools to resist manipulation.
In its first two years, DDIA has laid the empirical foundation for understanding how misinformation impacts Latinos in the U.S. Through two nationally representative polls of more than 3,000 Latino adults each, a prebunking experiment, and continuous narrative monitoring across social media and more than 3,300 public WhatsApp groups, the organization has generated one of the most comprehensive data sets on Latino information ecosystems. Its behavioral research and open-source investigations examine familiarity with and belief in conspiracy narratives, trust in democratic institutions, perceptions of AI, and manipulation tactics targeting Latino audiences across YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok. (Watch DDIA's most recent briefing, Conversations with Latinos - What Makes Content Stick?)
This work underpins DDIA’s first-of-its-kind, dynamic monitoring system for Spanish-language content circulating among U.S. Latinos, the findings of which are disseminated through the weekly REDESCover newsletter. The newsletter—now reaching more than 2,000 journalists, civic leaders, and policymakers—has become a go-to resource for tracking trending narratives and responding in real time.
DDIA also tests what works. In controlled experiments, prebunking videos co-produced with Latino influencers increased participants’ ability to recognize manipulative tactics and reduced intent to share falsehoods. Gains were strongest among immigrant citizens, Spanish-dominant users, and women. A 14-point best-practices guide distilled these lessons for the broader field, filling a major gap in Spanish-language misinformation research.
Capacity-building efforts likewise show early, tangible results. The Latinos, Media, and Democracy Training Program launched in 2024 and has already engaged dozens of emerging journalists and creators across several Latin American and U.S. communities, building early momentum toward a broader regional network. Participants report stronger confidence in fact-checking and a deeper understanding of how to address culturally specific misinformation narratives.
At the community level, through REDESCover, DDIA helps Latino journalists, creators, and community leaders prioritize the narratives that matter most to their audiences. Its training and partnerships have inspired creators to produce bilingual civic content, strengthening local participation and information resilience. DDIA’s research and analysis have been used by outlets such as CBS News, NPR, and The New York Times, amplifying Latino perspectives in national discussions about Latino-specific misinformation and democracy.
Leadership
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Roberta Braga
Founder & Executive Director
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Stephanie Valencia
Board of Directors
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Ricardo Zuniga
Board of Directors
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Olga Belogolova
Board of Directors