Spread of Disinformation Online

Disinformation, misinformation, and “fake news” are longstanding phenomena that, in the wake of the digital revolution, have become newly politicized and consequential. Citizens around the world have instant access to a vast variety of information – some of which is purposely misleading or manufactured for political ends. The known uses of disinformation include coordinated campaigns aimed at influencing elections and undermining democratic processes. In response to these developments, new research on mis- and disinformation is rapidly emerging from a range of academic disciplines.

Faced with the “infodemic”, the spread of rumors and false content, Latin American checkers join forces to share the information we produce and, by joining forces, provide better information to our communities. The disinformation that circulates in many cases is the same in different countries and being able to count on the work of others helps to disprove falsehoods more quickly and prevent their spread.

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Hoaxy is a tool that visualizes the spread of articles online. Articles can be found on Twitter, or in a corpus of claims and related fact checking.

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The Hamilton 2.0 dashboard, a project of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, provides a summary analysis of the narratives and topics promoted by Russian, Chinese, and Iranian government officials and state-funded media on Twitter, YouTube, state-sponsored news websites, and via official diplomatic statements at the United Nations. (NOTE — there currently are no UN statements or YouTube data for Iran).

Today, we need access to the truth more than ever before. But in this polluted information environment, it’s never been harder to know what to trust, and never easier to be misled. Misinformation is targeting and damaging our communities, all around the world.

At First Draft, our mission is to protect communities from harmful misinformation. We work to empower society with the knowledge, understanding, and tools needed to outsmart false and misleading information.

EU DisinfoLab is an independent non-profit organisation focused on tackling sophisticated disinformation campaigns targeting the EU, its member states, core institutions, and core values. EU DisinfoLab is a young NGO focused on researching and tackling sophisticated disinformation campaigns targeting the EU, its member states, core institutions and core values. We develop and maintain the main independent European platform on disinformation, which assembles the community of experts fighting disinformation and provides them with needed tools and resources to encourage collaboration.

Emergent is a real-time rumor tracker. It's part of a research project with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University that focuses on how unverified information and rumor are reported in the media. It aims to develop best practices for debunking misinformation.

This project visualizes the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab research on coordinated disinformation campaigns. Coordinated disinformation campaigns are more likely to thrive when they go unnoticed and unchecked. This interactive visualizer breaks down the methods, targets, and origins of select coordinated disinformation campaigns throughout the world. There are significant efforts across the industry working to stop the effects of disinformation. These countermeasures take a wide range of forms.

LEXOTA (Laws on Expression Online: Tracker and Analysis) offers a comprehensive overview of laws, policies and other government actions on disinformation in every country in Sub-Saharan Africa. The tool is powered by multilingual data and context-sensitive insight from civil society organisations and uses a detailed framework to assess whether government responses to disinformation are human rights-respecting.

DisinfoPortal.org is a one-stop interactive online portal and guide to the Kremlin’s information war. The portal aggregates open source research and journalism from the United States and Europe and presents it in a user-friendly way, with timely multimedia content produced by the Atlantic Council and its partners explaining Russia’s ongoing influence operations.