In February, the Knight Foundation announced a $300 million initiative to strengthen journalism and democracy. Five months later, as part of this initiative, the foundation committed $50 million to support research to better understand how technology is transforming our democracy and the way Americans receive and engage with information.
Knight President Alberto Ibargüen laid out the initiative’s philosophical underpinnings, calling the proliferation of digital communications and social media “the most profound shift in how we communicate with each other since Gutenberg,” and that to “understand what is actually happening, we need independent research and insights based on data, not emotion and invective.”
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Source: Knight’s Initiative on Tech and Democracy Comes into Sharper Focus — Inside Philanthropy