As counter-disinformation strategies face mounting challenges—shrinking budgets, shifting alliances between tech and governments, and the limits of top-down techno-legal solutions—civil society in the Global Majority offers innovative alternatives. In this article, Ong and Jackson describe an alternative agenda that prioritizes community resilience, challenges the structures fueling disinformation, and provides actionable insights for Global North partners to better support the creativity and autonomy of Global Majority civil society organizations.

In recent election cycles, political violence has afflicted democracies worldwide. From assaults against candidates in France to riotous nationalism in India and to the seditious attacks on the government in the US and Brazil, civilians in democracies are increasingly participating in politics using violence. Notably, many of these instances of violence are predicated on mis- and disinformation, which are used to amplify political mobilization and target out-group ideologies. This review explores how mis- and disinformation fuel political violence in democracies by examining the drivers of unrest, the role of institutions in shaping disinformation, and the connection between misinformation and polarization, while highlighting strategies to disrupt harmful narratives.

Welcome to MediaWell’s Dataset Library, a curated collection of tools, guides, and resources to support evidence-based solutions to digital mis- and disinformation. Our library is made up of three sections: Datasets & Data Repositories offers access to raw data, and includes details on the update status (active/archived), data type, time period, and access type (open/restricted) of each resource; Social Media APIs Guides & Toolkits helps navigate the shifting landscape of requesting data from social media platforms; and Peer Resources & Partner Organizations provides a list of cutting-edge labs, centers, and think tanks working at the intersections of democracy and technology.

In this interview with the SSRC, anthropologists Sahana Udupa and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan discuss their book Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media (New York University Press.2023).  Their work explores the intricate ways that digital networks shape – and are shaped by – ongoing struggles against coloniality, through the lens of student-led antiracism protests, data capture, academic practices, and a rise in right-wing extreme speech around the world. Udupa and Dattatreyan offer insight into the fieldwork that informed their findings and the implications for power hierarchies in the contemporary digital environment.

As AI continues to dominate public attention and private investment worldwide, regulatory scrutiny of every point in the “AI stack” becomes more pressing. The data that defines many AI products differs from that of other computing technologies, requiring a new set of policy interventions. Data raises fundamental questions on the sustainability of the “bigger is better” paradigm, the worldview of the models, the standards of development, and the capturing of human preferences in feedback. Questions about regulation and policy are essential when the paradigms driving AI development incentivize the reckless and often invasive collection of data about people and communities.