A decline in local news has created an information vacuum across the U.S. In its stead, communities have turned to social media, where mis- and disinformation has flourished.
A 2020 report from First Draft analyzing the spread of false content in five U.S. states argued that “all misinformation is local.” It found that misleading photos during protests, false information about health safety measures, theories about government surveillance, and more, were often spread through private groups on social media platforms and messaging apps. Influencers, elected officials and political candidates in turn amplified these false claims.
A resurgent local news space may play a critical role in counteracting this. “The hope is that high-quality local journalism can inform democratic deliberation, debunk false claims, and restore the feelings of trust and community that help to keep conspiracy theories at bay,” reads a report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published in January.
Here’s a look at how three organizations in the U.S. work with the local communities they serve to counter the spread of false information.
Center for Media Engagement, UT Austin
In 2022, Natalie Jomini Stroud, director of the Center for Media Engagement at The University of Texas at Austin, identified a major problem: newsrooms were finding it difficult to detect locally circulating misinformation, which prevented them from refuting it.
“If I think about our vulnerabilities in the United States going into 2024, I really think we need to be thinking locally,” said Stroud. “We did a couple of interviews with newsrooms to try and understand what their current practices were, to find out something that's going to be helpful.”
Stroud and her team of researchers and programmers at the Center for Media Engagement are collaborating with Univision, City Bureau, The Des Moines Register and the Detroit Free Press, along with researchers at the University of Michigan, to build a tool to tackle local misinformation. Community members will be able to use this tool to report suspected misinformation about local issues via a website or mobile app, supplying information about the platform they encountered the content on, relevant details and links, and supporting images. Newsrooms will then utilize an internal dashboard to organize and manage the submitted cases.
The idea is that this will help journalists identify topics to report on more extensively, said Stroud. For example, if a community member shares a post with inaccurate information about mail-in ballots, newsrooms can publish an explainer on the topic that effectively addresses and debunks it.
“Anyone looking that [issue] up in the future would have an authoritative local news source providing them with that information,” said Stroud.
The tool will be rolled out ahead of the 2024 U.S. elections to select local newsrooms to test its use and effectiveness with community members. “When you put a product out there, people might use it in some new ways that you never even thought of,” said Stroud. “Our hope is that this helps newsrooms both preempt and react to misinformation that can circulate [within] communities.”
The Documenters Network, City Bureau
Nearly half of local governing boards in the U.S. do not have a single reporter covering their meetings. To fill this gap, City Bureau created the Documenters Network, comprising local new organizations that train and pay community members to attend and cover public meetings.
These community members, called Documenters, publish original notes, social media threads and multimedia reports. This information is also made public on the Documenters Network website. In the last seven years the network has trained 2,800 Documenters, who have collectively completed more than 6,400 assignments.
“In the world of misinformation, I think one of the most important things that Documenters do is make sure that their neighbors, their friends, family members, people who live in their communities, know what's going on locally and know that there are trusted eyes and ears, keeping track of what's going on in local government,” said Max Resnik, director of network services for The Documenters Network.
The initiative has been able to build a trusted link between newsrooms and their audiences through the priority they place on recruiting Documenters who are from the communities they cover. This has enabled newsrooms to better identify the kind of information that spreads locally, and who is engaging with it.
Among its impacts, Documenters’ coverage of public meetings has led local boards and committees to regularly update their calendars, creating greater transparency of the proceedings. Documenters have also founded local newsrooms of their own, for instance in Cleveland, Akron and Indianapolis. In Harvey, Illinois, Amethyst Davis, a former Documenter with the Tiny News Collective, launched the hyperlocal Harvey World Herald.
Detroit Free Press
Ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the Detroit Free Press hired a mis- and disinformation reporter to engage directly with local communities and online groups where false content was spreading.
“We wanted to look into networks of misinformation and disinformation and wanted to understand not just what was true or not, but who is putting it out there, and how they may be connected to other people or organizations,” said the outlet’s executive editor, Anjanette Delgado.
For three months starting in October 2020, this mis- and disinformation reporter, Ashley Nerbovig, was active on 11 messaging apps and social media platforms, including Telegram, WhatsApp, WeChat, Instagram, Twitter and Yelp. She joined closed community groups, with names such as “Michiganders for Trump,” “Michiganders for Bernie” and “Michiganders against vaccines," to identify where misinformation was circulating.
Conversations in the groups didn’t call for violence, but they did push members to be vigilant of the election and the processes around it, noted Nerbovig. There were calls to action to monitor the new ballots being dropped off at one of Detroit's ballot counting centers, concerns over Sharpies invalidating votes and dead people voting in Michigan.
"Prior to the election, there was kind of just a vibe of setting the groundwork, or priming the groundwork, to create suspicion around the election,” said Nerbovig.
Upon identifying the topics community members were discussing, the Detroit Free Press then published explainers, long-form articles, and videos to address and debunk any false content being spread. They also engaged users on social media in this effort.
“If somebody is tweeting something that's false, it's not enough to just have a story correcting that information,” said Delgado. “We would go on to their post and reply to it and say, ‘well, actually no.’”
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