Disinformation Issue Page Hero Image

Disinformation

The Issue

PEN America understands disinformation as a fundamental threat to free expression and democracy. The PEN Charter, drafted in 1948, commits to fighting “mendacious publication, deliberate falsehood and distortion of facts for political and personal ends.” PEN America has taken up this urgent issue as a core part of our work, beginning in 2017 with the publication of our report Faking News: Fraudulent News and the Fight for Truth, in which we anticipated the potential risks if disinformation went unchecked, including “unending political polarization and gridlock; the undermining of the news media as a force for government accountability; a long-term risk to the viability of serious news; an inability to devise and implement fact- and evidence-driven policies; the vulnerability of public discourse to manipulation by private and foreign interests; an increased risk of panic and irrational behavior among citizens and leaders; and government overreach, unfettered by a discredited news media and detached citizenry.” Today we see a deluge of falsehoods, in words and images, injected into the public conversation, often in deliberate campaigns by sources who seek political, financial, or societal advantage. Disinformation impedes the public’s access to the accurate information needed for civic engagement and informed decision-making, and disrupts the practice of journalism itself, as evidenced in our 2022 report, Hard News: Journalists and the Threat of Disinformation. It undermines our public discourse, sows discord, and weakens our political system and ultimately our democracy upon which free expression rights rest.

PEN America believes an empowered public and vibrant news ecosystem are the best means of countering disinformation’s pernicious effects. As such, we work with journalists and newsrooms, community leaders, researchers, policymakers, tech platforms, and other stakeholders to enable equitable access to credible information and advance a healthy information landscape.

Reports

Hard News Featured Image

Hard News: Journalists and the Threat of Disinformation

PEN America’s nationwide survey of more than 1,000 reporters and editors on how disinformation is disrupting the practice of journalism.

Media Literacy Report 50 50 Content Block Image

The Impact of Community-Based Digital Literacy Interventions on Disinformation Resilience

These findings highlight the importance of trust-building within communities of color, working with and through community and faith leaders, and supporting community and ethnic media in bolstering disinformation resilience.

Faking News

Faking News: Fraudulent News and the Fight for Truth

Faking News rates the range of fact-checking, algorithmic, educational, and standards-based approaches being taken to counter the proliferation of fake news.

Truth On The Ballot

Truth on the Ballot: Fraudulent News, the Midterm Elections, and Prospects for 2020

Micro-targeting capabilities have weaponized disinformation, so that what might once have passed muster as simply a hard-edged campaign message in the public arena can now move with stealthy, laser-like efficiency to reach sub-segments of voters while remaining invisible to the wider public or opposing campaigns.

Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Search for Solutions

Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Search for Solutions

Confronted with the scope and stakes of the problem, Losing the News ultimately calls for a radical rethinking of local journalism as a public good.

PEN America Resources

Communicating During Contentious Times: Dos and Don’ts to Rise Above the Noise

Communicating During Contentious Times: Dos and Don’ts to Rise Above the Noise

A new guide for community leaders to use in their pursuit of credible and peace-forward messaging strategies.
Read More
Community Disinformation Action Hub

Community Disinformation Action Hub

The Community Disinformation Action Hub is for community leaders and anyone who wants to learn what disinformation is and take action in their community to stop it.
Read More
Media Literacy Toolkit

Media Literacy Toolkit

Drawn from the curriculum of PEN America’s “Knowing the News” project, here are five quick tips for defending against disinformation.
Read More
How to Talk to Friends and Family Who Share Misinformation

How to Talk to Friends and Family Who Share Misinformation

Your friends and family may spread misinformation, and it can be tough to know how to confront them. Here are a few suggestions.
Read More
PEN America’s Guide for Combating Protest Disinformation

PEN America’s Guide for Combating Protest Disinformation

False, misleading, and misattributed stories and images can polarize communities, unfairly damage reputations, and obscure the truth.
Read More
PEN America’s Guide on COVID-19 and Disinformation

PEN America’s Guide on COVID-19 and Disinformation

If you’re looking to find factual information about public health, check first with trusted institutions, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the World Health Organization.
Read More
How to Prevent the Spread of Disinformation About Russia’s War on Ukraine: A Tip Sheet

How to Prevent the Spread of Disinformation About Russia’s War on Ukraine: A Tip Sheet

How can students mobilize and respond to book bans? This guide will help you fight back against book bans and build a stronger community of readers and advocates in the process.
Read More
Five Ways Political Campaigns Can Combat Online Disinformation in 2020

Five Ways Political Campaigns Can Combat Online Disinformation in 2020

Certain segments of the population are microtargeted with false or manipulated content; fake social media accounts bombard feeds with fake information that has the potential to confuse and mislead voters; and some political ads contain demonstrably false content.
Read More
The Reporters Guide to Covering the 2020 Election

The Reporters Guide to Covering the 2020 Election

This Reporters Guide is intended to be a shortform distillation of the most critical reporting elements for those covering the 2020 U.S. election.
Read More

Commentary

New PEN America Report: Journalists Face New Challenges in Grappling with the Blurring Line Between Extremism and Politics

November 17, 2022
"Journalists and newsrooms are an essential bulwark against the erosion of democracy, and today, U.S. democracy is threatened in part by the increasing prevalence of extremist views in our politics and in society at large. As a result, political reporting has become extremism reporting, and journalists face the challenge of not just documenting facts, but informing the public about the nature and severity of threats posed by anti-democratic ideology and tactics," said Summer Lopez, PEN America’s chief program officer for Free Expression.

PEN America CEO: All Eyes on Elon Musk to Back Open and Civic Discourse on Twitter

October 28, 2022
PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel has made the following comment today in response to the announcement that Elon Musk has completed a $44 billion deal to takeover Twitter: “All eyes are on Elon Musk to see whether he goes through with pledges to dismantle content guardrails and call open season for disinformation, harassment and vitriol on Twitter, or is serious about trying to nurture a platform where actual civic discourse can flourish. I'll be watching for early signs of whether he comes in thinking he has all the answers, or is instead ready to listen and learn the intricacies of a platform used worldwide with sometimes life or death consequences.  With the midterm election two weeks out, a pivotal indicator will be whether purveyors of disinformation are given free rein to mislead people over Twitter about when, where and how to vote.”

Stanford Study: PEN America Workshops Significantly Improved Participants’ Digital Media Literacy Skills to Counter Disinformation

September 29, 2022
To counter that threat PEN America launched its Knowing the News media literacy program in 2020 to equip the public with the knowledge and skills to defend against disinformation. In 2021, PEN America partnered with four organizations that are deeply invested in the health and empowerment of their respective communities: Mi Familia Vota, National Action Network; Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and the National Congress of American Indians to stem the impact of COVID-19- and vaccine-related misinformation in communities of color. In order to better understand the effectiveness of our media literacy workshops, PEN America partnered with the Stanford Social Media Lab to evaluate the workshops. As the Stanford researchers note in their white paper, there is surprisingly scant research available assessing the effectiveness of interventions to counter the impact of disinformation in communities of color, despite the fact that these communities are frequent targets of disinformation.

Stay In Touch!

Stay in touch with PEN America by signing up for our newsletter, or reach out to us any time at [email protected].

Additional Disinformation Resilience Tools

Images

  • https://tineye.com/ : To use Tineye, all you need to do is upload, paste, or enter an image URL.Tineye also allows you to sort the results from oldest to newest. However, TinEye only supports the following file formats: JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF or WebP.
  • https://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en : either upload an image or paste an image URL by clicking the camera icon. The results will show you links to sites Google thinks are most relevant, visually similar images, and pages that include matching images, where you should pay special attention to the date when a page was published.
  • https://knowyourmeme.com/ : pretty self explanatory. A database of memes. Depending on the journo beat, they may want to familiarize themselves with this. When establishing a fact checking desk for an entire newsroom or training a journo whose beat is disinformation, knowledge of memes is good to have.
  • https://yandex.com/images/ : click the camera icon, to upload an image or paste an image URL. Results will show you similar images and sites where the image is displayed.
  • https://www.invid-project.eu/tools-and-services/invid-verification-plugin/ : InVID can help perform reverse searches for stills in video content. download the free plugin, which works with Chrome or Firefox. Once installed, you can click on the inVID icon on your browser and select “Open inVID.” There are many tabs and tutorials to explore, and Amnesty International’s Citizen Evidence Lab does a good job breaking them all down here. But a good place to start is to click on “analysis” and paste a YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter URL. Once you hit submit, the tool gives you useful metadata associated with the video, such as the upload time and number of likes and shares. It also breaks down social media video into thumbnails which you can then run a reverse image search on, using the tools at the bottom of the analysis page.
  • https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reveye-reverse-image-sear/keaaclcjhehbbapnphnmpiklalfhelgf?hl=eniklalfhelgf?hl=en This is a great tool because it is a one-stop-shop that aggregates all the other reverse image tools. download the browser extension. Once downloaded, simply right click on an image and scroll down to “reverse image search” with the eyeball icon. Select “all search engines.”

Limitations

  • Google and Yandex don’t order search results by date, so it can be difficult to find the earliest version. 
  • TinEye and Yandex require direct links to image files, so when searching for content embedded in Twitter posts, for instance, you must first open the actual image file itself in a separate window to get the URL the search engine can use.
  • There is no easy reverse image search tool for a full video; you can only run a reverse image search on a screen grab or thumbnail from a video. InVID makes that process easy by breaking down social media video into thumbnails, but sometimes its analysis tool doesn’t work if the social media user has enabled certain privacy/sharing restrictions.

 

Bot Detection Tools

  • https://hoaxy.osome.iu.edu/ : allows you to type in a phrase like “monkey pox” and see “bot scores” for the accounts that are using it
  • https://botsentinel.com/ : allows you to analyze an account by clicking the green box on the upper right hand corner. You can enter either a Twitter handle or a tweet URL and see a “trollbot rating,” which the site uses to describe “human controlled accounts who exhibit toxic troll-like behavior.” 
  • https://botometer.osome.iu.edu : Uses Twitter API, identifies bots on Twitter specifically
  1.  

 

Fact Checking 

  1.